Hand on heart, I have never used a museum as a creche. Lord knows, I would have. I'd have happily tied the Infant Samuel to the V&A's activity cart by his walking reins, and come back to collect him around the age of 18 - but he only had to see a sand-tray full of slightly chewed dinosaur bones, or an alcove full of tough looking toddlers trying on polyester and velcro tabards, and he would cling weeping to my ankles, pleading to be taken away to play with some nice, safe grown ups.
My parents certainly did use a museum as a creche, and its safe to say it failed the Kids in Museums manifesto in every conceivable respect. The national museum in Dublin was just around the corner from the rotting Georgian building where my father worked, and we regularly waited there for a lift home.
My earliest memory of a museum space is the old entrance hall in Kildare Street, which was filled with full-size plaster replicas of Irish high crosses and ogham stones, barely lit by dim lightbulbs giving it all the colour and warmth of an eastern bloc supermarket.
There was no shop. There was no cafe. There were, as I remember it, savagely brass buttoned staff about ten feet tall, who would certainly have fetched a battle axe down from the military history gallery high overhead in the gloom of the dome, to sort out any running, laughing, loud conversation or chewing anything including a finger nail. On any given day, acres of the museum were closed off: there were towering mahogany doors which I never once saw open.
It has of course changed now beyond recognition, but I remember it as a place of wonder. I could still point out to the inch where my particular treasures used to be, the prehistoric boat so visibly made from a trunk that could have come from a tree in our garden, the real Tara brooch so familiar from hideously embroidered Irish dancers' costumes, the sad skeleton curled on his side in his little stone box. It shaped my whole life. I'm not sure that feeling free to shout "monster!" unrebuked would have made it any more glorious.
My parents certainly did use a museum as a creche, and its safe to say it failed the Kids in Museums manifesto in every conceivable respect. The national museum in Dublin was just around the corner from the rotting Georgian building where my father worked, and we regularly waited there for a lift home.
My earliest memory of a museum space is the old entrance hall in Kildare Street, which was filled with full-size plaster replicas of Irish high crosses and ogham stones, barely lit by dim lightbulbs giving it all the colour and warmth of an eastern bloc supermarket.
There was no shop. There was no cafe. There were, as I remember it, savagely brass buttoned staff about ten feet tall, who would certainly have fetched a battle axe down from the military history gallery high overhead in the gloom of the dome, to sort out any running, laughing, loud conversation or chewing anything including a finger nail. On any given day, acres of the museum were closed off: there were towering mahogany doors which I never once saw open.
It has of course changed now beyond recognition, but I remember it as a place of wonder. I could still point out to the inch where my particular treasures used to be, the prehistoric boat so visibly made from a trunk that could have come from a tree in our garden, the real Tara brooch so familiar from hideously embroidered Irish dancers' costumes, the sad skeleton curled on his side in his little stone box. It shaped my whole life. I'm not sure that feeling free to shout "monster!" unrebuked would have made it any more glorious.
