York Museums Trust Blog

Last week I went caving.  It was not a stroll in the park.  A stroll in the park would’ve been nice.  Even in the rain.  It didn’t rain in the cave.  It didn’t have to.  I still got wet right up to my oxters (the spell check doesn’t like ‘oxters’. I don’t suppose computers have any.) 

My son, Finn, went caving with school last year and loved it, so my husband arranged for a friend of ours to take Finn and his sister, Esme, caving with her.  She invited other friends’ kids along too, and the upshot was that she needed an extra adult.  Richard, my husband, suffers from horrendous claustrophobia even in spacious, floodlit show caves with stalagmites named ‘the witches hat’ and ‘the grumpy elf’.  So I had to go.  It was as bad as I expected, such that, standing in the middle of a car park afterwards, in the rain, peeling off sodden clothes beneath a damp towel was, by comparison, a delightful experience.  When I got home, physically trembling from a combination of shock, exhaustion and hypothermia, Richard beamed and said, “That makes up for all those visits to the Abbey Museum I’ve had to endure.”

How can that be?  How can caving compare with the occasional trip to our local museum?  I was dumbstruck. Anyhow, I now have to consider that if there is even a shred of truth in his comparison, I have to accept that not everyone enjoys repeat visits to museums and galleries in the way I do.  Are we expecting too much of the people of York when we ask them to visit the Gallery again and again?     

Could we threaten to send them caving instead?