First things first - ensure the property is open before you visit. When I was a kid, nine of us drove 50 miles across Lincolnshire in two cars, only to find Belton House was closed on Mondays. It didn’t dilute my enthusiasm - to me, visiting a stately home is THE best way to spend a Sunday.
If your chosen property belongs to the National Trust or English Heritage, you’d better have a very convincing answer ready for why you don't want to become a member. The little old ladies in the gift shop may look sweet, but they are all ex-KGB and will sniff out any hint of weakness. Before you know it you’re signing Direct Debit paperwork and being given a free travel rug with water-resistant backing. Prepare your response before you go in. I answer with a blunt “No, I really don’t,” with a disarming smile, but you may wish to be less direct.
Guided tours are the work of the Devil. For every interesting tour guide there are five retired teachers who miss doing Assembly and will bore you rigid with tales of which portrait married which, when all you really want to do is admire some marquetry or gaze in rapture at an exquisite piece of cornicing. It’s even worse if the group is small - once there was just the two of us, meaning we spent the entire hour nodding and making encouraging interjections of Hmm, Fascinating and Really?
Room guides are better, but with an average age of 92, sometimes they sit so quietly that you start to worry they have died. (They tend to revive quickly when another volunteer approaches with a cup of tea and a pink wafer biscuit.)
Houses still in private ownership always have lots of contemporary photographs on display. Owing to centuries of inbreeding aristocrats are rarely photogenic and often startlingly ugly, but it is bad form to leap backwards with a cry of “What is THAT?”, especially if “that” turns out to be the 33rd Baroness Pendlebury.
I used to be a tourist guide and the knack is to try to tailor the tour to fit different audiences. I was much more interested in architecture than family history, and struggled to remember accurately the details of the marriage history of large unemployed families of benefit scroungers with spare bedrooms.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you about the smiling assassins in the gift shop. Me and Kim went into the RNLI station in Morecambe a while back, on the search for postcards, and got this very polished and persuasive spiel about how much they need support etc. We managed to escape without signing anything, but it was a close shave,
The RNLI's a tricky one. Being a coastal girl I have every interest in the boys I went to school with being rescued if their fishing boats get into trouble, but the chinless public-school wonders who populate the local yacht clubs - why am I bankrolling their hobby? They don't pay my RAC membership.
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