I didn’t get it either

What part of the body should one scratch when struggling with a wordy information board at a museum?

The chin, to feign intellectual intrigue?

The head, as an honest indication of your incomprehension?

Or that hairy, cavernous, scatological region located betwixt your legs and lower back, to let your fellow museum-goers know that you too are bored out of your brains?

If you think you have detected a bias at work within the three itchy options I have laid out, you are correct.

If you have thusly made assumptions about how my last trip to a museum went, it is likely they are accurate as well.

However, if you are about to denounce me as an uncultured, psychologically-deficient, spiritually-abased philistine, incapable of appreciating history, art or anthropology, then please take a breath, make a cup of tea, and ask yourself, where is all this anger coming from?

Because, the truth is – and call me a lying toe rag if you wish, you unhinged museum-defending maniac – I have enjoyed several trips to exactly the kind of places you seem so fanatically attached to.

However, I do not subscribe to the unspoken-but-often-abided-by view that we should pretend every trip to any old house of history constitutes a day well spent.

It’s okay to just not get it.

Isn’t it?…

For example, recently I went to a place called Buda Castle – a heaving structure of stone and slate, located right in the heart of Budapest.

First ‘finished’ in 1265, it got a few monstrous extensions in 1749 and 1769, and, as is probably the way with most buildings so big, old and worth preserving, it has been spruced up about every fortnight since, be it a lick of paint, a new door mat, or a freshly erected place of worship.

Anyway, Buda Castle is part-castle, part-museum.

It is brilliant building; like the innumerable rulers that called it home, it is imposing and powerful, overlooking the expansive Danube that sweeps beneath its feet.

However, because it has been around so long and housed so many different leaders through as so many distinct eras, every corner of the place has a story, every feature and fixture a tale to tell.

For a man who knows nothing of Hungarian history, this means reading a lot of long-winded, not-very-well-translated explanatory information boards.

I stared and stared and read and read, but the picture was too great for the eye to take in.

Trying to get a grip on the narrative of the place was impossible.

Walking around with the weight of the entire history of Hungary on my shoulders, I vainly attempted to digest dense chunks of technical text that not only was I not going to remember in a week, but that I was already forgetting by the time I moved onto the next room.

About an hour and a half in, my brain was saturated with names and dates and eras.

I felt like a glutten at a buffet, full to the brim, but still trying to get my money’s worth.

At one point, I remember looking at another man who was staring at an information board and being sure that he was silently counting down the number of seconds that he thought it would probably take someone to actually read it.

However, as I said, this is not the totality of my experience with museums.

At school I went to the Bogside Museum in Derry, replete with a Provo-led tour of the area.

A wee, bald, bog-born militant guy guided us around, pointing out the flats where bricks were fired during the Battle of the Bogside, and taking us to the spot that Bishop Edward Daly waved his blood-stained white rag on Bloody Sunday.

That was a great day out; enlightening and hard-hitting, if not, in hindsight, a touch propagandising.

I also not long ago enjoyed a trip to Ulster Museum, where, despite almost losing consciousness while walking hungover around the life-sappingly hot tropical gardens, my inner-child went nuts for the dinosaurs and mummies (dead Egyptians). And a couple of months ago, whilst in Prague – I know, welcome to life on Fleet Street, baby – it was at a museum that I found out that the planet was once home to a terrifying looking beast, appropriately named ‘beardog’.

Until this day, I often think about beardog.

Hopefully this column will provide comfort to those who have found themselves silently suffering through long days tripping around museums, intellectually out of their depth, looking at paintings of faces they do not know, peering through glass at artefacts they do not care about.

There is no shame in not getting it – the real problem is in pretending that you do.