Who are you looking at?

I’ve never been much of a fighter, and I’m cer­tainly less so now at my age, but I reckon I could have taken Franco. Mano a mano, I don’t think he would have stood a chance against me. Pau Gasol is a dif­fer­ent mat­ter. In fact, all he would have to do is hold out an arm, grip my head in one of his huge hands, and let me ex­haust my­self swing­ing at the empty air be­tween us. Dalí would have been way too puny to get out of one of my head­locks, al­though I quite fancy Pi­casso’s chances de­spite him hav­ing a few years on me.

These were some of the thoughts going through my mind as I pe­rused Barcelona’s wax mu­seum, which re­opened not long ago after re­ceiv­ing a com­plete makeover that in­cludes 80 new fig­ures of fa­mous faces from the worlds of en­ter­tain­ment, sci­ence, pol­i­tics, sport, his­tory and pop­u­lar cul­ture. If you want to find out more about the mu­seum’s ren­o­va­tion, you can check out our ar­ti­cle on page 26, which will tell you all you need to know.

I bring it up here be­cause it’s one of the few mu­se­ums I’ve been to since the pan­demic started, and hav­ing spent so much time shut up at home, it gave me a new ap­pre­ci­a­tion for vis­it­ing places that all too often I take for granted. Jour­nal­ism gen­er­ally of­fers very few perks, but one is that you can get to see new stuff be­fore any­one else, and for free. I went to the wax mu­seum in De­cem­ber when it re­opened, to do a re­port for a news agency, and not only did I get a guided tour but I was left to roam the place to my heart’s con­tent.

These days, mod­ern tech­nol­ogy al­lows us to visit just about any mu­seum in the world from our desks by tak­ing ad­van­tage of vir­tual tours and 360 views. That level of progress has no doubt made the re­cent lock­downs more bear­able for many, while at the same time it makes arte­facts and trea­sures ac­ces­si­ble to all. As time goes by, these dig­i­tal ex­pe­ri­ences will no doubt be­come even more so­phis­ti­cated, re­al­is­tic and im­mer­sive, and I’m all for that. Let’s be hon­est, the chances of me ever vis­it­ing the Auck­land War Memo­r­ial Mu­seum are slim to say the least.

Yet, what my visit to the Barcelona wax mu­seum re­minded me of is that there’s noth­ing quite like see­ing things in per­son. Few of us in Cat­alo­nia live very far away from a mu­seum, gallery or land­mark, and from now on I for one in­tend to make more of an ef­fort to get out and about and visit more places, es­pe­cially once we get back to nor­mal. In fact, given that mu­se­ums were among the in­sti­tu­tions hard­est hit by the lock­downs, it’s al­most our civic duty to give them a boost if we can.

I’d cer­tainly put the wax mu­seum on the list. At one point while I was there I was walk­ing past Nel­son Man­dela and got a feel­ing he was look­ing at me funny. I stopped and turned to face him. “You want some?” I asked. Si­lence. “Didn’t think so,” I said dis­mis­sively, turn­ing my back and going off to check out the Star Wars room.