Stories
What was your most memorable cultural experience when you were young and how has it stayed with you?
Below is a sample of your stories. Please see the menu on the right for more videos and stories.
Professor Tanya ByronProfessor Tanya Byron“It's part of our life as a family”
Malcolm Rigler, NHS GP, Swindon PCT/Trustee the phf
My mother was employed part-time in three homes in our avenue to clean and tidy the homes of some very well-travelled elderly people. As she cleaned and dusted their homes – when I was under five years of age – I enjoyed to look at and touch some wonderfully crafted art pieces – small bronze sculptures, pictures of battles and foreign parts. It was a museum experience week by week which has never left me these past 60 years.
David Anderson, Victoria and Albert Museum
When I was very young we moved as a family from Belfast to Rugby. By the time I was at secondary school I was used to being called Spud or Paddy. Irish jokes were common so I was sometimes their target. We often visited the then Ulster Museum. But it was a history teacher at my school who truly began my cultural education. I learnt that the past has a relationship to the present and that relationship can be controversial. He organised trips to see the historic landscape and he took us to museums. I still remember the moment where I saw my memorable object – an Irish elk, the skeleton towered above mere humans. Its antler span alone was some 11 feet. It was huge, and it was Irish. “Bring on the English elk”, I thought. This was the experience that crystallised my identity, as well as an unarticulated sense of cultural loss. I have never forgotten it – or the power that it revealed to me of objects to move us
Rachel Carroll, smallpersonbigideas
Seeing The Royal Ballet perform ballet aged ten. I still want to be a ballerina.