A curse on all the selfie-takers who blocked my view of the Egyptian tombs at the British Museum

Human beings have been making artefacts and images for millennia —and the British Museum is one of the world’s great repositories of that history. But what many visitors go for now is not so much to see the treasures there as to picture themselves, using these glories as a backdrop.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to the BM but I went last week with a specific purpose, to look at Egyptian tombs with “false doors”. The Ancient Egyptians believed these doors to be a threshold between the worlds of the living and the dead — and it is where offerings of sustenance for the deceased were placed by family members, and depicted in the side panels and niches.

I’ve been revising the English of a Dutch friend who has published three academic studies of these tombs, using statistical analysis to show how they changed from one dynasty to another throughout the Old Kingdom. Yet in all this time I’d never looked at one for real. Happily, the museum has some prize examples, so off I went, to see for myself. It wasn’t quite the doddle I had hoped.

You’re glad that the BM — the first public museum in the world — is busy. It always has been. You don’t expect all of these visitors to be especially studious. That’s never been much of a problem before. Things have changed though. Selfie-taking has now altered the experience quite radically.

Bag searches at the BM are now conducted outside in marquees — and there, for security reasons presumably, photography is discouraged. Inside, however, there’s no restriction at all. Any hand-held camera may be used, though actual selfie sticks are not allowed.

“If a visitor complains that your photography is intrusive you may be asked to stop or leave the museum”, the Visitor Regulations warn. Complaints are rare, they say. Well, here’s one.

If you go to the museum to look at the exhibits, I now realise, you will find yourself at cross-purposes with many of your fellow visitors — just as you do now when visiting other great tourist venues, Venice, say, or Angkor Wat in Cambodia. They are there not so much to look as to get pictures of themselves. If they can’t use a selfie stick they get a friend to perform as one, before returning the favour.

The main trouble this causes is straightforwardly physical. Lots of people can look at an exhibit peaceably together, facing in the same direction. The selfie-taker, however, needs to get in between other viewers and the exhibit — and then look the other way and pose for the camera.

Lytton Strachey, when asked at a First World War tribunal what, as a conscientious objector, he would do if he saw a German soldier trying to rape his sister, perkily replied: “I would try to interpose my own body.” This the selfie-takers achieve over and over again. They interpose their bodies between other visitors and what they have come to see.

That obstruction is irritating enough — but worse in a way, more demoralising, is what it reveals.

In that moment of being at last in the presence of some of the greatest things to see in the world, selfie-takers prefer one more picture of their own silly faces. How sad is that?

Let’s just get rid of acting altogether ...

Scarlett Johansson has quit her role in the fact-based trans drama Rub & Tug , in which she was set to play the crime kingpin Dante Tex Gill, who was born Lois Jean Gill but identified as a man while running a prostitution racket.

Announcing her respectful withdrawal from the project, Johansson apologised for her previous insensitivity and said she was thankful that this casting debate has “sparked a large conversation about diversity and representation in film”. Her about-face has been welcomed by the trans community.

Really, it’s a scandal that some people still think they can pretend to be someone they are not. The effrontery!

In time, this new puritanism could see an end to the beastly profession of acting altogether.

We can but dream.

*I’m the kind of grouch who doesn’t like noise being worse than it has to be. But I’ve become appreciative of at least some noise pollution.

We have a baby, not yet talking, too young to be easily entertained, so we’re grateful, pathetically grateful, for anything that diverts him. It turns out that he adores the sight and sound of aeroplanes and helicopters.

Last week he was entranced for hours by the three thunderous sci-fi-style Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft that circled around our home, presumably as part of President Trump’s security arrangements . It felt almost as though we had been selected as the very epicentre of possible threat — or given our own free private airshow. So I, for one, wasn’t protesting.