Happy hours ... the terracotta civil servant. Photograph: British Museum
It was the terracotta civil servant who did it for me yesterday. The pink cheeks of the recently excavated, faintly smiling scribe - a smile, funnily enough, not unlike that of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun, which drew me as a timid teenager to make my first visit to London in 1972 - brought that rare prickle of excitement down the spine.
I know that come September I too will be joining the crowds who will undoubtedly besiege the British Museum, when the pottery soldiers and their scholarly cousin arrive from Xian.
Recently it has become mandatory to denounce the blockbuster exhibition as the museums and galleries equivalent of Celebrity Big Brother: glossy magazine names herded together, and cynically pitched as entertainment for the masses.
It's certainly an odd phenomenon: a few days after the National Gallery's Vermeer exhibition ended, with its heaving crowds struggling for breathing space in the claustrophobic subterranean Sainsbury Wing, I passed through the main building and found the dreamy women back on their accustomed wall, in a totally deserted gallery.
Museum and gallery works spend half their lives analysing what makes a genuine 22-carat blockbuster exhibition, and the other half scouring the world trying to round up the raw material for one. The general view is that the words Pompeii, Vermeer, Leonardo, Michelangelo or Rembrandt are good starting points, and that once you announce a big Impressionist show, with as many Monets as you can scrounge, it's time to order the crush barriers.
Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, whose saintly demeanour doesn't entirely disguise a razor sharp business mind, grinned slyly yesterday as he announced the plans for the Chinese show: "Revenue considerations are absent from our thoughts - this is about the pursuit of truth."
The truth of course is that the right show is a triple whammy for the institution: money, publicity, and a leg up in the borrowing and lending bazaar of international museums - show me your Monet and I might let you have a go on my Donatello.
There's something insufferably elitist about the critical sneers for the resulting exhibition: why queue for hours to see a Caravaggio just off Trafalgar Square, when you can rent a villa in Umbria for a month, and walk up an agreeable hill at dawn for a solitary communion with the soul of the artist before the great unwashed arrive, flashing their damn mobile phones and whimpering for postcards.
This patrician contempt for the mob is particularly rich from art hacks, who very rarely join it: they go round these shows on press days, or private views, often led by the curator. But what, in any case, is so contemptible about joining a crowd coming together in the name of art?
Back in 1972 I worked in a sandwich bar to save the fare on the mail boat and train from Dublin to London, and found friends of my parents who would put me up because I couldn't afford a hostel.
When I got to Bloomsbury that September morning, the crowd filled the British Museum courtyard, and stretched out all the way through Montague Street to the corner of Russell Square. I spent most of the day waiting to get into the Treasures of Tutankhamun: it was one of the most thrilling experiences of my short life to date.
A precious catalogue was read from cover to cover, then loaned on down the queue. A very few who had actually been to Egypt shared their experiences: many shared sandwiches. Children cried and boiled sweets were passed back from the recesses of pockets and handbags. The faces of those emerging were anxiously scanned for evidence of a transcendent experience.
The Canadian hippy beside me, on holiday from driving a school bus for Inuit children in the Arctic circle, invited me to dinner, in a proper restaurant if we ever did get into the museum and out again - the first man who had ever done such a thing.
It was a pilgrimage, a great communal act of faith, and the final revelation of truth was better for having suffered a little on the road. I probably wouldn't do it now, I fear I wouldn't do it in September even if internet-booked timed tickets hadn't almost eliminated such scenes - but it was wonderful. And so was the exhibition.
