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ARTS AND CULTURE

My life as a tourist trap

  • 29 January 2014

When I have achieved universal fame, and I am dead, they will probably turn my childhood house into a tourist attraction.

In order to do so, it will be necessary to build a ticket booth on the front lawn. This will require the removal of the old tree that grows in the front garden, which will be a shame, but a small price to pay to grant the masses the privilege of entry to my childhood house — for a fee.

In any case, the booth will be done in a very tasteful, modernist style — that is, it will be a large, featureless concrete block, with holes in the wall from which underpaid teenagers will sell the tickets.

There will be one queue for those who reserved tickets online or who are with an authorised tour guide, and another for everyone else. Of course, owing to my universal fame, both queues will bend far down my street. A large steel fence will be erected across the front lawn, to ensure people don't get in without a ticket.

Unfortunately, the entrance to my childhood home is not wheelchair friendly. So it will need to be redesigned. Purists will complain, but they'll still come.

Since they have to redesign the entrance anyway, it will make sense to enlarge it just slightly to include space for an information desk. At the desk, you will be able to pick up a map and hire an audioguide.

It won't destroy the appearance of the original facade too much to also add a toilet block.

My mum and dad's bedroom won't be of much interest to many me enthusiasts, so that room will be converted into a me museum, housing various artefacts such as my plastic tricycle and some bedraggled picture books. Plaques will declare each artefact's provenance and significance, and explain what part it played in shaping my life such that I would go on to do whatever great deeds I did in order to attain my universal fame. The artefacts themselves will sit inside inlets in the wall, glassed off to protect them from prying fingers, and the elements.

In the lounge room, visitors will be excited to see the original family lounge suite. Of course, visitors will not be permitted to sit on the original family lounge suite. They will be prevented from doing so by an elegant red rope, suspended by two stainless steel poles, and a pictogram sign