On a trip to England in 2008 we visited the National Railway Museum in York. This is a fantastic museum, and if you have any interest in trains, you should definitely go. (And then go to Train World in Brussels, which is smaller but better. It just is. Sorry, York.)

I’m not hugely into trains myself, but the hozz has a long-standing affection for transport systems, and more importantly, back in 2008 we had a small but fanatically devoted railway enthusiast in our midst, in the person of our elder kid, then just approaching his fourth birthday. So obviously, being within striking distance of the museum, off we all went.

Locomotives, man, what can I tell you?

They are impressive. Honestly. They are impressively large. They are impressively metal. Even at rest, at last, in the vast halls of the museum, they exude an impressive sense of clanking power.

You can climb up into some of them and look out the window and pretend you’re the driver. You can see how their wheels connect and how their couplings work. You can examine their buffers. You can imagine them in motion, speeding down the track with a long plume of smoke floating out behind them on the blue air.

And when you’ve done all of that, I am here to tell you that there are still nine hundred and eighty-six more engines that the three-year-old really, really needs to inspect. Sigh.

So we saw the trains. And we saw the other trains. And we saw some more trains. The hozz did much of the actual performance of extreme train enthusiasm, while I pushed the empty buggy around, and the eight-month-old slept in his sling on my chest.

Then I spotted something that seemed much more my style

I hurried towards it with a familiar sense of rising excitement, anticipating the very specific flavour of brain-tingling pleasure that is derived from looking at beautiful things.

It was the exhibit devoted to the Royal Trains.

Through the windows of the carriages on display, I looked at all the rich textiles, the carved and polished wood, the ornate fixtures and sparkling glassware. Lavish appurtenances. The trappings of royalty. King-bling.

I stood there, and I felt … peculiar.

It was as if the fuse had fizzled out and the firework of my lovely-object joy hadn’t ever got off the ground. Something about the exhibit just wasn’t doing it for me.

Forgive me: I felt too Irish for the occasion

I found myself acutely wanting to know what it would be like to look at the exhibit as a British person — an actual subject of the monarchy for whom all this was done, who might therefore be able to look at it with some sort of an integrated perspective.

Or what, by the same token, a French person might feel in looking at Versailles, or at Napoleonic splendour. Or a Belgian looking at some royal extravagance paid for, god help us, with the wealth of the Congo. What is it like to be a member of a nation with an imperial past, looking at artefacts of that past?

(It should be pointed out, by the way, that on the imperial front, the Irish are both innocent and guilty. Wait, what? OK, lightning-quick summary: it’s complicated! Yes, Ireland was colonised and suffered enormously under British rule; and also, Ireland was in the United Kingdom for over a century and supplied a disproportionately large percentage (compared to its population) of the British army and colonial administrations in other parts of the empire. The reasons for this? Also complicated. But the fact remains that some Irish people perpetrated horrific imperial violence. Look up Michael Francis O’Dwyer’s career in India, to take one example. It. Is. Complicated. Please don’t take my word for any of this: read actual historians.)

Anyway. What I was trying to grasp, I think, was something about a layered view. Having grown up and been educated in Ireland, I believe it would have been quite difficult for me to go through life leaving questions of monarchy and empire unexamined, and so when I looked through the windows of (as it might be) Queen Victoria’s dining carriage, I saw the sumptuous velvet and the gleaming mother-of-pearl, certainly, but I also saw the layers of history, and friends, I felt mournful.

I really did feel sad.

I thought, “This would have entranced me once!”

When I was a child, I was as fanatical about Olden Days Stuff as our tiny trainspotter was in 2008 about steam engines. I wrote ages ago about how much I loved visiting châteaux in France (among other delights), how I revelled in the opulence of it all, the fanciness, the decadence.

And at least to some extent, that’s still true. I will reliably go weak for a bit of intricacy, a bit of silk and velvet and lace, a bit of polished wood and shiny curly metal. But apparently, I can’t unlearn what I now know about the context that many such things carry with them.

Nor should I. Context is important.

Don’t we all love beautiful things, though?

Aren’t we all entitled to take pleasure in gorgeous objects that bring a smile to our lips?

Yes. We definitely are. The right to enjoy beauty for its own sake should be open to everyone. “Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses,” as the song goes.

Where does the balance tip over into ugly excess?

I don’t know. It probably depends (dammit).

I did happen to remember this week that the word “luxury” used to have a much less positive meaning than its modern one. It has the same root as “lechery”, and started off meaning something much closer to “lustful excess” than it does today.

Access to excess — the ability to display surplus — has been a sign of power for a very long time. I mean, probably since humans started doing power. And the fact is that beauty, in this context, often has an unmistakable stink to it, once you notice. Sadly, that makes it harder to enjoy.

In conclusion, we’ve all heard the saying that all that glitters is not gold. I suppose you could add, sometimes gold that glitters is not all that.