I made a conscious choice here: none of Louis’s classmates have sketchbooks, even though their assignment is to sketch the museum artefacts. It definitely doesn’t make sense, and that’s the point! During most of my life going on school field trips, people didn’t really bring their phones on the trips. The most goofing-off we did was trading snacks at lunch time when people didn’t like what their parents had packed for them! But I recently went on a field trip to the Boston MFA (a fantastic museum that I highly recommend), and people were on their phones so often, sometimes not even looking at the art – or photographing it, which I totally condone if the museum says it’s okay

I may have also snuck out of that field trip to buy myself Ethiopian food for lunch, so I guess my field-trip lunchtime antics haven’t really changed over the years. I’m just older now, equipped with actual cash and Google Maps: the two most powerful tools in the world.