The year I turned five, no other little girls in Grangemouth got to watch cinematic classic The Last Unicorn.
I had the niche 1982 animated film perpetually rented from our local Global Video for so many months on end that eventually my parents bought me my own copy.
And even then, I watched it every other night with a mixture of fascination, fear and a strange sense of grief I can’t quite name.
It’s one of those weird films, like Watership Down or The Neverending Story, which was ostensibly for kids but feels heavy and wise beyond its years.
And it bred in me a lifelong fixation on the image and story of the unicorn.
I still remember my excitement when I found out, a few years later, that unicorns are Scotland’s national animal.
By then, I’d carefully curated a small collection of unicorn figurines and soft toys (hard to get then, which is hard to imagine now).
And I eagerly anticipated each year’s Scholastic book fair, where I’d scan the cheery red leaflet for the next instalment of Linda Chapman’s My Secret Unicorn book series.
So when I discovered that I lived in a land which claimed the unicorn as its official emblem, it felt like fate. Like magic.
Unicorn obsession defies repression
Fast forward a quarter of a century, and the obsession lives on, although it’s buried deep.
A cartoonish, unicorn-shaped stress toy sits on my desk as I type this – a joke prize won at an arcade and cherished well beyond its reasonable lifespan.
Otherwise I try to keep it cool. Unicorn-obsessed kids are cute, but in adulthood, it can skirt creepy.
But I simply couldn’t contain my inner child’s glee when Perth Museum announced that its first temporary exhibition was titled ‘Unicorn’.
Immediately I rallied the troops (put a message in the group chat) and convinced my pals to accompany me to Perth to indulge my unicorn love.
And Perth did not disappoint.
First of all, we were greeted at the entry to the exhibition not with ticket scanners or wristbands, but with stickers.
Cute, colourful stickers with wee pictures of unicorns on them, to show we’d paid our way in.
I’ve not been given a sticker on my lapel since primary school, so immediately my inner child was bursting to get out.
Then there was the exhibition itself.
Perth Museum brought magic to life with Unicorn
Beautiful etchings of mystical ‘monoceros’ (a strange horned creature with the body of a horse, the head of a stag and the feet of an elephant), medieval anthologies depicting unicorns in eerily brilliant colour illustrations, royal paraphernalia and even a ‘unicorn horn’ amulet, were among the treasures on show.
My personal favourite was the bizarre painting of a maiden seemingly choking a unicorn.
And the huge Trojan unicorn complete with neon, rainbow horn at the top of the building was the pinnacle of the masterpiece.
The exhibit tracked the mythology of the unicorn all the way from classical Greek texts, through the lion and the unicorn fighting for the British crown, right up to the 21st century queer community’s embracing of all things unicorn and rainbow.
And in the spirit of someone who has already geeked out entirely on a subject, I got to revel in loads of fun facts I already knew.
Like did you know that it was often said unicorns could only be tamed by a virgin girl?
Or that their horns were thought to be medicinal, so apothecaries (ye olde pharmacists) often used an image of a unicorn on their signs?
Or that Christianity adopted the unicorn as a symbol for Jesus thanks to a clerical error made at the library of Alexandria when scholars were translating the Bible into Greek?
My friends are, as you can imagine, very patient people.
Childhood preserved in museum exhibit
But nothing could have prepared me for the wall of emotion that hit me when, turning the corner in the upper level of the exhibition, I came face-to-face with the very unicorn which started all this.
The Last Unicorn. My childhood, on DVD. In a museum. In Perth.
My first thought? I feel so old.
My second thought? Why don’t I have this on DVD?
Third? I’m so happy this is here.
After that, I abandoned all pretence of chill, decorum and maturity for about 10 minutes.
Like big kids, the lot of us swooped on the interactive play area at the end, colouring in unicorn masks and solving silly riddles.
Our inner teenagers came out as we pointed to haunted-looking illustrated animals and wittily quipped: ‘That’s you.’
In the space of an hour, the six of us had gone from ponderous, serious adults to a bunch of weans, linked at the elbows and sniggering.
That’s the magic of the Unicorn exhibition.
Now, does anyone know if The Last Unicorn is on streaming?
Unicorn is at Perth Museum until September 22 2024.
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