A thumbs-up for Tutankhamun in Dallas

Perhaps you, like me, tend to put these things off. It's actually quite pleasant to be a person who's often just as happy to stay home and read a book, but it means I never get around to seeing a lot of movies and festivals and lectures and fireworks displays.

But I like a good, mainstream, popular upper-middle-brow blockbuster museum show as much as anybody. I made my husband take me all the way to Memphis to look at a Titanic retrospective long before the movie turned the epic disaster into a sappy romance for teenagers.

Yet the deadline for Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs at the Dallas Museum of Art crept up on me – it's over on Sunday. Anxious to avoid the crowds, I went on Wednesday.

I did not avoid the crowds. Instead, I stood in a painfully long and slow-moving line, (all the signs called it a "queue," as if using the Euro-English term took the sting out) reading my trusty Kindle and trying to block out the shrill cacophony of field-tripping children being disgorged by school buses.

And, let me tell you right now, that if you too have put this off until the last minute, and you're looking for excuses to let this one slip by – it'll be hot, crowded, expensive, the kids will get antsy – here's my advice: Go anyway. It's more than worth it.

There's plenty to compensate for the wait, the crowds and the absence of the much-discussed death mask (which was included in a 1970s touring exhibition, but deemed too fragile to make the trip this time).