JANET Barnes, boss of the York Museums Trust, set out her organisation's successes and challenges with typical candour last week.

Her message: work is underway to rejuvenate the city-run attractions, but much remains to be done.

More food for thought is contained in a new book published on Thursday. Britain's Best Museums And Galleries (Allen Lane, £30) offers mixed messages for York.

The author, Mark Fisher, has not even included the York Castle Museum among his top 350. We are astonished by this omission. But then Mark, Labour MP for Stoke, doesn't seem to care much for an attraction's appeal to children.

He includes Jorvik but only, it seems, in order to deliver a public kicking to the Viking centre.

"When the mannequins are motionless, in low light, their faces turned away, it is possible to catch some sense of the intended activity," he writes. "Full face, fully lit, in motion, they fail sadly, their mechanical movements recalling television animation of the 1950s."

If that's bad not enough, he remarks how "wonders of this great excavation are reduced to accessories in a shadow-puppet show".

"Regrettably, the experience is apparently pitched at the curiosity and concentration span of someone's idea of a reluctant ten-year-old," he concludes.

Mark is keener on the trains at the National Railway Museum: "You stand in their lee, sensing their power, imagining the taste of steam, the smell of oil. Here is romance..."

York Art Gallery, too, is a Fisher favourite: "The gallery glows with the idiosyncratic excellence of the paintings on its walls." And he remarks on the "archaeological excellence" of the Yorkshire Museum.

He is also keen on the Beck Isle Museum of Rural Life at Pickering, and not just because of its "delightful mixtures of objects and collections".

"I should declare an interest," he writes. "My father was stationed in Pickering with the Welsh Guards in the Second World War, an infantry regiment learning to handle tanks on the moors.

"I was conceived here shortly after the Christmas party for which Rex Whistler painted murals."

IT'S always a little sad when you only discover a fascinating life once it is over.

The first the Diary knew about Terence "Dumbo" Willans was on reading his obituary in the Guardian last week.

He was born in York, the son of an engineer, only to leave for Australia aged 16, three years after he was orphaned. At the start of the Second World War he returned to Britain, joined the Army and volunteered to become a parachutist.

"Willans acquired his nickname on his first parachute jump when the instructor, perhaps detecting an understandable hesitation, called out: 'Uncurl your ears, Dumbo, and fly!'" reports the Guardian.

After the war he stayed in the Army for three years to research and test new parachutes, and became a safety harness pioneer.

ANDY Scaife drops the Diary a line to praise our top Saturday columnist.

"We loved Sophie McGill on the subject of chavs (October 23)," he writes. "My daughter Jess and her friends have been regaling me with chav jokes ever since. Here are a couple.

"What do you call a chav with a brain cell? Gifted.

"What have a chav and a slinky got in common? Both are completely useless but great fun to chuck down the stairs."

Updated: 09:14 Monday, November 01, 2004