Running from mummies
Lija and I did exactly that on the weekend. I was working here and there and we met up in the city between shifts to go and check out the British Museum.
The Museum is grand from the outside and jam-packed on the inside. We had several hours on Saturday and explored the Egyptian history, going back as far as 4000BC in some cases.
As you walk into the Ancient Egypt exhibition you face one of the most famous pieces of rock in the world – the Rosetta Stone, the key that broke the mysteries of Egyptian hieroglyphics. With scripture in three languages, some of it so small you can hardly see it, Thomas Young was able to compare the Greek with the demonic and Egyptian to work out the hieroglyphics. It enabled Egyptologists to read almost all Egyptian writing since.
There were also many statues of kings and gate guards which almost always had a twin. It’s not surprising that arms were missing, noses were missing but the scary sculptures were the ones where the eyes were perfectly left hollowed to fit the real things in. Eww! The most fascinating though were the mummies and their sarcophagus, shaped out perfectly for their bodies and covered with many colours and symbols to celebrate the soul moving on to the afterlife. The guards were all beginning to usher everyone out of the museum so I said we better go, and Lija said not till you have a look at this – and I turned around to see the bones of an uncovered mummified woman who was lying on her back, all a deep browny maroney colour, arms out at her side, head tilted towards us with perfectly preserved chompers and huge gaping eye sockets. Charming.
In the evening we had free tickets, yeah for a Saturday night! to see Edward Fox in Legal Fictions. Fox is a British actor who one of my ladies loves, and she was so excited that morning when I told her where I was going that I just had to get her a programme so she could drool over him, we had a good giggle in front of her hubby!
Legal Fictions was actually two smaller plays, the first was set in a prison cell and told the story of a lawyer’s first ever case, even though he’s been in the profession for ages and it was a pro-bono case. Well, between himself and the prisoner they worked out and played through a fantastic story that would proove the man didn’t kill his wife, but things don’t always go according to plan…
The second play was a retired high-court judge who imagines his wife having it off with the neighbour in the greenhouse, which brings up all these questions about their son and who he belongs to. Both were flamboyant and imaginative, with sets that weren’t extravagant but were nicely put together. The two actors were good, and I can see that Fox must have been pretty Foxxy in his hayday.
On Sunday we went back for an hour between shifts again, and checked out the Greeks and Romans, lots of marble, big urns and pots painted with timeless stories of heroes and gods.
Tags: Travel
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