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We got another Saturday together, just the two of us. I would be very surprised if we got another (but you never know), but this was a great one to go out on if it proves to be the last. My amazing wife is largely unbowed by being over nine months pregnant and was keen to get out of the house and have some fun. So we headed into town for lunch at the highly recommended
Savoir Faire - a small bistro near Holborn which has great food and wine at a very reasonable price. It felt more special, no doubt, because such quiet and uncomplicated lunches might be a thing of the past very soon (or at least take some organising). I am looking forward to meals out with prams and high chairs and crying (and I suppose the baby might need some of that stuff too - BANG. You thought I was already talking about the baby, but I was talking about me. What do you mean it doesn’t make sense?), but it was cool to have some steak and a glass of red wine and enjoy the last dregs of our carefree life, when we could have lunch in a bistro any time we wanted. We didn’t do it very much, to be honest and maybe we should have done it more. But this was a little oasis of bliss, a perfect celebration of the seven years it’s taken us to get to this point, as well as whatever is coming next. I am the luckiest of men.
And then we headed to the British Museum to check out their
Ancient Lives, New Discoveries exhibition which centres around 8 mummies which have (like me) all been inside a CT machine, so we can get a 3D representation of what’s inside. My brain is in much better shape than any of these dead idiots though (although mostly their brains have been pulled out during the mummification process - though one of them has the tool intended to do that lodged in their cranium so it wasn’t always successful). It was a reminder of how lucky we are to live in the modern world, where we might not get intricate cases created to contain our desiccated remains, but where dentistry and medicine give us a reasonable chance of living a largely pain free life. One of the mummies had terrible abscesses in his jaw that might have killed him, but would certainly have made his life a painful misery.
The Egyptian mummies are beautiful and haunting in a romantic sense and I don’t know why they have become associated with horror as they are all rather calm and contained, but there was one from the Roman Period that was much more unsettling. This was wrapped in linen which was then painted on to give him a wide-eyed, rather doleful expression. His fingers were separated and he was made to look like he was wearing a weird costume and it felt like he might sit up at any moment and wreak his revenge on the living.
There were grave goods too including a flatbread which still showed the marks of the fingers that made it two or three thousand years ago. I love this stuff. I saw some tourists taking their photo with a selfie stick and thought that one day that would be an exhibit in a museum too. One that maybe future historians were unable to ascertain the intended use. In the archaeological record the selfie stick will be like those years where a devastating volcano affects the rings of every tree on the planet. You’ll be able to date finds to exactly 2014/15 because there’s a selfie stick amongst the detritus.
We also saw
the Meroe Head exhibit, which is the decapitated head of a statue of Augustus that had been ritually buried by his enemies on the borders of the Roman Empire. They thought that they had defeated him, but ironically they had preserved something that would have otherwise almost certainly have been lost. You have to love historical ironies. It’s a beautiful object. It even had little metal eyelashes though these are pretty much all destroyed now.
As we help create the next generation who will replace us and symbolically (and probably actually) bury us into history, it was a fitting time to consider the brief span of life and our place in the eons of time.
We had a night in, still full from lunch and watched Gone Girl, which is ridiculous but quite engaging. We watched Terminator:Salvation last night and I was pleasantly surprised. I thought it would be terrible (and it was filled with stupid machismo and was free from humour) but it was much better than the third instalment and the chases and fighting made more narrative sense than the ones in the previous films. Like Gone Girl, none of it makes a lick of sense as evidenced
in this amusing parody trailer for the next chapter in the logically flawed franchise. (thanks to Robert P for that). John Connor ended the film seemingly arguing that we are masters of our own fate, even though all that had happened in the previous four films showed he was very wrong about that - even changing Judgement Day meant exactly the same things happened. (Spoiler) I enjoyed Skynet’s way too intricate plan, given that they could easily have fulfilled their mission by just killing either John Connor or his dad at almost any point. But when you’ve come up with an intricate plan you want to see it through, even if ultimately it is the cause for all the trouble that is to come. Even Skynet can’t fight fate. You’d think they’d al give up trying.
