Artifacts

I thought I'd show you my latest find at yesterday's flea-market. It's an iron flint-striker, and dates from sometime around the late 17th or early 18th century by the look of it. Maybe it is obvious, but it was used for striking against a flint over tinder by people out on the road who needed fire for whatever reason. I think it was found by a metal-detector not too far away from here.

It is a really nice thing to hold and quite an historic little thing. I won't be keeping it for long (in fact I've already agreed to sell it again), but it is nice to have it around to look at for a week or so.

I don't know what sort of bracket I fall into, because I'm not a collector and I'm not a dealer, and I have become much more acquisitive over the last 10 years or so. I don't like parting with things, but I don't like hanging onto them either.

When I was a kid, I always wanted to have my own museum, and persuaded my father to get me a glass cabinet which was put in my bedroom. In it, I put various bits of rubbish ( a few fossils, a cow-bone (which was sold to me in 'The Lanes' in Brighton as 'dinosaur' by an unscrupulous shop-keeper), some old coins, a few WW2 bomb fragments - a load of mismatched and unrelated objects which, for some reason, held a fascination for me.

I wanted my museum to be along the lines of an old Victorian one, like the British Museum in London was at the time. If only I had seen the 'Pitt-Rivers' museum in Oxford when I was young - I would have been in heaven. Have you ever been there? It is crammed with innumerable objects in cabinets and shelves, as well as a multitude of unmarked drawers which you have to open in order to find out what is inside. Here and there, there is an empty cabinet which has a label saying something like, "This cabinet used to contain a shrunken human head of the **** tribe, but has been given back to them as a mark of respect for their ancestors".

Another wonderful place to visit if you you are in London is the Sir John Soanes museum in Lincolns Inn Fields. It is an entire, 18th century house which is stuffed with artifacts from all over the ancient classical world, and it is completely free to get into. The landings around the huge stairwell are so crammed with Greek heads and Egyptian items stacked on shelves, that two people cannot pass on them. You can look down into the basement and see a massive Egyptian sarcophagus made from a single slab of alabaster - it must weigh about 3 tons, and there are contemporary prints of how they got the thing down there, all those years ago.

I miss these ramshackle displays these days. All the big museums have gone in for smart presentation, and there are usually more things in the archives than they have on display. Whole businesses have grown up which sell presentation systems which involve humidity controlled cabinets with integral lighting, video projection with sound equipment, etc.

Places like the Pitt-Rivers are under threat for want of funding, but will probably survive if they are attached to a university of some sort. The little country museums are always good - like the one in Devizes. I instantly go back to my childhood when I wander around them.

Meanwhile, I am always on the hunt for something that will quicken my heart for a brief period, before I sell it on to some other old fool.