Underground

Whenever I visit someone's garden I spend more time looking at the earth than I do at the flowers. I am that much of an amateur archeologist. I do the same thing with mole hills. I once found a medieval enamelled book-boss in a ploughed field by the side of Newark Priory in Surrey, then found its twin in Guildford museum.

I veer more toward the Indiana Jones method of archeology than the Barry Cunliffe. I want to get straight down to the artefact discovery. I don't have the patience for paintbrushes and trowels.

One of the great things about living in damp old England is the way everything sinks over a relatively short period of time. If an ancient Egyptian dropped something on the ground in the Valley of the Kings 3000 years ago, it would still be there now if nobody picked it up. There are great piles of spoil from tomb extensions chucked there millennia ago - thousands of stone chips with hieroglyphic images cut in them. There are also dire warnings that anyone caught trying to smuggle a piece out of the country would be arrested at the airport and imprisoned, which is why it is still lying on the ground all these years later.

You know that I spent three Summers touring Europe with a theatre company in the late 80s? I was the driver/technician and toward the end of my last year, I finally persuaded them to write some new material for a show. I knew all their other shows word for word and I needed to see something different for a change.

So Mick and Corinne came up with 'The British School of Archeology'. They have never managed to get a good video of anything they have done, but here is the link to their You Tube video of the show. I made the bone at the end of it - if you can manage to sit through the rest of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylXL7rKgK5A