Tut & I

Unlike the young Queen Elizabeth on the opening day, I was one of the 1.7 million in the summer of 1972 who queued for hours along the hot pavements outside the walls of the British Museum to experience an encounter with a long dead king and his bling. London was Tutankhamen crazy that year : stamps, postcards, candles, lighters, cocktails … 

With an inexplicable but lifelong obsession for all things Egyptian, I was happy enough to suffer an afternoon of heat and dust and grumpy international jostling to feast my soul on the treasures within. It was pricey, but the revenue would return to Egypt for further explorations. And I was in line to bask in the presence of a god.

At long last, we were filtered in tight bundles through armed security into a darkened room, where selective spotlights hinted at gold glints in tall glass cases. Uniformed guards chivvied us along lest we linger long enough to lick the glass or pull off a smash & grab, as we filed sweatily and obediently past clinical displays of bygone skills and eternal aesthetics. The ancient crafted gold tightly clutched its precious stones, and the mystical blue of lapis lazuli seemed to carry an ancient message that we may never understand. We shuffled on, agog for our moment with the famed funeral mask of the long gone boy king. He was indeed magnificent, though he looked rather tired, and a lot smaller than I had imagined him. But all too soon, before the spell could engage, it was all over, and we were cast, blinkily, out of the darkened sanctuary into the tawdry decompression chamber of the souvenir shop. Thence, clutching a bag of soulless trinkets, I stumbled back into the drab ordinariness of our now world.  For some hours, I felt thoroughly spiritually disjointed.

At home I just slumped in a chair seeking solace in the slim exhibition catalogue whilst my disinterested (and possibly jealous) husband plied me with consolatory alcohol. It was probably one of the bigger anti climaxes of my life, as I was to tell my mother on the phone later that evening. Along with the Mona Lisa (she being so very tiny), and the absurd over-wonkiness of the leaning tower of Pisa. All I could really recall was being pressed too close to sweaty strangers, being forced to share their breath, their voracious voyeurism, the whole shepherded experience.

Two days later, I received a phonecall from a stranger. A longstanding wartime friend of my mother, there was some kind of karmic debt that now led to an invitation for me to meet her, a significant hieroglyphologist-whatever, at a rear entrance of the museum at 5.30 on the following Friday.

And so it was that I had a second date with the king, spending just a few stolen unforgettable minutes alone with Tut the Timeless. Not even the Queen of England could claim that privilege.