February 2021

 “…the breakfast, a meal in which the Scots, whether of the lowlands or mountains, must be confessed to excel us. The tea and coffee are accompanied not only with butter, but with honey, conserves, and marmalades. If an epicure could remove by a wish, in quest of sensual gratifications, wherever he had supped he would breakfast in Scotland.” 

Thus spoke the 18^th century English writer Dr Samuel Johnson, who made a tour of the Western isles of Scotland in 1773. Although extremely rude about much of the food he was offered on the journey, he was whole-heartedly in favour of Scottish breakfasts. So I am currently living in the right country, and I strongly agree with the marmalade bit.

When I was working on a dig in France, we lived in tents in the field next to a small country restaurant. We had our breakfasts (jam not marmalade but it was good and the coffee was marvellous) on the terrace of the restaurant in the early morning sunshine, surrounded by tubs of petunias and geraniums. The owner of the establishment had an ancient father who used to come and sit on a corner of the terrace while we were eating. His breakfast consisted of a piece of salami and a large glass of cognac.  To each his own…

I saw an interesting breakfast in a Singapore café. A little old Chinese lady came and sat at my table, bringing with her a very large bowl of curried noodle soup. She was a tiny, skinny little thing, and I watched with interest as she steadily spooned and chop-sticked the enormous bowlful into her diminutive person. She looked very perky so it was obviously doing her good. Maybe I should try it. Probably this form of breakfast was the inspiration for my son’s current favourite, which is to take a pot of instant curried noodles, break two eggs into it, and pour boiling water over the lot. When the noodles have had their due time, the eggs could by a stretch be said to be poached.

I myself was eating the signature breakfast of the city, or at least part of it. This is coffee and kaya toast, eaten with two boiled eggs. I skipped the eggs as I am not fond of soft eggs in any form, and the eggs that go with this breakfast are so soft boiled that you are expected to break them into a bowl, stir them up with soya sauce and drink them. ‘Kaya toast’ is white toast made into a sandwich with kaya jam. Kaya jam is a combination of coconut milk, egg and sugar flavoured with pandan leaf, and is very nice. My first attempt at this breakfast was a bit oversweet, as I did not understand how to specify that I wanted my coffee without sugar.  I watched the man preparing it  put a tablespoon of sugar into the (glass) mug, then about an inch of condensed milk, and then fill it up with coffee. But once I had got the coffee sorted out it was a fine tropical start to the day’s sightseeing, especially when I started adding miniature, perfectly fresh bananas bought from a nearby supermarket. Oh joy!

The Full British Breakfast, in its English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish variants, is part of the pleasure of staying in B&Bs all over the British Isles. Sausage, bacon, egg, fried bread, baked beans, fried mushroom and fried tomato: a decadent combination of saturated fats to begin a day walking up mountainsides or along the seashore in the freezing rain and/or howling gale. I like the Scottish version (Lorne sausage and haggis) even better than the traditional English one. The Irish version (black and white pudding, soda bread and potato cake) is not to be sneezed at either. I haven’t yet tried a Full Welsh, which allegedly includes seaweed and cockles made into a patty with oatmeal, but it sounds promising.

But I think my favourite breakfast is the bacon butties you get on the local ferries to the Outer Isles of Orkney. Coffee and really good bacon butties munched as you sail across a brilliantly blue sea past small green islands on your way to visit a chambered tomb is the absolute best. Oh, how I’ve missed them during Lockdown!

Archaeology is a very badly paid profession for all but the very lucky. It is also very insecure, with many short –term contracts. It is regarded as non-essential to the well-being of society in many countries, although there are others so fiercely proud of their national heritage that they will put you in jail for picking up stones in the river bed in case they were prehistoric tools. In 2010, as the recession bit and redundancy loomed, some of us in the archaeology curators’ office at the museum where I worked had a discussion about possible alternative jobs…

One of my colleagues suggested becoming a private detective. As he pointed out, this would involve spending a lot of time sorting through the contents of people’s dustbins, analysing what they have thrown away and what it tells you about them. Perfect! As archaeologists we have all spent ages digging out people’s rubbish pits, the pre-modern equivalent of the dustbin, and drawing deductions from the contents, so we have loads of relevant experience. Well, sort of. As the museum’s specialist in medieval pottery my deductions tended to be along the lines of how much local as opposed to imported pottery the household was using, as a very rough guide to what date the site was, and an even rougher guide to how rich the household was and who the town was trading with. I yearned to get someone to do a chemical analysis of the cooking pots to see what they were boiling up in them, but there was never enough money.

Another colleague suggested becoming an undertaker, since we have all spent plenty of time exhuming corpses, albeit usually reduced to skeletons.  I dug up my first skeleton when I was still at school. Subsequent years of work in a museum involved caring for many boxfuls of human bones and crunchy bags of cremated ones. The latter contributed to the education of my son’s class in infant school. I was asked to talk to twenty five-year-olds about being an archaeologist. We all sat in a big circle on the carpet and solemnly passed round a selection of objects I had brought in. Before we started I had asked the teacher privately if she thought the children would be upset by a small bag of cremated dead Roman. Beaming, she said that would solve a problem for her, as they were supposed to “do death” that term, and she would now be able to tick the topic off quite painlessly. The weeny ones didn’t seem at all upset, although I’m not sure how many of them really understood that what was in the bag was the remains of a 2000-year-old person.

Sewage worker would also be appropriate. There is nothing like a really good cesspit. I had been working on the contents of a sixteenth century cesspit at the time. The pottery had wonderful green stains from the cess (sewage), and the soil samples contained things like blackberry pips and the eggs of parasitic worms that had gone right through the people who had used the loo. Most cesspits in the medieval town produced traces of parasitic worms; those poor medieval guys were full of them. But my favourite was one amazing latrine which produced a whole jar of 14^th century plum stones that someone had tipped down the loo.

Well, today’s job market is all about transferable skills….