October 2021

Giving evening lectures to local interest groups was part of my work as a museum curator. The subject matter was usually interesting enough in itself (Roman toilets), the objects beautiful enough (medieval decorated jugs and illuminated manuscripts), to make it easy to hold the audience’s attention. Well, they only went to sleep on one occasion and the organiser reassured me afterwards that those particular members usually did so. I did get some good tips from my father. He was a microbiologist specialising in rabies vaccines, and he once showed me a slide he used to jazz-up a lecture, which I assume consisted mainly of tables and graphs. It was the front page of a French magazine, a sort of Gallic “Hello” or “OK”, and showed a curvy young female on a beach having her bikini pulled off her behind by a mad dog. The title was “La Rage sur la Plage”.  This inspired me to buy a few stills from the film “One Million Years BC”, with cave men and women fighting dinosaurs, to enhance my next lecture on Stone Age Hertfordshire. They went down a treat.

But the best trick I ever saw was when I was a student and attended a conference on bog bodies. The last speaker of the day was from Scandinavia, an area rich in well-preserved human remains recovered from peat bogs, where the acid soils slow the decomposition of organic material, and preserve such dramatic finds as human skin with wounds, hair and clothing, stomach contents, and other things which you don’t usually find on your average excavation on a redevelopment site in the town centre. The most famous bog bodies all have names, which any archaeology student will know, such as Tollund Man, Lindow Man and so-on. At the end of his lecture, he whipped a small black object out of his trouser pocket, and held it up, announcing “And here in my pocket is the finger of Grauballe Man”.

How cool is that!