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Reader, have you ever met a museum curator? Have you ever penetrated to the dark rooms where they lurk? Do you know what they do for the money that you, the taxpayer, spends on them? I think it was when I was made redundant in 2011 that I realised how few people know what a museum curator does. When most people visit a museum, they encounter the ‘front of house’ staff. These are the people who are responsible for taking their money, showing them where the toilets are, telling them how to get to a particular exhibit, vacuuming the carpets, and so on. Some of them are very knowledgeable and can answer many of the visitors’ questions. Visitors, and indeed district councillors, won’t meet the “back of house” staff, i.e. the curators unless they come to an open day or evening lecture. 

So, what was a typical day as a curator like, when I was doing it? I have worked in three museums and volunteered in a fourth, as well as swapping anecdotes with curators from many others. The following is not an actual day, it’s a composite made of the sort of tasks that museum curators have to do in the average local authority museum. It also refers to a generic local authority museum, not any one in particular. So here goes…

…Having spent half an hour in a traffic jam, I sit down at my desk and log onto my computer. While it warms up, I wash up a coffee cup from the festering heap in the sink in the curator’s office and make myself a cup of coffee. I then attack my emails. I delete several dozen which have come from the council offices to all staff, but have nothing to do with the museum. I forward two advertisements for Viagra to the council’s  IT department with a rude note complaining that their firewall needs attention as a respectable middle-aged female staff member shouldn’t have to field inappropriate stuff like this. This is not really because I am shocked, but to get my own back for all the perfectly respectable websites that I need to consult for my work, but which they have blocked in their “one size fits all” campaign against staff wasting time, thus seriously holding up my research.

I then deal with simple enquiries, like, “will you give the Lacemakers a lecture on the 27^th March after their AGM,” (yes; I like the Lacemakers and they gave us a lovely demo for free at one of our open days and anyway I like sounding off for 45 minutes about my favourite topics); or “will you tell me which sites in the Roman town were the most important during the 1^st century AD and why”, (no; I’m not writing your undergraduate thesis for you).

I then proceed to the difficult ones. Like, “approximately how many Palaeolithic handaxes found in the XXXshire area do you have in the museum?”. How on earth do you admit to a researcher from the university of Cambridge that your accessions register has never been fully digitised, because you haven’t got the staff to do it,  and you therefore have no way of finding out, except by going through the paper records page by page, which you certainly don’t have the staff to do?

Somebody wants to come and look at all the Roman tiles from three sites in the town centre. Your eyes brighten, because you know that you only have to go to the store, where the boxes are stacked in alphabetical order of sites, and get them. So you get into your car, carefully noting your mileage for the claim form, and drive through another traffic jam to the out of town store, a disused warehouse.  Sites A and B are fine, you load them into the back of your car (did I mention that the council does NOT pay for the Business/Light Goods insurance necessary?) and go back for the tiles from Site C. They are not there. There is no Movement Ticket in the space on the shelf to tell you who has taken them and where to, let alone why. Fortunately it has to be someone inside the museum, because only museum staff are allowed keys to the store. You spend nearly half an hour searching the store just in case some idiot has moved them to a different shelf for some reason, and you still can’t find them.

Back to the museum, where you explode to the other four curators who share the office with you. One of them suggests that a certain senior person was giving a lecture on Roman tiles the day before yesterday. This person is out, but in their office are the missing boxes. You remove them, secure in the knowledge that they won’t give them another thought. Why do people always think they are entitled to disregard the rules they probably made themselves? If they needed six boxes of artefacts for a piece of research themself and couldn’t find out where they had gone, they wouldn’t be very pleased, would they? 

After a sandwich and a cup of horrible coffee at your desk, followed by a brisk walk, the afternoon is spent looking at the contents of the plastic bags which are cluttering up your desk. Some of them are enquiries from members of the public who have dug them up in their back gardens, or picked them up when they were having a country walk. They can be anything from a genuine Neolithic leaf-shaped arrowhead to a piece of Georgian chamber pot. These are a delight. Tact and diplomacy are sometimes required, however, when telling members of the public that their fascinating piece of flint which fits the hand so well is actually a perfectly natural frost-shattered pebble.  Other plastic bags hold collections of broken potsherds dug up by the museum’s field archaeologist. They are singularly unexciting as they are all smashed into very small pieces. The field archaeologist wants to know how old they are so he can date the layer they came from, in the (all too frequent) absence of coins or preserved timbers for dendrochronology. If I’m not sure of the date I just pass them round the room and the conclave of curators pronounce on them. A short report is typed up.

Towards the end of the day some time is spent Googling the names of various fossils, because the fossils in our natural history collection were catalogued a long time ago, and the nomenclature has changed. It is therefore a little difficult to match the notes just given to us by a visiting expert with the records in the catalogue. If the museum still had a natural history curator, the thing would be easy, but the post was abolished long ago, so an archaeologist or a social historian has to do it.

On and off all day you try to get hold of the local police firearms officer. The museum needs a firearms certificate, because it hold a number of antiquated but technically usable guns that have to be kept securely, and the officer needs to visit to approve the security arrangements. He is difficult to get hold of. Try again tomorrow, before the emails.

Time to go home. And as you wander through the empty galleries to the exit you think “How lucky I am to work here!” And you really really mean it. 

One of the side effects of the covid-19 epidemic has been panic buying, with supermarket shelves being emptied of pasta, baked beans, and toilet paper. It caused me a certain amount of amusement that people should consider toilet paper to be as essential for human survival as food.

My son spent two years working in Singapore and travelling all over South-East Asia, so he has first-hand experience of the fact that over large areas of the planet, people don’t use toilet paper and never have. They use water. In the up-market office where he worked as a computational chemist, the toilets were provided with both toilet paper and a “Malay hose” for those who preferred the traditional method. I will spare you the exact details, but I Googled them and it does sound as if it takes practice to spray your backside clean without soaking your clothes. However, the result is generally acknowledged to be a cleaner rear end than using paper alone. Some of these conveniences are extremely sophisticated. A modern Japanese toilet has a sort of bidet arrangement which is electronically controlled, and if you can’t read Japanese and you press the wrong button, you can end up flooding the cubicle. I like the sound of the warm air dryer though. I found a charming Youtube video on how to do it properly.

What people used to wipe their behinds in the days before loo rolls is an interesting topic for speculation and archaeological research. Historical records come up with some appalling ideas: potsherds; washable flat sticks (“shit sticks”), stones, shells and corn cobs. Most uncomfortable. The Romans are supposed to have used a sponge on the end of a stick to clean themselves, although literary references to this are few and ambiguous. It is suggested that the sponge was used by everyone who visited the loo and washed in between in salt water or vinegar. Yuk!

Leaves, moss, raw wool and old rags are a more attractive idea. I worked for many years in a town near London with an interesting history.  During the medieval period the local monastery had a number of toilets, recorded in the abbey chronicles. The monastery buildings were mostly demolished during the Reformation, but in the 1920s a flint-lined cesspit below the toilet attached to the abbot’s lodging was excavated. It contained fragments of coarse cloth which were likely to have been used as toilet paper.

The possibilities are endless. The 16^th century satirical novel “Gargantua”, by Francois Rabelais has a chapter which explores the subject of anal cleansing in earthy fashion. In chapter XIII the young giant Gargantua tells his father about his experiments with various materials in his search for the perfect wipe.  These included such things as a young lady’s velvet mask (lovely and soft); a page’s cap (also good); leaves of various plants (mostly good); and a selection of live birds and animals including a cat, which didn’t work so well because it scratched him in a most delicate place. He finally decided that the best “torche-cul” or bum-wipe was a nice fluffy young goose with the head held between your legs.

Gargantua didn’t consider paper very efficient. It is widely recognised today that he was right, and that using toilet paper alone is not actually very hygienic. You will find a neat article on the subject, one of many, at this link to a bbc website.

Both paper and water have their disadvantages. What do you do in a country where water is hard to come by?  See Dr Jane Wilson-Howarth’s book “How to Shit Around the World. The art of Staying Clean and Healthy While Traveling” (2006 Traveler’s Tales, Books, Palo Alto) for suggestions.  The disadvantage of using paper is that it has to be disposed of afterwards. There is a famous story about Queen Victoria, who was visiting Cambridge and noticed bits of paper floating down the River Cam. She naively asked what they were, and instead of telling her the unsavoury truth, that they were toilet paper which in the days before sewage treatment ended up in many a river, she was told that they were notices forbidding bathing in the river. Even modern toilet paper needs a strong efficient flush to move it along, or your toilet will block up. When I was a young woman in Greece, many toilets had a small bin beside them for you to deposit your used loo paper, as the flush mechanism couldn’t cope with it. What a fun job emptying them must have been!

“…it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man…”  wrote Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, in his essay Essay  “Of Gardens” (1597).  I agree with him.  When I visit a town for the first time, the first place I go to is the museum. The second place is the town’s botanical garden or public garden.

But you do not have to visit gardens in the real world to enjoy their peace and beauty. Human beings seem to have planted gardens for pleasure as well as food, as far back as written records go, and probably earlier, and archaeological excavations now pay attention to evidence for gardens as well as buildings. There are many “gardens” recorded in history as wall paintings or written descriptions, which you can enjoy as a virtual experience. These were not real gardens but gardens illustrating an ideal. Plants which flowered or fruited at different seasons could be shown together and there is a lot of symbolism involved in the plants chosen, which I am not qualified to go into. But they are as beautiful as any real garden. My personal favourites are the garden painted on the wall of the tomb of Nebamun, a middle–ranking official who lived in Thebes in Egypt (around 1350 BCE); the garden of King Alcinous, described in the Odyssey (probably composed 8^th century BCE but thought to have been set in the Late Bronze Age around the 12^th to 11^th centuries BCE); and the garden painted on the walls of the empress Livia’s (58BCE – 29CE) dining room at her villa at Prima Porta north of Rome.

The estates of wealthy Egyptians always had a walled garden where the owners could enjoy peace and quiet and cool shade. The painting of the garden of Nebamun shows a pond full of fish,  water birds, papyrus and lotus flowers, which is surrounded by trees and plants: dom palms, date palms, acacias, sycamores and mandrake plants. You can visit this garden online on the British Museum website, or in the Egyptian galleries at the museum itself. I love it because of the beautiful colours, and I am very fond of pools with water lilies. It is easy to imagine yourself sitting by the pond, shaded from the hot sun by the palm trees, trailing a hand in the cool water and smelling the scent of the lotus.

The garden of Alcinous, king of the Phaiacians on the island of Scheria was described by Homer in book VII of the Odyssey. It was four acres in extent, watered by two springs and warmed by a constant west wind. Much of it was an orchard, which, magically, produced fruit all year round, pomegranates, figs, grapes, olives, apples and pears, without ever suffering from blight or frost. Beyond the orchard there were flower gardens. Even in translation (alas, I have no Greek) the words of the description paint a beautiful picture of an ideal garden, warm, peaceful and perpetually fruitful. You can almost feel the warm wind, taste the wine from the grapes. The Project Gutenberg website has a selection of translations by different people.

Livia was the wife of Augustus, the first emperor of Rome. The dining room of her villa at Prima Porta was decorated with beautiful wall paintings of a garden surrounded by a low wall, with a wide variety of flowers, shrubs and trees, with birds perching in them, and garden furniture, drawn in exquisite detail – quinces, pomegranites, myrtles, oleanders, roses, daisies and many more. I have seen the frescos in a museum in Rome and they are beyond stunning. Google images will get you there – there are hundreds of them.

Take Bacon’s advice. If you are staying in, for whatever reason, refresh your spirits with a virtual visit to the gardens of our ancestors.

Recently, my current employers, whose services to tourism have been massive, were invited to meet Princess Anne at a garden party in Edinburgh. Alas, the nearest I have ever come to royalty was accidentally walking on the queen’s red carpet at a public event. The Egyptian government had lent some of the treasures from Tutankhamen’s tomb to the British Museum, and the queen was going to open the exhibition. I was at that time a student at the Institute of Archaeology, now part of University College London, and the BM was my second home, so to speak. The Institute is located in Gordon Square, a few minutes’ walk away from the museum. We were always being sent round to look at the displays in the public galleries, and occasionally got to work in the stores.

The morning of the royal visit, I was working as usual on some stone age tools in the depths of the massive warren of underground passages and storage rooms below the public galleries. Those were the days before the war on terror; nowadays they wouldn’t have let any students in for a week before a VIP visit. The member of staff responsible for me had promised to come and warn me when I had to get out. However, as it approached lunchtime, there was no sign of him, and I thought I had probably better get going. The way out from my particular part of the underground maze opened onto one of the public galleries. I took my usual route and emerged from a door in the panelling of a gallery full of printed books to find myself standing on a red carpet in the middle of a roped-off area, with about a hundred people staring at me. Scandalised attendants leapt out from all sides and hustled me and my battered briefcase out of the way. As I looked back over my shoulder, someone had got out a carpet sweeper and was running it over the area my plebeian feet had polluted!

In my professional capacity I have cleaned many a floor. No, I don’t mean vacuuming the carpet. I mean excavating the floor of a prehistoric family home. One in particular stands out. The year I graduated from university, I went to work in France on an archaeological site in the Dordogne region. This area is famous for its prehistoric painted caves, but there are also many sites in the region where people lived as well. The site I was working on dated from the end of the last Ice Age, when humans, and they were modern humans like us by this time, were still hunter-gatherers. They lived, not in the deep caves where the paintings were made, but in rock shelters and overhangs. They often made them cosier by building fireplaces, and walls across the entrances, and paving the floors. The local limestone splits into handy pieces, and the shelter I worked in at the end of the summer had a floor tiled with limestone pieces carefully chosen and fitted together. It was covered with the rubbish the original occupants had left behind.

I spent about three weeks drawing and excavating that blasted floor. The words “sur le dallage”, “dans le dallage” and “sous le dallage” are still burnt into my brain like a French language exercise. First I had to draw the surface of the floor and everything that had been left lying on it – bones, flint flakes etc (sur le dallage). Then I had to take three dimensional measurements of all of these objects, and excavate each one and place it with a label in a little plastic bag. We didn’t have GPS in those days, so we used tape measures and a curious little string triangle constructed on the edge of the trench. You measured the depth of the object by sighting across to the triangle using a wooden measuring stick. Then I had to excavate the floor and take up all the limestone fragments, again carefully measuring in and labelling everything that I found in the cracks among those paving stones (dans le dallage). And finally I had to do it again when all the stones had been lifted and I got to the area underneath (sous le dallage).

This is the nitty-gritty of archaeology, which programmes like Time Team can’t really convey. It takes WEEKS to excavate a thing like that properly and a lot of it is boring, repetitive work, which nonetheless has to be done with absolute accuracy.  But the thrill is that you are uncovering the lives of humans thousands of years in the past, people who felt the cold of winter and wanted a fire and a windbreak, people whose feet got wet and wanted a floor that wasn’t a sea of mud, people who sat round the fire and gnawed on a marrow bone, and carved decorations on their possessions, whether for magic or just for pleasure. People very like us.