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Health and safety at work is an emotive topic. As I filled out a risk assessment form for that most dangerous of museum activities, colouring-in for toddlers, I could understand why some people feel that Things Have Gone Too Far. Shortly afterwards we were doing an education session on the revolt by the Bryant and May’s match  girls, who, if you remember, were all dying in Victorian times of phosphorus poisoning contracted at work. I am personally happy to waste five minutes filling in a ridiculous form if that is the price of a society that values workers’ safety.

There is nothing like working on an archaeological site for making you appreciate the value of health and safety legislation. Having slashed my hands many times making replicas of flint knives, I have never felt any temptation to wear shorts or sandals on a site where the soil is full of flint. And I have personally fallen into a trench when someone left a slippery piece of plastic on the edge of it. I was lucky it was only three feet deep. One director I worked for in Greece suffered a fracture when a stone that had been carelessly left on the side of a deep trench fell onto her shoulder during a minor earth tremor. It could have been her head. Another colleague was buried up to his waist in sand during a trench collapse. He told me that you do not have to be completely buried to suffocate. If the earth is above the level of your diaphragm, you can breathe out but it becomes impossible to breathe in.

Earth-moving is a potentially hazardous exercise for anyone. I particularly remember one site I worked on in the early 1980s. We were working around a firm of developers, who had dug out a deep hole in the hillside to put in an underground car park. There was a large chunk of concrete the size of a wardrobe in the bottom of the hole and they needed to get it out. They slung a chain around the middle and attached the other end to the bucket of a JCB, and start to pull it up the steep side of the hole. It hadn’t got very far when the digger with its driver started to tilt and slide towards the edge.

After some frantic shouting, they stopped to think, with the slab of concrete hanging on its chain halfway up the side. By this time the archaeological team was lined up on the other side of the hole, watching the problem with professional interest. And then, before our astonished eyes, a man climbed down the slope, carrying a pneumatic drill, stood on the slab and began to cut it in half. Have you guessed? He was making the cut between the place where his feet were and the chain that was holding it up. And when he finished cutting, the bit he was standing on fell down into the bottom. Fortunately he managed to leap clear and cling onto the side of the hole, dropping the pneumatic drill, which by great good luck didn’t fall back onto him. The rest of the concrete was then light enough to be pulled out of the hole.

I have never before or since seen such a piece of mind-blowing stupidity.

Most of the things I dug up or picked up during my years as an archaeologist in the field were broken pieces of things, sherds from pots, smashed roof tiles, butchered bones. If they weren’t broken when they were thrown away, they were crushed by the shifting pressures of the earth and buildings under which they were buried, or smashed by some archaeologist pulling them out of the ground in the gathering dusk as the bulldozers moved in. But I remember one find that startled me so much when I found it that I actually yelled out loud, because for once it was complete and unbroken.

I was working on the site of a Roman villa just outside my home town. This was in the late 1970s. It was a research dig, so we had all the time in the world (within reason). The trench and the diggers’ campsite were in a piece of perfect English countryside, in the tree-lined avenue of the local stately home, with fields of ripe corn and contented cows on either side. It was high summer, so the days were sunny and warm, with a breeze that sent ripples across the cornfields and rustled in the leaves of the towering horse chestnuts. The lane leading to the house was fringed with frothy white flowers of cow parsley, and birds sang in the hedgerows. In the evenings, after the usual water-fight by the horse-trough, where the more boisterous members of the team threw saucepans of water over each other, some of the staff played chamber music on their recorders in the tool shed. The others went to the pub. So English!

I was poking the point of my trowel into the earth, which I should not have been doing – I was supposed to be scraping carefully with the side – and suddenly the earth just fell away to reveal a little Roman brooch. It was a cheap bronze trinket without any decoration, of a kind made in large numbers for ordinary people to fasten their clothing with in the days before buttons. The metal was bright green from the corrosion products of the copper, but when it was worn it must have been either a reddish-bronze colour or perhaps a brassy gold-yellow. And it was complete. That one was a special thrill.

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.