Driving back from Scotland today was made a little quicker by Neil MacGregor. Former director of the British Museum, he’s an artifact of sorts himself, brought down from Scotland and forged in the academic mill of Oxford University many decades past. He collaborated with Radio 4 to create a History of the World in 100 Objects. I’ve now listened to a good fifty of them back to back.
MacGregor is very much a product of his privilege, very casually bringing in household names to talk about esoteric things. “Here’s Lara Croft on Hieroglyphics”… “Here’s SpongeBob to talk about Augustus Caesar”. All of the vowels have made friends with him. You can hear the “h” when he says “wheel”. Listening to this is like taking tea with a benign and ancient retired headmaster in the garden of his ancestral home. The ideas rove all over the world. He is full of scattered insight into the ancient world, political mechanisms, the power of trade, humanity, sex, food, shifting morals… Antiquities are a minefield of outrage and meaning these days. He occasionally nods to what could be endless arguments about almost everything he talks about, but he doesn’t let these modern sensibilities derail what is always fifteen minutes of timeless knowledgeable and pleasurable whimsy. It helped me eat the hours up on that seven hour slog back from Ellie’s.
I didn’t want to leave hers which is why I’ve only just got home now at half ten. I was loving the tranquility and creative potential in that little slice of land, that stone house full of history and possibility and dreams up there in the marches, the borders, the edges. I took the morning to really fill out my diary and look at the shape of my coming month.
Tonight, directly outside my flat, men with flashing lights, big machines and drills are whistling to each other and appear to be very seriously gearing up to spend the whole fucking night making big noises with machines. I’ve got to deliver something unfamiliar tomorrow morning way too early in a place that’s hard to drive to. My alarm is currently set to half five. I’ve said “yes” to too much again it seems, and the next fortnight is going to be a test of stamina. I have a feeling I’m gonna wish I’d snapped my phone up there like Gus Fring and gone and lived in a tent with the hares until winter where nobody can make me do random things.
That said, it was cold up there. It’s noticeably warmer down here, although in such a way that I want my window open and that means these huge machines might as well be on my bed as they crank up to do whatever nonsense they have to do. Why the hell does anyone live in London?
I shall attempt to sleep while dreaming of antiquities, interpretations, ancient civilisations, worlds without petrol.
AlBarclay 