Roland Unger, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
I remember being taken by my parents to the Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum in the spring or summer of 1972. It was the thing to do that year.
I remember the excitement of planning the trip. I remember the crowds outside the British Museum and having to queue for ages.
I remember being shepherded through the exhibition, in truth not seeing much as a tiny tot, but still being exhilarated by it all.
To compensate me for the long queues and not all that much to see once we’d been through the exhibition, my parents bought me a souvenir of the visit; a Tutankhamun Mask Mug, which still to this day forms part of my minuscule trophy cabinet, in itself part of a slightly larger drinks cabinet:
For several decades, that “Treasures of Tutankhamun” relic of mine has served as the collection dish for small coins that are better off in the charity coin jar than in my pocket. While it still serves that purpose, in theory, in practice (nearly 50 years later) I rarely use cash these days so the jar fills up mighty slowly.
Earlier in 1972 – The Curse of “Toot”
My favourite memory surrounding the huge public phenomenon that was the Tutankhamun exhibition was my Grandma Anne’s take on the topic, in early spring of 1972.
Grandma Anne, bless her, was more than a little deaf by 1972. Also, despite having lived in England since just after the first world war, English was not even her second language, after Russian and Yiddish.
Driving away from Streatham one Sunday, I’ll guess just before the arrival, or early in the days of, the exhibition, Grandma Anne exclaimed, as we drove along Bedford Hill, that someone had cursed the common.
We asked her what she was on about. She’d heard it on the radio. She was emphatic. Grandma Anne didn’t know the details, but someone had put a curse on the place and if you went there, bad things were likely to happen to you. She was keen for me especially to keep away from the place.
The curse of Tooting Common. It took us a while to twig her confusion and we three were in stitches about it. I’m not sure Gradma Anne ever got her head around why they named a park in South London after an Egyptian Pharaoh …or maybe a Pharaoh after a South London park.
Anyway…
Cursed Or Lucky? Autumn 2012
…roll the clock forward more than 40 years after the 1972 exhibition in London – Janie and I got something close to a private viewing in Cairo in 2012 when we inadvertently arrived in Egypt on the day some trouble kicked off, so we visited the Cairo Museum in the absence of 95% of the normal number of tourists:
There’s lucky, not cursed…hopefully.
