OLD BONES

I suppose, in the end, even I was surprised by how little I actually cared whether the old bones they found under that car park in Leicester actually belonged to King Dickie III or not. I think that I’m rather more disturbed by it all than interested, perhaps because, even though I know I wouldn’t know all that much about it, I’d rather not think about the fact that this old skull of mine might end up being tossed around a lab somewhere by some spotty Herbert in a white coat, if such things would still be around by the time my old bones became something which might be of scientific interest.

Perhaps such disinterest might appear out of character, especially coming from someone who is quite capable of examining the minutiae of his own pitiful existence on an almost daily basis, and getting excitement from the presence of the most humble and mundane of subjects and objects, but I’ve rarely felt any real connection to the long dead, and I certainly have very little in the way of “romantic” attachment to the dead and buried, unless I knew them personally.

A pile of old bones is a pile of old bones, and it really doesn’t matter all that much to me who they once belonged to, unless of course it’s going to help someone get some peace if it can provide some closure to a living person who is missing someone…

Family history doesn’t interest or excite me very much at all. I’ve often said that I am probably descended from a long, long line of nobodies who I probably wouldn’t have liked all that much, and finding out that I was right, or just finding a long list of names of people I never knew, isn’t something that would give me personally any pleasure, even though I know a lot of people seem to find that sort of thing quite fascinating and a whole new industry seems to have been built up around such curiosities.

I’ve never been a fan of “Time Team” and its ilk, either, perhaps because I always had the sneaking suspicion that they really only wanted to find a hoard of gold coins rather than anything useful, so it’s a show that has passed me by over the years as so much digging around in mud and guessing. But then, I’ve always struggled with other people’s obsessions and how they sometimes fail to understand how whatever it is just doesn’t excite you in quite the same way…

Meanwhile, didn’t someone once say that the percentage of creatures which have turned up in the fossil record is so miniscule that we’ve barely scratched the surface, and much of what we think we know about life before humanity might actually give us a couple of thousand years out of the four billion or so that we can reasonably guess about with anything approaching certainty?

Even the ancient civilisations that we know something about tell us little about the day-to-day life for the ordinary person living in those times, and how they got up each morning and got through their day perhaps thinking that they were at the very apex of civilisation, things could never be better than they were that day, and that life was going to stay pretty much the same forever.

Some of us make that mistake these days, and it’s always a sobering thought that civilisations fall as well as rise.

History to me is more cerebral than physical anyway. The artefacts, and the bodies, themselves don’t particularly interest me as much as the philosophies, the mistakes and what we can learn to make sure that we don’t make those mistakes again and add to the long list of human misery.

And so, whilst the headlines that tell us perhaps less shockingly than they hoped it was, that a “Dead person is still dead!” I don’t think it’s simply because they are almost certainly the remains of King Richard III that my lack of being bothered is manifesting itself. I’ve certainly not got any “Lancastrian” axe to grind. My disinterest is more universal than that, as opposed to merely being disinterested…

The obvious unfortunate rhyming slant aside, and the Shakespearean connection notwithstanding, I suppose there is some mild interest to be found in the science of the whole thing, but it’s not as if he was found in an exciting or interesting place like the Tombs of the Pharoahs are.

I know that I haven’t really argued this all that well at all in these pages today. I’m sure in itself that the discovery remains mildly interesting, but perhaps I’m just feeling rather more cynical about the media who-ha surrounding something that seems a little bit trivial to me, and which is getting an awful lot of stupidity wrapped around it, not least by me, I suppose.

But a dead king is always going to remain a dead king and unless we are suddenly going to “Jurassic Park” the old feller, I don’t think anything’s going to change that all that much…

Except... Well, because this is precisely the kind of contrary nonsense I write when I’m feeling in a particularly awkward mood, one thing which might change is my opinion on all this. Tomorrow, indeed I might just find it all incredibly fascinating and the most interesting thing ever. It must be this winter of discontent getting to me...