Chris Pascoe’s Fun Tales

Chris’s question may be bizzare, but he was not the only one who wanted to know…

Never go to an exhibition on ancient history with an academic scholar of ancient history. This is very sound advice and as such I ignored it. I’d just let myself in for one of the longest days of my life.

The exhibition in question was Tutankhamun in Chelsea Being the non-academic type, I was much more interested in spotting cast members from MadeinChelsea than any ancient artifacts, but the ancient artifacts outnumbered them by hundreds to nil.

Everything on show came from the reign, 3,344 years ago, of that most iconic of Egyptian Kings, and I feel that 3,344 years is about how long my academic daughter Maya took to get round it.

“Allow 90 minutes for your visit,” said all the blurb… not thousands of years. Maya was in the first gallery for 90 minutes, and there were still four more galleries to go. I was finished with Gallery One in 4 minutes flat – over 4 times less than even the average browsing time, displaying an attention span only a quarter of a normal person’s, and therefore probably proving me to be over 20 times more disinterested and stupid than Maya. She’d always suspected as much.

In truth, I am a bit basic. Maya read every single note, inspected every exhibit studiously and even attempted to translate hieroglyphics. Eventually, in the halfway cafe, she glanced at my phone and saw that all I’d done in those three hours was Google “Why did Tutankhamen have breasts?”

“What! Really Dad?” she admonished, sounding and looking incredibly like Saffy from AbFab. “One of the most important exhibitions in the history of everything ever, never to be repeated here again, with all these totally amazing exhibits… and your only query is why did Tutankhamun have breasts?”

“Well he did,” I reasoned, “On half those statues, he definitely has. Why has he?”

“I doubt that anybody else, anybody at all, has asked that.”

Well Maya, my little scholar of ancient history, it turns out they have! My Google search turned up big academic studies on the very subject. Some believed it to be a stylised art form, depicting fertility and semi-deity in more than one Egyptian King, while some believed they just had boobs, get over it, probably a genetic thing in the family.

When we finally reached the gift shop, Maya somehow conned me into to buying her an official exhibition book for £40… £40! That’s 12 pints in real money! As we queued to pay, a little boy who’d clearly been thinking very hard, looked up at his dad and asked “Daddy, why did they draw Tote-um-Moom as a girl?’”

“I wondered that!” came his father’s instant response, “I think he must have been a lot fatter than they let on.”

Before they could carry on discussing this whole new take on the subject, they were distracted by a very loud and involuntary groan of despair emanating from a certain young lady standing at my side clutching a book worth 12 pints.

So, not the only one asking then. I must learn to control my smug-smirk – my shin’s still hurting.

My search showed academic studies on the very subject

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