Student union beer festive, Trip to see Tutankhamen's stuff, Wales win 6 Nations Grand Slam!
...It's been a LONG few weeks.
The Student Union Real Ale and Cider festivals was all that it promised. Me and will teamed up to show whoever wrote the Pub quiz that setting a round on Dinosaurs followed by one on Ancient Rome and when one team consisted of an archaeologist with an interest in paleontology and an ancient historian was a recipe for disaster for them, and a guaranteed win for our teem. We only got one t-shirt, one bottle of beer and six beer tokens between the 10 of us, but the gloating right were worth it. I then promptly got onto the cider (I still maintain that the American phrase "hard Cider" is a blasphemy, ALL cider is by definition alcoholic) which was a nice whiskey cask conditioned scrumpy on the masochistic side of 8% and the rest of the day became quite hazy.
The next day, unwilling to let my unused low value tokens go to past, i went to the beer festivel again and had a far more sedate time with Bullmastiff Son Of a Bitch, Valley of Glamorgan Vog y Grog, Bragdy Mŵs Piws (purple moose brewery) Ochr Tywyll y MŴs (Dark side of the moose) and a whole other range of Porters, stouts and Milds, especially a nice little mild i think was by Rhymney brewery in Mertha tydfil.
Then came Thursdays trip to London to see the British Museum, then go to the millennium dome to see Tut Ankh Aten, later Tut Ankh Amun, well, we knew HE wasn't there, but a lot of his grave goods were in London on display, and although i have seen them, and in fact seen his mummy in Egypt, it was worth the trip to take another look.
However, to get there in time we had to leave Caerdydd at 0600, which for me meant getting up at 0530. For R it meant leaving work at 0430, drunk, to get there just in time to fall asleep in a doorway, so me and the rest of our friends had to pick him up and guide him to the bus.
This more or less set the tone for the rest of the day as the next generation of the UK's finest archaeologists wandered in a sleep deprived, and as far as at least 50% of these present, hungover state, about the capital ("Hey guys, if we get drunk we'll get to sleep really early and so waking up at five will be okay!"). However the Brit was, as always, excellent, and as our lecturer knew some people there we got to go behind the scenes and handles some roman finds.
Tut was also good. Sure, the boy king himself was absent and the display on Akhenaten, AKA Amenhotep the fourth, was far to brief, mentioning only that he was most likely the father of Tut-ankh-amen, and mentioning briefly his sweeping religions reforms that replaced most of the traditional pantheon with the worship of one god, the Sun Disk, The Aten.
So aside from not mentioning the most interesting new kingdom Pharaoh, if not THE most interesting pharaoh exept in breif terms, the exhibit was good. Oh, and i had the minor inconvenience of having to empty all my pockets as the coin that slipped out through the hole in my coat pocket and is not trapped in the lining set of all the metal detectors. Considering that i carry several pounds of largely useless, occasionally VERY useful shrapnel such as miniature screwdrivers for fixing my glasses, a comb, gaffa-tape, a hip flask, a tin of fisherman's friends lozenges and a dozen bottle openers on my person at all times, as well as scrapes of paper with useful aids to the memory, this took five full minutes and attracted a small crowd. Remarkably the security did not bat an eyelid and were quite happy to let a walking toolkit like me in, despite the fact sleep deprivation was kicking in and i was quite possibly dribbling slightly at the time.
The exhibit was... beautiful.
After a full two hours and an quarter oggaling the exhibit, including giving a small child a basic lesson in how to read Hieroglyphs ( read from the direction the animals face, and remeber that the names of gods come at the start of a cartouche name, so for example Tut-Ankh-amun is written "Amun Tut Ankh") we had to leave as several other groups had lapped us and because as i was wearing my National Geographic top, and the exhibit was sponsored by National Geographic, and because i was telling anyone who would listen about how great Akhenaten compared to the rest of the 18th dynasty several people had mistaken me for staff. Eventually, too tired to even get drunk, we were herded about London aimlessly until we got the bus home were me, R and the third year organizers of the trip ended up stuck next to the bus's emergency loo, one that by the smell had seldom, if ever, been cleaned. Ammonia closet aside, the trip back was utterly hilarious, in that way ANYTHING is when you have had 4 hours sleep in the last 48, some of them in a doorway if you were R.
Fast forward to Saturday; Rugby time!
the weather killed the attendance's at the big open air screen dead- we went twice and the first time about 12 people were there, the second only a few hundred. Considering there more than that on the ground floor of the gatekeeper when we left it to check out the open air screen we went back.
Ireland lost their match, which upset me, but i did take solace in the projector repair man. As the Projector the Gatekeeper mega-pub uses to show big games had broken weeks ago, and considering this was the biggest match for years and they were the closest watering hole of any size to the stadium, and this would be one of the biggest drinking days for years in wales, you would think they would have had the projector fixed before now.
They hadn't.
So when we got there, there was STILL a repair man rising out of the sea of red rugby shirts struggling with a machine that I could from a distance of ten meter, tell was utterly kaput. The burn-marks were a clue. so what did the repair man do facing a potential angry mob if the wales-France match failed to make it from the many small plasma-screens to the giant screen at the appointed time?
He went outside for a moment, came back with ANOTHER projector and, i kid you not, strapped it to the bottom of the first one with car-ties and gaffa-tape. Thus the second half of the Ireland match and the entirely of the vital wales France match could be viewed on the big screen.
As for that match i will say only this; I have never been in a more alive crowd and taken part in more genuine jubilation than on that sweaty and beer-soaked pub floor on that day. It is not something i think i will ever forget, not look back on with anything but genuine happiness.
Wales, this is for you.
Oh and a happy St Patrick's day.
