18 February 2016

The Curse of the Pharaohs

How many will die this time?

By Chin Chin

Curses come in different shapes and sizes.  At the top end of the scale there is the “full pharaonic,” visited on Lord Carnarvon and others shortly after the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1923.  A quality curse this, served up with all the accoutrements: his Lordship’s dog howling and dying in England as his Lordship expired in Egypt, the subsequent unexplained death of Howard Carter’s secretary, the suicide of the secretary’s father, the mysterious death of the radiologist who had examined the mummy, the shooting of Prince Ali Kemal Fahmy Bey by his wife just after they entered the tomb.  The ancient Egyptians believed in building on a grand scale, and their thoughts on curses seem to have run along the same lines.

At the under other end of the scale there are the theatrical curses, the best known being the traditional curse on productions of Macbeth where actors have referred to the play by name rather than using the euphemism “the Scottish Play”. It is unclear why Macbeth has been singled out.  No Scottish Kings were harmed in the writing of the play so there is no obvious reason for them to clamber from their tombs when it is produced, no obvious reason that is, unless the production is an offensively bad one – in which case the demolition job could surely be left to the critics. In any case the curse cannot be a commentary on the quality of productions because Macbeth is not the only Shakespeare play to be performed badly.

Some time ago I was at a small London theatre which, since they sometimes do good work, I will leave unnamed. I had gone to see Henry V and I must say that my heart sank to see that it was one of those modern productions which shows soldiers in battle dress on television screens at every possible opportunity. There were two original touches, though. The first was that the Saint Crispin’s Day speech was done as a scene between Henry V and his speechwriter. That was probably the only shaft of light in an otherwise clod-hopping piece of political correctness. The other touch, however, was rather different. At the interval they swapped some of the actors around so that Henry V was played by an actor who had been playing someone else in the first half.

There was a certain logic in making substitutions once the production had made it through the first half.  After all, football managers often do that.  What was less clear, however, was why one should do it without telling the audience, so that those who had not seen the play before would be completely confused as to who was who. One of the theatre staff tried to explain the reason for the changes as I left.  “Ah,” she said wisely, “you see in the first half the king was Henry I and in the second half it was Henry II.” As far as I know nobody died in the course of the production. The reason why productions of Macbeth should be singled out remains a mystery.

There are other curses too – on diamonds, on places and people – but the one which really concerns me is the bank holiday curse and the reason for that is that I think I have caught it.

I am not sure whether this particular curse is contagious or infectious. Perhaps I stood too close to someone in the tube. You know the sort of person; short, female, squat with a black pointed hat.  Get too close and stand on her foot and she will mutter “curse you” through gritted teeth; from then on, unless you’re prepared to pay for a full-blown exorcism, you are cursed for life and it only remains to find out what sort of curse it is.

Now everyone has their share of life’s misfortunes and I have no sympathy with those neurotics who try to blame them on supernatural causes. It’s just bad luck, that’s what it is, but when the bad luck is always at the beginning of a bank holiday weekend so that it can’t be fixed, you begin to suspect that there is more to it than that.

Take driving through France as an example. A couple of years ago we had a large Mercedes motorcar and we were driving back from southern France when it broke down. There was nothing particularly unusual in that. It had previously displayed irritation with being on the continent on a number of occasions, once by spraying diesel over all those on the pavement as it went along, something we only discovered when we realised that the car behind us always had its windscreen wipers on.  Anyway, on this occasion it was the suspension that went and, at the same time, one of the tyres went as well, presumably out of some form of trade union sympathy. “It will be expensive to get all this repaired over the weekend” I thought. Actually I was wrong. The right word was “impossible”. On that occasion there were two successive bank holidays so we were stuck for four days, the good bit being that at least we were stuck in Nuits St Georges.

This time round, it was water. We were staying in a relative’s house in New Zealand when the water dried up.  The only person who knew how to fix it was my brother-in-law and, inevitably, he had just gone away for the long weekend. Of course when he came back it was sorted in minutes. He just turned a few taps, tapped a few stopcocks and up came the water as if he was Moses.  Yes, it’s the sort of thing that happens from time to time but how did it know to happen just after the expert had left for the bank holiday weekend? That’s not coincidence, that’s not.

Nowadays I look at bank holiday weekends with foreboding. What will go wrong this time? Will it be some awful ailment which only one doctor can cure, the one who has just left for a bank holiday weekend on the Galapagos? Still, there are others who may need to worry more. It is understood that excavations are taking place on another tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Yet another pharaoh, I believe, and this being the first to be unearthed since 1923, lots of people will want to be there.  Plenty of celebs for a start, flying in by helicopter, and probably a lot of the other attention seekers of the world as well: politicians, journalists, academics.  There they will be, flaunting themselves, posing as experts, pretending to a real interest in Egyptology, speaking in that hushed whisper which is meant to pass for reverence but is really just the sound of self-satisfaction sliding through money.

This time the mummy is a Queen and one can only hope and pray that she did her cursing well. It would be tragic indeed if she missed such an excellent opportunity.

 

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