4 hours ago
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Having lived in London since 1986, it was to my shame and discredit that I’d never been to the British Museum. I was not proud of the fact. This wasn’t a one-man boycott over the Parthenon marbles or anything like that. I’d just never got round to it. And this wasn’t good enough. So last week, at the ripe old age of nearly 58, I paid the British Museum a visit.
“Ah, Mr Chiles,” exclaimed no one when I walked in, “about time!” But there must have been something trepidatious about me, because a nice chap asked if I needed any help. I stammered something about looking for room 41. A friend had told me room 41 was special, so it seemed as good a place as any to start. This room tells the story of Europe from AD300. Which was amazing and all that, except it was a story told mainly through the medium of pots. Urns, pots and assorted drinking vessels of all shapes and sizes. I moved from room 41 to other rooms, going backwards and forwards in time and to all points of the compass, and found yet more pots, urns and drinking vessels. Ornate pots, rustic pots, arty pots, functional pots.
This was the history of the world told in pots. Perhaps this is how it must be, but it left me rather cold. Before long, I was suffering from what I can only describe as pot blindness. I mean, one ancient urn from antiquity is mind-boggling; a thousand of them makes each individual one that bit less interesting. Less is more. They merge into one.
Soon, my inner Trewick was stirring. For the 99.7% of readers who won’t know what I mean by that, John Trewick was a footballer, one of the West Bromwich Albion team which, incredibly, in 1978, went on a pre-season tour of China. This was the subject of a BBC documentary, The World About Us: Albion in the Orient. On a visit to the Great Wall, the players oohed and aahed appropriately. But Trewick, not so much. “Impressive, isn’t it,” he acknowledged. “But you’ve seen one wall, you’ve seen them all, haven’t you?”
Whether or not this was a fair question, I can’t say. But here I was, in the British Museum, feeling that having seen one pot, to some extent I had indeed seen them all. The shame of it. Furtively, I checked for attendants or cameras on the lookout for such impure thoughts. I also looked at my fellow museum-goers, for any signs they felt the same way. If they did, they hid it well. Some stopped to stare in wonder at an urn, while I stared in wonder at them, wondering what they could see in this particular urn that they’d missed in the hundred other urns in that room alone. Everyone seemed more into it than me. Admittedly, some younger foreign visitors didn’t dally in any room for long, but even they seemed more engaged than I was, taking selfies with urns behind them, that kind of thing. One lad paced around videoing them. This seemed a bit strange but, as the odd one out in this earthenware orgy, who was I to judge?
Afterwards, when I told friends I’d been to the British Museum for the very first time, they all said, “Wow, amazing, isn’t it?” To which I replied, “Well, yes and no. Isn’t it basically an awful lot of pottery? History told through pots, urns and assorted drinking vessels? Put it like this: if the museum was called Pottery Through the Ages, how would it look any different?” Eyebrows were raised, sighs were sighed, heads were shaken. So I’m going back to give it another go. I’ve got John Trewick’s number somewhere. I might see if he fancies coming along.
Adrian Chiles is a writer, broadcaster and Guardian columnist
