R2E Excerpt #53: A Stolen Cat, Living For Eternity in the British Museum
The cat-lover lived in Egypt 2,500 years ago. But now his feline was in England, just as lost as I was. WRITTEN & ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE
When the mood strikes, I run excerpts here from A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG NINCOMPOOP, my coming-of-age-travel-memoir-with-funny-drawings.
(The first entry is here. Most recent one is here. If you wonder who the hell I am that I should write my coming-of-age story, click here.) It details the story of my road through Paris, London, and god help me, Zagreb, in search of the ultimate destination: a life worth living. The story so far: Young Peter arrived in Paris, occupied a dorm room at the Alliance Française language school, tiptoed out onto the Boulevard Raspail and the Paris Metro, and made my first steps on the road to elsewhere. Then I went to England. Big mistake. But mistakes are, of course, the first step on the road to elsewhere.
I FOUND ZERO EVIDENCE of Bloomsbury Group life in the Bloomsbury neighborhood of London, on the day I visited. No surprise there. Virginia Woolf and all the other famous scribblers who had lived there had been dead for decades. I searched, but didn’t locate, the alleged historical plaque at 51 Gordon Square. It might have at least lent a brick-and-mortar link to the quote from philosopher G.E. Moore (no relation; I wish), which gave the Bloomsberries their raison d’etre: “One's prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge.”
To that, I added: Pursuit of beer. The pubs were open for business that morning, even if the Woolfs (Wolves?) weren’t, so I nipped in for a pint and my second breakfast.
One of the benefits of traveling alone is that there’s nobody to talk to. So I often fell in with other groups of punters who were already sick of each others’ voices. Peter’s Pub seemed a good place to stop, for eponymous reasons, so I settled in with a morning beer and sandwich, and was quickly drawn in by two argumentative Englishmen.
The first accosted me with the unintelligible “whaddyadrinkinmate?” and finally made me understand that he wished to ply me with alcohol. The man’s nose formed a peninsula below the landmass of his forehead, which projected out beyond his sunken cheekbones and eyes. I stared in astonishment.
Over the course of our animated discussion, he and his mate delivered themselves of these thoughts:
“Paris is a pisshole.”
“Too many Frogs.”
“Too many of them and not enough of us.”
“Too many jiggyboos.”
Downside of traveling alone: It’s hard to extract oneself from the embrace of these sorts of companions. And they’d already “shouted” me a beer, and hence, I needed to shout back, £1.66 worth, which inevitably led to a beer too far for 140-pound-me at an early hour of the day—a dubious return on my generosity.
Soon they were looking for a “goodbye round,” from me, and when I rose to leave, things turned ugly.
“The problem with Americans is that they’re all talk and never come through,” I was told. “What do ye think of that, mate?”
I didn’t think anything of it, except for how the empty spaces in my wallet never came through, either.
The problem, he continued, was the Yanks late entry into World War 2. Which was closely tied to my own failure to pay for round three of morning beer, decades later.
I was rescued from this historical reckoning by a dispute one of my companions had with the bartender over yet another round of drinks (it couldn’t have been much past noon by now), punctuated by my new friend shouting “Where’s my bloody drink? I’ve paid for it and I want it now!”
That was followed up by lots of pushing and shouting, which gave me cover to stagger toward the door.
As I pulled it open, I heard behind me “He was a nice lad, eh?”
I raced from the building into the streets of Bloomsbury.
Soon, and by complete chance, I had staggered into the British Museum, perfuming the Egyptian antiquities with beer breath. In Europe, history is everywhere! The Museum boasts about 50,000 artifacts, including the Rosetta Stone and a 5,000-year old mummy. The whole giant barn reeks of a looter gesturing proudly at his hot TV and the fancy store where he stole it.
As a cradle of civilization, Egypt has been trampled by invaders from time immemorial: the Greeks and Romans, yes, but also by such forgotten interlopers as the Umayyads, the Fatimids, the Abbasids, the Mamelukes, the Ayyubids, and most recently by the French and the English. Last in, first out with the goods. The British Museum only displays 3% of its holdings; would it hurt to store the rest elsewhere? Say, in a nice secure pyramid? Or in plain sight, in Cairo?
In my drunken and emotional state, I focussed on the child mummies on display. In imagination, there was I, shrouded in my graduation gown, awaiting a trumpet blast to announce that yes, finally, I was a self-sustaining adult who could shout beer rounds without fear or remorse.
I also wondered about a cat mummy, triple-wrapped for the afterlife. It had a long torso and feet like the human mummies, but a perfect kitty-cat noggin, alert and ready for an ear-scratch. The Egyptian afterlife is a domestic haven for the rich people from 2,700 B.C.E. though, if you’re a dead cat, it must be surprising to live out eternity in glass cases in central London.
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Oh, so true! Loved your "fond" memories, no matter what circumstances you got yourself into.