Last week I ordered a printer from the newly created Amazon Sweden. I also ordered some toner and paper. Because they were coming from separate suppliers, the order had been split into two deliveries. For reasons unexplained, one of them was coming by DHL and the other by PostNord, the post office.
Today it was PostNord with the toner and paper.
I had a text message at 6am saying to expect the delivery today. My next text message from the post office was at 5pm saying the parcel would be with me between 5pm and 10pm. It would have been nice to have had the 5pm message at 6am. As it was, I was stuck in the house for the entire day.
In the meanwhilst, Mirinda went out and found a lovely café where she worked on her writing for an hour or two, enjoyed a bottomless cup of coffee and an extremely naughty cardamom bun.
It’s important to record that she DID NOT bring one home for me. What she did bring home was the news that it was delicious. How generous.
Having delivered this little report of tastebud glory, she then decided to sit outside, on the small terrace, and work in the sun.
As can be seen from the photo, it wasn’t cold at all.
Mirinda also managed to take the girls out for a couple of walks through the day, before the inevitable darkness at around 3.30pm.
And me? I did some washing, researched some soldiers, read a bit about Henrik Groen and, eventually, cooked dinner.
It was while I was cooking dinner (and Mirinda was in a meeting with her boss and some Americans) that the PostNord chap turned up with the toner and paper. And what a cheerful chap he was. Of course, I shouldn’t be surprised. In my vast experience of postal workers, all post office people are cheerful. Apart from Henry Chinaski, I guess.
Now, let’s hope DHL can deliver the printer tomorrow, otherwise I have no idea when I’ll ever be able to leave the house again.
Today, this happened
Howard Carter found Tutankhamun’s tomb. He started a systematic search in the Valley of the Kings in 1915. Then, on November 4, 1922, he found it. By the following February, 5,398 items had been cleared out. The clearance left only two sentinel statues.
Tut’s actual tomb was opened on 17 February with a whole bunch of witnesses.
Newspapers, at the time, reported that a curse was on whoever opened the tomb. When George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnavon died the following April, more papers were sold. It was George who had financed Howard’s dig.
The curse was more or less proven to be one of those newspaper lies we sometimes read about, when, of the 58 people present at the opening, only eight died within the first 12 years. In fact, Lord Carnarvon’s daughter, who was there as a witness, lived another 57 years, dying in 1980 of old age. Unless that was the curse.
Or, maybe it was a Reverse Curse. After all, it’s thought that Tutankhamun only lived to be 18-19 years old.
Mind you, he certainly did a lot in that time. He married his half sister for one thing, and she had two failed pregnancies. He reversed his father’s (possibly Akhenaten) dissolution of the Ancient Egyptian Religion as well as restoring a few old monuments damaged during the previous, Amarna period. He also moved the capital from Akhetaten to Thebes.
And he did it all with a foot that was deformed enough to require a walking stick. He also suffered from scoliosis and a few strains of malaria. (More Reverse Curse evidence.)
Of course, given he started his reign at the age of 8-9, he was managed by a vizier. This chap was called Ay and he became king when Tut died. Ay only ruled as Pharaoh for four years but he was thought to have been the ‘power behind the throne’ for a number of previous rulers.
The Pharaoh who came after Ay, didn’t like the previous incumbent much. He spread a lot of fake news about him after his death and even went so far as to desecrate Ay’s tomb, smashing his sarcophagus to bits. (Perhaps an ancestor of the present White House incumbent.) Fortunately the lid of Ay’s stone coffin survived, to be discovered in 1972 by Otto John Schaden, an American Egyptologist.
In 2008, Tut’s DNA was analysed and it was announced that his parents were siblings. This has been disputed. One explanation is that, due to a certain amount of genetic degradation, the DNA matches could be a result of cousins marrying cousins for successive generations.
Regardless of his relationship tangle, you have to admit he did an awful lot for a kid with walking stick, various strains of malaria and, possibly, a Reverse Curse.
