Thursday, 7 February 2013

My kingdom for a ... cardboard box covered by an old tea towel

[All credit to a Christopher M. Cervasco for this pic that's
been doing the rounds on the interweb.  Of course, pedants
among that select band that really enjoyed Series 1 of The
Black Adder will point out that Baldrick was the clever one
in that series...]
Well, what a week it's been for fans of short-lived, inconsequential 15th-century monarchs!  As it happens I was in Paris when the University of Leicester revealed that its archaeologists had discovered what was, fairly convincingly, the body of Richard III and missed *that* BBC TV programme.  That said, I feel, from the sheer quantity of Facebook commentage, that I might as well have seen it.

Apparently there are some data that don't fit but it's still very interesting and credit where credit's due.  But let's just remember that whether or not it is Richard III and whether or not he did therefore suffer from a painful condition, his bones don't tell us that he was or was not a child-killer or that he was a nice man.  There are other questions that remain to be asked and debated.

But there is one issue that the project, its news coverage and BBC programme laid to rest (leaving aside the implication of some gushing comments that most people had hitherto either believed that Richard III had lived an incorporeal existence or, alternatively, was still roaming the earth as a zombie).  After their enthusiast-in-chief insisted that the bones of the king were taken from the site in a cardboard box covered in what (apparently) looked like an old commemorative tea-towel, and confessed to getting a tingle down her spine when she entered the car-park (that's happened to me before now), sure that Richard III had to be buried under one of the Rs of Car Park, there is one thing that is now beyond doubt.  And that is that the Richard III Society definitely contains some really, seriously ****ing weird people.

Here is a selection of the better web-satire that caught my eye:


at