Blakeney Quay

It was a stunningly beautiful morning today, if a tad colder than it has been. I was meeting G&M and H&M at Blakeney for a U3A talk, so I arrived a tad early and walked down to the quay to take a photo and nip into the Blakeney Hotel to ask about booking afternoon tea for late January (something to look forward to in the coldest of winter). The talk was by the manager of the Swaffham Museum, Dr Sue Gattuso and was entitled The Centenary of Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun. It was a brilliant talk, largely skipping over the normal tales of the gold and treasure and the curse, and focussing on the story of Howard Carter himself whose family lived in Swaffham (& London). His father was an animal portrait painter and taught all his children to paint and draw. He went with his father to Didlington Hall near Swaffham, and through that connection he was suggested when someone was looking for someone to copy tomb paintings in Egypt. So he went aged just 17, from an ordinary background, and poorly educated, but a talented painter. He worked at one point with Flinders Petrie, and the two men changed archaeology into a disciplined, methodological science. Carter also changed the way tomb paintings were copied and hence how we saw them. He was also very determined and stubborn and had a number of disagreements with those in authority. I loved hearing about how close he and others came to the tomb in previous digs. A fabulous and very engaging talk, I must visit Swaffham museum now, the only one with a gallery dedicated to the work of Howard Carter.