Just like the precious locks of hair I have of my children cut when they were tiny. Next to it in the display case was a bronze age ball of wool. Exactly like the balls of wool my grandmother had. Exactly the same.
So connected do you feel to these ordinary people, who we know were just like you and I are now, that when you come face-to-face with the Weerdinge couple you feel as if you somehow knew these guys.
It didn't feel ghoulish, disrespectful or freaky at all. Quite the reverse, in fact. You wonder, instead, what these men felt when they were dispatched. Did they know they would be sacrificed and placed in the bog? If they did, how did they feel about that? Special? Scared? Both? And what about their families?
Did Yde girl know what was coming? The mortal remains of this 16-year-old lie on a hospital bed, as if waiting to be put into a MRI scanner. I looked closely at her shrunken, deformed leathery head, her little mummified toes peeping out from beneath a blanket and thought - this was once someone's beautiful daughter, perhaps someone's beautiful mother. I saw her life, not her death. [snip]
Excerpt from the The Modern Antiquarian
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