For the happy man! - Collected writings DEPRESSION: Ed Atkins

Or confiding that the head eventually found shrunken,
some thousand odd years later, on display in a provincial museum
somewhere. Apparently mistaken as the reliquarial head
of a saint, it was preserved in what looked like a huge, gilded,
jewelled tea-urn, in a chamber (THALAMUS) somewhere off
the transept. The first to be suspicious of its provinance was a
Japanese tourist who happened to know something of this sort
of thing. His interest piqued, he contacted a local archaeological
department, who obliged with a visit, then a series of tests,
dating, etc. Anyway, nothing came of it – the tests came back
inconclusive, apparently; save for the fact that the head was too
old to belong to the particular saint the church believed it to be,
so they didn’t want it. So it ended up as a curio in a local museum
above a label bearing the enigmatic legend, “The oncehead
of a once-saint”. And there it languished till very recently,
when some Professor of these things, holidaying in the local
area, visiting the museum on one of those dreary, drizzly nondays
you get on British holidays, spotted it and, with growing
excitement, requested a closer inspection. The expression upon
the face of the severed head was, he later relayed to the local,
and subsequently, the national newspapers, “the first giveaway:
somewhere between impish and surprise – a combination rare
on these sort of things.” After a bit of haggling, he managed to
convince the director of the museum to allow him to transport
the head back to his lab. Which was in Edinburgh. Needless to
say, he happily cut his holiday short. After a series of intense
tests, examinations and staring, it was finally established – just
as the Japanese tourist had suspected – that this was indeed the
lost head of the robber found in a sealed stone chamber with
only one guarded exit.
Or we might agree that that offers any explanation as
to how he died. It’s what we call a COLD CASE, no? Probably
at the time it caused quite a stir – and in an wholly more sinister
fashion than we might think of it now. Being a historical