Back to our Horrific Horror Movie characters. They are all waiting to get out of the closet. England has been scratching the door from the inside, complaining of stale air and dampness. No wonder – England is a Mummy.
England used to be a gentleman-explorer wearing a top hat and a pleasant smile when, full of hope and expectations, he was leaving the friendly (but wet and miserable) shores of British Isles to sail and take over the world. Which he did.
He followed all the right paths of justifiable conquest and diplomatic channels to scramble to power and achieve his lofty purpose nicknamed “Rule Britannia”. In order to rule however, and rule efficiently, he had to civilise the savages so that they could understand the principles of the Rule of Law and social order. Alas, the savages misinterpreted his teachings (obstinate wild things that they were) and promptly elevated him to the status of revered God, whereafter they decided to empirically explore the idea of his immortality. Unfortunately the experiment went wrong and the bastards, against their best scientific intentions, managed to smother our Englishman to death.
Never mind, they said, God is dead, let’s pretend he isn’t or there will be riots and unrest. So they took out his guts and other internal offal (which they reverently consumed), bathed him in scented vinegar and wrapped him tightly in bandages made of only natural fibre. All through the entire process, our Englishman didn’t bat an eyelid and kept a stiff upper lip (which shouldn’t surprise, considering he was dead) and from then on the English became world-famous for their stiff upper lip.
After the mummification, our misunderstood God was carried into a nice comfortable chamber in the heart of a pyramid. Some obscenities have been written in hieroglyphics all over the walls of his chamber by the most talented local graffiti artists. As the obscenities were pretty explicit, the linguists of latter day pretended they could not decipher them – they were too embarrassed – until of course, that Frenchman came and sacrileged the illusion out of pure French spite towards the English.
Centuries later the Mummy was excavated and brought back home to be displayed in the British Museum. A whole retinue of chieftains, scribes, astrologers, street beggars, peddlers and all sorts accompanied their old God to the Mother Country, and since he was long dead and buried, decided to settle down nearby the British Museum to keep him company, where they remain to this day.
The Englishman enjoys his peaceful rest (though since he is back, rheumatism has kicked in and he misses the sunshine and dry air of the desert. Secretly he wishes his remains could be borrowed by the Spanish Museum of Human History in Madrid. The weather there is immeasurably more mummy-friendly, but he naturally no longer has any say in how the British Museum or indeed the world is run so he keeps up his stiff upper lip).
Sometimes, American tourists come to take a few pictures of him, which irritates him beyond endurance but he is too much of a gentleman to say anything. He only resents the fact that for all his kind heart he is being represented in schools to little children (whom he adores)as the epitome of evil and in America they use his nicely clipped accent for all evil characters in Disney movies. Again, he won’t bat an eyelid, even though it hurts somewhere deep down where his guts used to be.
A few times he awoke to appear in two Hollywood movies, “Mummy” and “Mummy Returns”, but on each occasion he was exterminated by one Dalek called Brendan Fraser (good looking but alas an American).
With all eternity ahead of him, our mummified Englishman has only one worry – with all the shortages they may one day recycle his bandages to make environmentally friendly Sainsbury bags, and then they will discover the God-King is… naked.
technomist
Tres bien.