Modern relics
Writing about Becket this month got Sherds thinking about the modern relic industry. These days most people do not expect a miraculous cure as a consequence of contact with a relic, but they have not lost their sense of reverence for relics themselves – Sherds remembers, for example, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s highly successful 2017 exhibition called Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains, at which groups of men-of-a-certain-age stood lost in quiet adoration in front of display cases containing silent and immobile bits of electronic gadgetry used by the band Pink Floyd for their various prog-rock albums.
You know you have really made it into the rock pantheon when the Royal Mail issues a set of postage stamps dedicated to your work: the Beatles were so honoured in 2007, followed by Pink Floyd in 2016, and Queen in 2020. There have been commemorative issues devoted to individual artists, too: David Bowie in 2017 and Sir Elton John in 2019. Sir Paul McCartney is now to be honoured with a set of 12 stamps – eight will feature the covers of post-Beatles albums and four are based on photographs of Sir Paul in the recording studio.
But stamps are as nothing compared to the news carried recently on the popular Scottish TV channel STV, in which it was reported that a piece of lino from the floor of Sir Paul’s childhood home was causing high excitement in Kirkcaldy. The National Trust donated the sample (measuring 24cm by 9cm) to Kirkcaldy Galleries in 1997, two years after the Trust acquired the property at 20 Forthlin Road, Liverpool, where Paul McCartney lived from 1955 to 1964. Museum staff were now trying to work out precisely where it was made.
Excavating Lincolnshire