My Object and Me by Joan Lennon

26Treasures comes to The National Museum of Scotland

Let me come clean right away:  I’m a prehistory groupie – an indiscriminately enthusiastic, dyed-in-the-woad fan of the really, really, seriously old.  When I got the go-ahead from the 26Treasures people my little heart leapt and I saw in my mind some arcane, ancient object that would whisper to me through the veils of time sort of thing – ideally something from the National Museum of Scotland’s Level 0.  Or, okay, I’d stretch a point and be happy with something from Level 1. 

(The National Museum of Scotland is organised from the bottom up – Level 0 starts 650 million years ago, Level 1 covers the period 900 – 1707 AD, and so on up to Level 6, where the exhibits are from the beginning of WWI to the present day.  One of the guides says she tells people they can start in the far distant past and work up, or be like an archaeologist, start at the top, and dig down.)

But 26 Treasures has a strict approach to giving writers their objects.  You don’t get to choose something you’d like, or something you’d feel comfortable with.  You don’t get to choose at all.  The museum curators select 26 objects and these are randomly assigned to the writers.  So, what did the luck of the draw give me?

Drag chains for BAE ship

Level 6

Scotland:  A Changing Nation

Ah.

I’d never even been that high in the museum.  I had to ask for help to find the lift!  Ridiculously, I found I was getting nervous on the trip up … and then, there it was.  My object.

Four obviously enormously heavy, red-rusted metal links, “cut off the drag chains which were used for decades for the launch of ships from the Fairfield yard at Govan, now part of BAE Systems.” 

Well!

In another setting, they would be a modern sculpture, but here it wasn’t the beauty of their interlocking shapes that was the really amazing thing about them.

You haven’t really seen a drag chain till you’ve seen it in action. 

On the wall behind the links two videos were showing, including one in black and white of the building and launching of a ship from, I’d guess, the 1950s (based on hair styles).  The footage of the drag chains was ASTONISHING – hundreds of them in great heaps, smoking, screaming, galumphing towards the water like gigantic metal sci-fi monsters, pitting themselves against the weight of a brand-new ship racing away with the full blessing of gravity behind it.  The drag chains don’t win – they never win - but they fail magnificently.

Another of the guides told me they aren’t going to be launching ships that way any more – just building them in dry dock and then letting the water come to them.  So soon there’ll be no need for drag chains.  They’ll only be found in museums, like my four, not out in the world doing their amazing drag-chain thing.

And even though Level 6 is still not my natural habitat, and even though I didn’t know what drag chains were not so long ago, now I think that’s a crying shame.