Fascination with liminal spaces 'began at age minus three months'

After six depressingly predictable minutes, a conversation Thursday between two Egyptologists discussing their life-long interest in their subject reached a conclusion only when one party claimed that he could trace his passion for ancient Egypt back to the time spent in his mother's womb directly before his birth. Unable to think on the spot of anything more preposterous, his colleague backed away from the water-cooler at the Ashmolean Museum staff canteen, but is now reported to be rehearsing a claim capable of 'trumping' his workmate, for whom he has long harboured a simmering resentment.

An eye witness to Thursday's face-off described to us how the scene had unfolded: 'John was talking out loud and to no-one in particular about how his visit to the Tutankhamun exhibition at the age of 4 - by which time he was fluent in Latin, Greek, Egyptian and, for all I know, Klingon - had sparked his interest in ancient Egypt. Trevor, who had told us all once that his own 'passion' could be traced back to a book given to him at age 6 by a history don at Oxford to whom he was related, looked a bit put out by this. Suddenly he was talking very loudly about how his time gestating in his mother's womb had first interested him in liminal spaces - an interest that eventually developed into his six-volume work on the tomb of Hun-nefer, published 46 years later.'

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