One of my earliest childhood memories is of the bog man. In the mid-1980s, a body was recovered from a peat bog in Cheshire – after a violent death he had lain there since the iron age, and when he was exhibited in the British Museum I went to have a look. He lay under glass as if asleep, his mouth open in a sort of snore, his skin tanned orange after thousands of years buried in the spongy wetlands near Wilmslow, pickled by layers of moss. He was recognisably a body, but one that appeared to have melted, like chocolate or cheese – he looked like dropped ginger cake. I was quite taken with him. I drew pictures in my little book.
Reading the story of the discovery today (and the surrounding ethics of displaying human remains) was fascinating, not least the detail that the peat worker who found him in the 80s, chucking what he thought was a piece of wood at his mate (they quickly realised it was actually… a foot), had discovered another body (a woman’s, dating from around AD210) only a year earlier. Andy Mould, his name was. Lucky chap. I wondered why this lone slice of history had stuck with me, a person unproud but accepting of the strict limits of my interests, which are rarely piqued by events pre-disco. It wasn’t the poetry of it, though stumbling through a science piece about the bodies in the New York Times I was moved by a line from Seamus Heaney’s Bog Poems, which includes a lament for one bog man whose throat was cut: “The cured wound / opens inwards to a dark / elderberry place.” And it wasn’t the science itself, the way the magical chemistry of bogs prevented decay. It took an afternoon in bed to realise that the thing that gripped me was how appealing it seemed.
I had taken that afternoon in bed in order to research the new trend for “bed rotting”. If I ever go to parties and fellow adults ask me what I do, I say “journalist” with the correctly earnest tone, then leave a generous moment for them to fill in the gap with visions of me, say, reporting from war torn countries or asking politicians difficult questions about the economy. I leave off the preface “lifestyle”, because perhaps they don’t need to know that I, a serious woman, a mother of two, a lover of IRON AGE HISTORY for God’s sake, might be paid to “bed rot”. The definition is not dissimilar to the idea of a “duvet day”, but with an added element of disgustingness, the image of marinating in one’s own juice. The illusion that you too might lie down in the moss one day and wake up 2,000 years later, preserved at 22, but now also an international celebrity, albeit slightly melted.
The world is fed up with wellness, and cleanliness is no longer even close to godliness. The “no-wash movement” started with the prompt for people to stop shampooing their hair, and a move towards reducing laundry, or giving it up altogether, has followed. Partly because of the environmental impact, partly because of the cost, and partly because it is exciting – it is radical! – to embrace a bit of our own innate rottenness. Humans are foul. We are. We have found a thousand ways to obscure our disgustingness, using soap and scented candles, and a thousand words for shit, and a thousand activities (beyond “lie in peat”) to delay our inevitable decay. But something is shifting. A cautious embrace.
The backlash to “bed rot” is built in. Reactions have been loud and dripping with scandal. There is one objection grounded in the moral failings associated with filth – laziness, for example, a lack of ambition. And attached to that is the objection to the flagrant disregard for productivity it promotes. I saw a tweet yesterday from someone whose friend had turned down an invitation to the cinema because today she only wants to watch films at 1.5 speed. Productivity! It grips our culture with a sharp-nailed fist. I’ve read recommendations that we should listen to podcasts at twice the speed – I have friends who go almost that fast on audio books, not to mention voice notes, all to maximise their time, to rush on to the next thing. Optimise! Now! This idea of wallowing in bed eating crisps when you could be exercising, hustling, improving, earning, has become terrifying to plenty of people, and a large part of that terror is a fear of giving into the parts of ourselves we hide, the disgusting parts, the bits we’re ashamed of. The bits that make us human. What would we lose if we just… lay down for a while?
Due to a chemical reaction with the acidic water in the peat, the bog people usually have red hair, well, a pale sort of copper, quite fetching, and I found myself idly wondering how my hairdresser would react if I took in a picture so they could match the colour. The whole aesthetic is increasingly attractive, in fact. It seems only correct that this should be the summer of the bog body, where we lean deeply into the muck of our lives, and let ourselves do nothing but calmly melt.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
English (US)