'king apologies

I read recently that the Danish minister of culture has apologised for the Viking raids that occurred 1200 years ago. At last! Better late than never, eh? I bet he's glad he got that off his chest. 1200 years is a long time to feel guilty about something. It's the latest in a long line of recent bizarre apologies, from the Fijian tribe who have apologised for their ancestors' amusingly direct form of theological argument with missionaries (eating them) to Tony Blair's apology for slavery. The one thing that links all of these apologies is that the apologiser had nothing personally to do with what he is apologising for. It's at best a cynical political statement and at worst a pointless PR exercise. I'm just waiting for Jonathan Sacks to go on Thought for the Day next week and say "Ok, yes, I admit it, we did kill Jesus. Sorry!"

The mention of Viking raids takes me back to my school days, when I was a huge fan of history and Vikings in particular. My family regularly visited the Yorvik Viking Centre, distinguished from all other local museums by the "authentic" smell of shit that pervaded all of the exhibits. At the time I found this delightful. With the benefit of hindsight I wonder if they just built it next to a sewage treatment works. The exhibits I remember include some slightly shoddy waxworks, some bored actors pretending to be Scandinavian but sounding suspiciously Yorkshire, and a machine that could convert modern currency into Viking currency, essentially by flattening it and making it smell slightly of shit.

I also read a lot of books about Vikings, and remember clearly a children's history book that contained the sentence: "The Vikings raped and pillaged their way across Northern Europe". However, being a children's book, it failed to explain what those key words meant, so I had to try to work it out from the context. As a naive ten year old I assumed they meant something like "hiked and explored". That was fine, until the following year when my school went on a trip to the Yorkshire Dales and I inadvertently made some pretty inappropriate suggestions for what we could do whilst we were there...