I don't know, I sit down to watch some junk TV and end up with stuff relating to my research work!

In the Christmas Day edition, we had a character who claimed to be an expert in earth customs explaining what Christmas was about, and using lots of mildly amusing cliches along the way - such as Santa being married to Mary.  Well I found it amusing and mildly thought provoking, others may not have done.

Then I read an essay entitled 'Emperor Kennedy Legend: A New Anthropological Debate' by Lesek Kolakowski in Tamsin Spargo (ed) Reading the Past, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2000.  This short essay is equally humourous, and presents a mythical debate between three scholars some 600 years into the future, into the story of John F Kennedy.  With only limited extant documents, interpolation, extrapolation and surmise are employed, with reuslts that are funny for 21st century English speaking readers but could, conceivably occur in several centuries time.

The essayist offers no commentary and on comment, like a parable, whoever has ears to hear is left to deduce what the story says.

So here's the interesting bit for me - what is the difference between Kolakowski's scholarly contribution and Hyacinth Bucket's husband (I can't recall the name of the actor or his character!) as a phony expert in Dr Who?

And, which is the message in each case, unless you were there, what can you REALLY know about the past?