It’s an occupational hazard of archaeology that songs can get awkwardly stuck in your slightly under-employed head. I struggled with this today as I shovelled away weary bucket loads of sand, trying to dig one end of my latest gentleman out of a metre-high baulk. The dead show tiresome little respect for the site grid.

In the normal run of things I don’t mind a jolly digging tune to make the day go faster (unless it is the endless nasal whining which passes for music on the workmen’s favourite radio station). However, when it comes to digging up the dead my subconscious can throw up some pretty morbid stuff, sending me into horrible reflections on mortality and my wasted life.

Today’s pre-second-breakfast pep-talk was provided by the looped last verse of an old Isla Cameron song I didn’t realise I knew:

“Dig me my grave long, wide and deep,

                Put a marble stone at my head and feet,

                And a turtle-white dove set over above,

                For to let the world know that I died for love.”

Thank you, dark little soul.

After second breakfast things perked up for a while when I found a fully articulated pelvis in the east end of the grave, complete with some well preserved pubic hair and a highly unpleasant smell. This was a happily accompanied by Foster the People’s Pumped up Kicks.

By the time the hairy skull appeared at around 12:30pm, the darkness within was reasserting itself and the rest of the working day dragged to its end backed with the chorus to a Bonny Prince Billy song, the name of which escapes me, going round and round and generally down:

“How long? Not so long,

                ‘til death knocks at your door.

                As the rain falls over everyone,

                So the reaper keeps his score.”

I left my half-excavated grave for tomorrow with a heavy, death-filled heart, in the sure and certain knowledge that the one metre baulk will collapse into it over night.

All of these songs were in fact more enjoyable than the one I had going on on Thursday, which was about incest (currently a sensitive issue among the dig house cat community, alas).