Sunday, 24 May 2015

"It's always Brits" - the bitter harvest of UK's Hoik-friendly Artefact Policies


Roland Hughes, 'Eurostar's problem with artillery shell collectors', BBC News 12 May 2015
When the Gare du Nord was evacuated on Monday after a passenger tried to take a disarmed artillery shell onto a Eurostar train, rail operators may well have let out a deep sigh and thought: "Not again".[...] An official with SNCF, France's national railway, told the BBC that such incidents were happening "fairly regularly". "It's always Brits," he said. "We have to teach them that it has to stop, [...]". A Eurostar spokeswoman noted that there were also "clear posters up in Paris Gare du Nord letting people know what they can and can't carry when it comes to war artefacts".
But of course British artefact collectors feel that such regulations do not apply to them, personally. They are, in their own minds, an exception. Like all antiquity collectors. The PAS was set up to educate the public about portable antiquity collecting issues, but seventeen years on, it does not seem to have made much headway in that regard. So, do you reckon the French will be adopting one soon?

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