The hat on Hatshepsut

It's been raining for the past six weeks and today has been the wettest yet.
It was a day for making marmalade and muffins.
I was going to dust the mantelpiece to make a trio of Ms achieved but I just looked at it and sighed. I took a picture instead.
I suppose the mantelpiece is an archaic concept now that domestic heating no longer always depends on an open fire or a single source of warmth that people sit around but traditionally the shelf above it was a key area for display and storage. In my rural childhood, when we visited neighbours the mantelpiece would always be the place where important items were kept: the tea caddy, the clock, china dogs (I have just acquired one!) with letters, bills, licences and other significant documents tucked behind. The farmer's shotgun would always be hanging above, safely out of reach of curious hands but handy when needed to deal with marauding foxes.

My objects on my mantelpiece are perhaps more diverse. Many of them predate me. I grew up with them and have transferred them from house to house through my life, with more added along the way. Hence it's pretty crowded now. Here is half of it, but the light being dim the details are not very clear. However I like the way the central item has come out. It's a plaster bust of an ancient Egyptian woman; my parents must have acquired it a very long time ago, I know not where. Not have I been able to identify her but I think she may be Hatshepsut, who, uniquely for a female, reigned as a pharoah three and a half thousand years ago. Apparently she adopted male garb and even wore a false beard but in this image I think she possesses the same bewitching charm as in my version. She must have been a brave and determined individual to defy convention to such an extent so it's not entirely inappropriate for her to be wearing a child-size Russian sailor's hat emblazoned with the name of the Soviet warship that, anglicised, sounds like SMELYE and means Audacious. The hat was a souvenir brought back for my elder son by his uncle on a visit to Russia many years ago. Actually, there was a little bit of competition to lay claim to this hat and I believe it occasioned something of a tussle between two middle-aged men on a Moscow street. Now it lives quietly on the head of Hatshepsut, being too small for anyone else in the household.