X-ray wrote:
...an unintelligible gurgle from an infant on its mother's lap...
...of a braying donkey caught in a quagmire....
And that's what your family reunions sound like, that is. Like you, they're all caught in the tireless grip of galloping senility, dementia reducing their communicative faculties well below that of newborns and beasts of burden.
Except for your mum who sits by the window in her rocking chair, festering in silence, that silence being the most intelligeble thing your collective family have ever put forth into any discussion, unintentional though it was.
But if we could, for a moment, return to today's subject of "Ancient Egypt Revisited".
No doubt you are aware that it was common practise for members of high society in the Egypt of the day to preserve their dead in a careful process of embalming and bandaging, having removed various organs, a process commonly referred to as "mummification" amongst today's younger students of the era.
It is also known that on the occasion that a young or attractive woman had passed away, her body was often deliberately left to decompose for a period of time prior to any further treatement. This rather unpleasant policy was introduced to deter a certain lowly stratum of society, who generally cursed with poor status, often classical ugliness and all manner of illness and other morbidities would think nothing of repeatedly copulating with the recently deceased to satiate their sexual urges in the only manner left available to them.
And that's the most romantic experience you've ever had that is. That's the closest you've ever come to having a meaningful relationship with a member of the opposite sex. Long lonely nights, mumbling incoherently whilst caressing the slowly putrifying skin of a deceased woman, far gone into decomposition now, despite your best attempts to preserve her remains.
And the unfortunate woman in question, denied even the basic dignity of a common burial so that you can enjoy an effete mockery of sexual relation with a female, that's your Mum, that is. You even had to use wire coat hangers to hook her long bones together and stuffed her ribcage with old rags after she fell apart during your last amourous advance.
