Codebreakers from Bletchley Park are among the experts to have been called in to try to decipher an inscription on a Marble Slab at a Stately Home in Shugborough, Staffordshire. The cryptic message, chipped into the stone reads JEMMA LUVS BAZ. JASON IZ DED FIT 4 EVER, and many believe it contains within it the secret hiding place of the Holy Grail.
Could this all be a bit of publicity for a stately home that has been unable to attract many visitors? By hooking into the popularity of Dan Brown's rubbish book, they may be able to persaude millions of Americans to come and visit the boring monument.
Cryptography experts are divided over the meaning of the code, and with many unable to really make head nor tail of it they simply make something up. "It just looks like a load of lines to me", explained former Bletchley Park wartime cypher wizard Oliver Lawn. "Then again, I've only got my normal glasses on. My reading glasses are at home", he explained. "Mind you", he went on, "in those days all the messages were about submarines, so I don't really know anything about a grail".
The search for the Holy Grail has been going on for centuries, and it is believed that the grail lies somewhere in Europe, after it was brought back from Jerusalem during one of the Crusades. In the seventies the Monty Python team, led by the explorer Michael Palin, famously set off on a doomed quest to find the grail. Their failure is thought to have been largely caused by their last minute decision to travel using a sort of skipping gait while banging together coconut shells, rather than using horses, or even cars which had by then been invented.
Many experts argue that the Grail is not really the cup from which Jesus drank the house red. Among the things that it has been claimed the grail represents are the secret about the bloodline and ancestors of Christ, a metaphor for eternal life, a fine bejewelled silver goblet, a simple wooden cup and a special secret-handshaking club for the police.