It’s the time of year when the weather and roads are foul and if I don’t have to go outside I don’t. Scrunched up under a blanket on the sofa with hot tea and bakery biscuits I was watching the … Continue reading
Been thinking about numbers lately as several friends have reached the half century mark, five sixths of the three score years that denotes old age, or once did. Ten years then left to the expectation of a lifespan. Threescore and … Continue reading
“It was a woman with a mirror,” said mum when we met up. She confirmed what I already had guessed, that the mosaic that I’d been looking up for research reasons was the same as the mosaic her mum’s dad … Continue reading
Writing and talking about Romans again and spending a lot of time thinking about Roman slavery. Mostly for my ‘Friends, Romans and Enslavers’ talk for the Vindolanda Trust that you can watch online on their YouTube channel. Few people who … Continue reading
There is a scandal over a memoir I read some time ago. It’s a book called ‘The Salt Path’ and what it purported to be was a truthful tale of personal triumph over terminal illness and poverty, a hooky kind … Continue reading
I am reading a history book that is so full of facts they roll away from my grasp like tiny kaleidoscope beads and I can barely see the pattern they make. It makes me think about the mirrored lines between … Continue reading
I’m writing a generalist book about Roman life as it was lived on Hadrian’s Wall and it’s bringing up all sorts of methodological thoughts about how to write this kind of book. These type of books, the books that appear … Continue reading
Splashing vinegar and sugar and warmed-then-cooled water resentfully into a vase. A recipe for flower preservation to ensnare a buyer for the house. I am moving and already the process is driving me out of my skull insane. The house … Continue reading
I had only a few minutes to look round the Royal Pump Room museum at Leamington Spa but I saw these Staffordshire figurines and wanted to find out more about them. The museum label gives a little information about their … Continue reading
This feels like a brag but my book is now in print, and there is little point in writing it a book if nobody is going to read it so I thought I’d post about it. This is an academic … Continue reading
Shortened days and storm-blown power cuts call for stories, and the loss of my uncle, my mum’s step-brother, echoing the loss last year of Steve’s dad has put me out of tune for the familiar schmaltz of Christmas Victoriana. But … Continue reading
My head is full of thoughts that are not my own. Since I could first understand words and language people have shared thoughts with me – in conversation, on the telly and radio, and most of all through writing. These … Continue reading
Recuperating today after going to a great conference yesterday in Chester, which is objectively one of the UK’s prettiest cities. I grew up not far away in Stafford and my heart always relaxes a little at the sight of black … Continue reading
They’ve arrived! The proofs of ‘Military Households of Roman Auxiliary Officers’ have arrived from the publisher and I’ve got a week to go through them and send any corrections I need to make before the printing presses will roll (if … Continue reading
I have been meaning to visit Bloxham Village Museum for quite some time but life and work always seem to push it down to the ‘would be nice to’ end of the priority list. However, news that the museum was … Continue reading
Why is the Roman Empire like a carrot? Cause men need vegetables five times a day. That joke’s not particularly good but it is mine, and riffs on the now well-known meme that men, and particularly men struggling with modernity, … Continue reading
Been to meet academic girlfriends for a museum day and really enjoyed it. This Christmas has been hard, and now things are picking up a little I badly need to enjoy myself a bit. I’ve treated myself to a new … Continue reading
This week I’ve cracked open the champagne because – drumroll – I’ve signed with a publisher for my first academic book. ‘Military Households of Roman Auxiliary Commanders in Western Europe and North Africa: Latin inscriptions, Vindolanda letters and praetorium archaeology.’ … Continue reading
Death came early for Christmas. My father-in-law, in hospital, had assessed his chances and agreed with the professionals: no resuscitation, please. Midwinter’s eve he spoke on the telephone to his son, my husband. He promised another visit, tomorrow; an hour … Continue reading
I’m working on some new fiction (which it’s far too early to say much about) and part of my research was a visit to the History of Science Museum at Oxford to see their magical and alchemical objects. This marble … Continue reading
There is no glittering frost outside today and the lengthening nights shut me in earlier and earlier. To make it through such dark hours I want comfort and enchantment, and for this I turn to the books I read over … Continue reading
All my book projects are waiting for other people to do various things before I get on with them so I’m back to working on my new fiction project and thinking about character names. This one’s a historical fantasy set … Continue reading
So, this is it. It’s almost a year since my PhD was awarded and I’m branching out into my own uncareer – a hodgepodge of things that earn money and don’t, with the main nexus being creative writing, and archaeology.* … Continue reading
I’m in that limbo between sending off a book draft – hurrah! – and the return of peer review – ouch! Or ouch it probably will be because it is highly unrealistic to expect that everything about the draft is … Continue reading
Took a walk around this rather spectacular modern earthwork and quarry and of course had to head down the research rabbit hole it offered. It is a disused quarry with some form of track and what looks like an enclosure … Continue reading
One thing I’ve wanted to explore more this year are digital methods to record inscriptions on stone with their monuments. What I really want to do is practice recording inscriptions using Reflectance Transformation Imaging, but this needs some basic kit … Continue reading
This is a superb account of the 1875 excavations of the Roman fort at South Shields published by two locally based historians, David Kidd and Jean Stokes. It draws painstakingly on newspaper clippings, drawings and photographs collected by Robert Blair, … Continue reading
One of the things I’m finding more difficult in my PhD is a big chapter dealing with the archaeology of the houses of auxiliary Roman commanders at forts. It’s not that I’m exactly short of material – I’ve looked at … Continue reading
Since I’m stuck mostly at home and avoiding like the plague (hah!) the normally normal chats and catch ups I enjoy, I’ve been spending an awful lot of time on social media. Which is no substitute at all for actually … Continue reading
I’ve been ultra-cautious with SARS-CoV-2 floating around* not because I’m a timid little mouse, but because I’ve already had experience of having my life ripped up in the aftermath of infections for months and months and months. Lockdown? It went … Continue reading
Much has been written about statues of late and whether they should stay up or be taken down or, in the case of the notorious slave trader Colston, be pitched into the Bristol Channel. Reading the demands from people of … Continue reading
It’s a little over two weeks since I finally sent my extensively re-written and somewhat lengthened chapter off in the likely vain hope that it might lead to a post-doc. This has obviously taken me far longer than I anticipated, … Continue reading
Today I feel so much worse than I have for some weeks, dismayingly so. I’m worried. Mostly about friends and family but also the amount of unknowns. What does this mean if I get the virus? Will it push back … Continue reading
This doesn’t exactly count as work, and needed a tiresome amount of energy-planning, but I did manage to get to the Troy exhibition before it closed or got corona-infested.* Hurrah. Although the exhibition was very crowded there were some lovely … Continue reading
There are some bits in research that you know in the best of times are going to make your brain hurt. These are not the best of times and I decided I may as well get on with it anyway … Continue reading
Day of sofa sitting yesterday as clearly I did ‘too much’ last week. I hate this. Walked as far as the garden shed and back and that was it. Better though this morning and following the lure of a paper … Continue reading
I’ve had a spate of good days and am hoping that these continue. This means that last week I was able to give a talk – the first in a year. It was for the Banbury Historical Society and proved … Continue reading
It’s four years since I last wrote this blog. A lot has happened in those four years and I wanted to get back to blog writing. But one of those things was serious illness* last year – serious to me, … Continue reading
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Life and PhD and general priorities have interrupted plans to go and properly record the Greenwich riverwall inscription – I’m now thinking that RTI might be the best way to go, although the wooden brace in front of part of … Continue reading
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A peculiarity in staging classical tragedies is that they are too frequently judged by how close the performance is to how it would have (supposedly) been in antiquity. The risk is that this critique consigns these works to connoisseurship, or … Continue reading
Originally posted on HARN Weblog:
[Just as a by the way, I was going to call this post ‘snowballing’ but on checking the spelling I discovered that while I think of snowballing as meaning either throwing snow around or corporate…
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There’s an especially fun-sounding area of archaeology termed ‘experimental‘, which pretty much means actually trying things out to see if your ideas about how things might have worked might actually be right. I don’t get to play though, as my PhD … Continue reading
Again and it seems I’m writing anything but my thesis. Although that’s not quite true – I’ve about double the amount of words I’m allowed for the upgrade hurdle that all PhD candidates must clear to get from MPhil to … Continue reading
As I continue to study for a doctorate, I’m uncomfortably aware of how little I know about most things outside my field. So much so that it feels almost wrong to stray away from my subject and write about three … Continue reading
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This week, after a lot of planning and persuading people to get involved, I ran a Wikipedia editathon to create and improve the pages of women who have been important to classics disciplines. (And I mean disciplines – philology, archaeology, … Continue reading
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On Sunday, wanting to escape both research and the furnace-blast of London’s heat-wave, I walked through the woods at Kenwood House, recently of Hollywood fame as home to Dido Belle, daughter of a slave, Maria – and niece of the … Continue reading
A short while back I met up with my Granny to go to ‘Roman Empire: Power and People’, a much-publicised exhibition that is stopping off at Norwich Castle Museum as part of its UK tour. The exhibition was as showy … Continue reading
Went last night to the excellent ‘Sappho in the City’; came home to a pile of catch-up editing for Wikipedia.* In an odd coincidence, translation was at the heart of both these activities. (Even if Josephine Balmer’s translation of Sappho … Continue reading
Sometimes I think archaeology is a bit like a jigsaw puzzle – one that’s missing half the bits and with no picture on the lid to tell you what it should look like. As well as worrying about the bits … Continue reading
Dr. Claire Millington 
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