It is not often that archaeology can tell a story about an individual event, but Mary Beard has been visiting an exhibition in Rome that may tell a tale about the fall of the Roman emperor Maxentius and his fall to Constantine.
It reminds me of one of my favourite archaeological sites in the world, Dura Europos, where the remains of a battle were preserved in situ.
… as observed on the No 134 bus.
Heading for yesterday’s meeting, I was at the back of the bus and surrounded by a group of four girls, three of them perhaps 12, with a younger sister of 10 or so – rather excited to be out on what was probably one of their first excursions on their own. They were scrubbed, neat-haired, tastefully dressed in what were certainly expensive labels.
They were excitedly having staring competitions with each other, innocently hanging off the railings (the bus was almost empty for much of the trip), having a great display of youthful high spirits.
They probably go to private schools, and if not to posh, hard-to-get-into, all-girls’ public ones.
Then at Kentish Town another group of youngsters got on – about the same age, but mixed-sex, two boys and two girls who didn’t look like siblings – much less groomed, wearing nylon parkas rather than woolen coats.
So far as I could tell the two groups didn’t know each other – indeed it would be surprising if they did – but there was instant, aggressive interaction.
One of the boys from the new group – a boy carrying a considerable amount of weight – came up and yelled a bit of abuse at them, and this new group took control of the prime space around the exit, while the girls shrank back to be around me and hardly said a word until they all got out at Archway, the younger one looking particularly anxious.
Class conflict starts young in north London.
Hillary can’t win the White House it seems, because Bill’s cookie recipe will never come up to scratch.
… based on the curious fact that the result of a women’s magazine test on the recipes has thus far been 100% successful in predicting the presidential election result.
I’ve been musing on this question – I imagine them as being as fast and agile as mountain-bred goats, but as scatty as little-handled sheep, prone to suddenly fling off in unexpected directions, usually that of a cliff or a boggy piece of ground that you’ll have to spend hours digging them out of. They are impractically white and fluffy, spindly legged and fragile, and with innocent, open faces, such as a child might draw a cow.
I’ve spent nine hours today, formally or informally (two hours in the pub at the end when much work got done) in a meeting today, after being up until 4am finishing a report for it. Does it show?
Not only is it the most boring “sport” on earth (a procession of screaming cars with almost no overtaking or interesting dicing of the type you find in simpler motorsports), not only is it one of the last refuges of the use of women in swimsuits carrying placards advertising cigarettes, but Formula 1 is also a serious climate villain.
Over 17 weekends this year, Jensen Button’s car will emit more than 50 tonnes of carbon dioxide:
The cars emit around 1,500g of carbon dioxide per kilometre, which is almost nine times more than the amount of the average new road vehicle.
And then of course there’s the flying of the whole circus around the world every week… not you would have thought, what a decent, ecologically aware manufacturer would have wanted to be associated with.
Over on My London Your London I’ve a review of an Icelandic production of Peer Gynt that opened last night at the Barbican – full marks for surrealism and staging, lower marks for characters about whom you can care.
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