mousetrappling | Tuesday 17 February 2026 to Tuesday 24 February 2026

Book

“The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World” William Dalrymple

Buddhism is particularly associated with merchants in its early days, in contrast to Hinduism where you lose caste if you indulge in trade. This means it’s carried on trade routes, and this bit of the book talks quite a bit about ancient trade between India & the Mediterranean, not just with Egypt during the Roman Period, but also with Mesopotamia much earlier c. 2500 BCE.

Digging for Britain

The northeast of England plus the southeast of Scotland. Quite a lot around the Roman era, including a Pictish settlement and what’s probably a Roman whetstone factory in Sunderland. There was also a bit on Gloucester Museum solving its cataloguing & storage problem by getting volunteers in to help.

The Great Philosophers

An episode on Husserl, Heidegger & Modern Existentialists, which mostly concentrated on Heidegger. Husserl was cast as rather arrogantly thinking he was the culmination of all that Descartes had started, then Heidegger pushes back against Husserl and that whole branch of philosophy. His basic idea is that you can’t think of us each as subjects that interact essentially from a distance with objects that may or may not constitute a real world, but instead we are out there in the real world and that our attention is often not consciously directed at any object so that’s not an answer to the questions of how our consciousness works.

Podcasts

Oh God What Now

A guest episode looking at the question of if we’re ready for a war with Russia (not really), and a normal panel show looking at could Farage do what Trump has done & also talking about a documentary that’s just aired about Tony Blair (I’ve recorded it but we haven’t watched it). The arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (and how the victims of Epstein are still being elided), and the upcoming Gorton & Denton by-election.

The Rest is Politics

Talking about Rubio & Starmer’s speeches from the Munich conference (their consensus was that Rubio’s message was the same as Vance’s last year but masked it more with flattery). A bit of a rant about how Farage gets away with everything, the Thai elections & the Bangladesh elections, more on the Munich conference. The arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (without Rory). Trump’s tariffs, more on the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor with Rory this time, the proposed SEND reforms.

The Bunker

Weekly wrap up (mostly about the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.) Start the Week. How Russia (and Putin) ended up how they are now when it looked like it might be so different in the 1990s. Pete Hegseth and the US military.

The Rest is Politics US

The arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor in the context of US domestic politics, the mid-terms. The Supreme Court declaring the tariffs invalid, recorded before Trump put them back on again, and very optimistic about this being the beginning of the end of Trump.

Talk 90s to Me

Britney Spears (only in the context of her first hit really, and her career prior to that).

The History of England

Guest/interview episode, covering c. 1000 years of English history very briskly through the lens of what various factors that meant that things like the Industrial Revolution & the Enlightenment happened here, and the better bits of modernity (prosperity, the welfare state).

Origin Story

A Patreon only Q&A episode, mostly jumping off from the season on Socialism that they’ve just wrapped up.

Empire

Another episode (fifth, I think) of their series on the Indian Uprising of 1857, this time covering the story of Lakshmibai who was ruler of one of the states that the East India Company tried to absorb at about this time and ended up leading part of the rebellion practically despite her best efforts to remain loyal. The sixth episode in this series, about the Siege of Delhi.

The Rest is Science

Randomness, chaos, disorder, the creation of meaning, and the origins of the universe and consciousness (for the latter essentially the idea is that we have evolved to create meaning from what we observe as a way of surviving and this is why we generate a sense of self, and if the universe had inherent meaning we wouldn’t’ve needed to evolve that ability).

Journey Through Time

Wrapping up their series on the Spanish Civil War, and looking at how it didn’t end up with any reconciliation after it ended, then after Franco dies there is a codified “forgetting” which is only now beginning to unravel. Also framing it as having something to teach us in the modern day about when & how to intervene as fascism takes hold.

Exhibitions

Made in Egypt

At the Fitzwilliam Museum. Looking at ancient Egyptian objects through the lens of how they were made. So they were organised by material (stone, pottery, faience etc), and the materials were organised to some degree by production method (pottery, faience, glass all need fire; linen, baskets, papyrus were all plant fibres sort of woven). I’d seen quite a few of the objects before (even the loans) but it was an interestingly different way to look at the them. I also particularly liked the way they used Nina M. Davis watercolour paintings of the reliefs from the tomb of Rekhmire to tie the whole thing visually together – these scenes show craftsmen at work, and they had appropriate bits projected onto the walls near the different sections with some of them animated.

Music

Art Brut live at Cambridge Corn Exchange

Support for Maxïmo Park, I thought I only knew one of their tracks but I think I actually knew two. They were quite fun as the opening act but I still don’t think I need an album.

Maxïmo Park live at Cambridge Corn Exchange

This was the 20th anniversary of their first album, A Certain Trigger, so that was what they were touring. Unlike PRR’s similarly themed show they didn’t play it all in order, instead mixing the songs in with stuff from their other albums. A good gig, they always put on a very high energy show and it’s a lot of fun to watch. We were right at the front again – this time because the audience for Maxïmo Park gigs always seem to arrive comically late, so we got there just after doors should’ve opened and then bought merch & put stuff in the cloakroom and still made it to the barriers at the front.

Talks

“New Discoveries from the City of the Snake Goddess” Nicky Nielsen

Taking us through the preliminary results from the 2024 excavations at Tell Nabasha. There isn’t much of the archaeology left due to modern building, but the two trenches he talked about tell us about two different periods – tower houses during the Late Period (with food production & cereal processing sites) and Ptolemaic occupation of what had previously (still was?) the temple site, which ended with a catastrophic fire.

Games

Diablo IV

It’s been 2 weeks since we played, so a bit of reminding ourselves how these characters worked with a NM dungeon, then a handful of Pits. Mostly at Tier 65, but we did do a Tier 66 at the end so I do now have the credit for one after the disconn incident two weeks ago.

Margaret