Margaret

Books

• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  Finished the introduction & taking a pause for some fiction before I move on to the meat of the book. The final chapter of the introduction set out what evidence he used & how he interpreted it, so the “methods” section of the book. Essentially he went through the literature for all seven civilisations and compiled a list of their features so far as we know – from archaeological data and from documentary evidence. A lot of the chapter talked about how the data is of necessity incomplete, there’s a lot we don’t know about any of these cultures but the missing parts aren’t consistent so you can still do comparisons of the ones where you do have good data. He also spent time on talking about the biases of scholarship in the various fields, and noting that he can’t claim to be unbiased either.
• “The Mercy of Gods” James S. A. Corey
  This is a new book by the authors of The Expanse series. Quite some mental whiplash reading this after a couple of Adrian Tchaikovsky books that made me think of The Expanse, coz this book made me think of Tchaikovsky. It’s a far future non-Earth setting with aliens (and the humans don’t remember how they got to the planet, there’s some sort of catastrophe in their history, but they know they’re alien coz of the different biology).

Podcasts

• The Rest is Politics Leading
  
  • Interview with Ai Weiwei.
  • Interview with Sarah McBride.
• Talk 90s to Me
  
  • Interview with an actress who played a long running character on Eastenders, which I’ve never watched. She was a kid in the 90s when she started on the show.
  • another episode about something I’ve never watched – a TV drama called This Life which I don’t think I’d even heard of.
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • More on the Mandelson scandal, where they both have clearly lost respect for Starmer. Plus more on the Iran war, and a short bit of a reminder about the atrocities happening in the Sudan civil war.
  • Q&A episode, covering stuff including Trump v. the Pope and how weird it is to be telling the Pope he’s doing theology wrong if you’re a Catholic (which Vance is, not Trump)
  • an episode from a month ago plugging Dominic Sandbrook’s new podcast about books, with a bit of chat with Alastair then an excerpt from their episode about 1984.
• The History of Egypt
  
  • Interview with Campbell Price about Khaemwaset.
  • Brief overview of the history of the GEM and what museums are left in Cairo.
• Empire
  
  • Back to the Mao series. This episode covered the disastrous famine caused by the Great Leap Forward.
  • and the next episode was the Cultural Revolution (which tied in well with the Ai Weiwei episode of The Rest is Politics Leading), and then through to Mao’s death & legacy.
  • Starting a series about the Arab-Israeli wars in the 60s, 70s & 80s, as a useful background to the current war.
• The Rest is Science
  
  • an episode about infinity, paradoxes involving infinity, and calculus.
  • an episode about cancer, and cutting edge research that is being done on new ways to treat or prevent it (like there’s a vaccination in development for lung cancer, and there’s methods in development for taking someone’s T-cells out, inserting new instructions for what to target, then putting them back in the body, basically vaccination done in vitro with someone’s own cells)
  • another episode about infinity, mostly focusing on different sizes of infinity and the work of Cantor.
• The History of Byzantium
  Some counterfactuals about how the history of Byzantium could’ve gone differently, and some listener questions.
• The Bunker
  
  • An episode about Canada, MAGA and the Albertan Seperatists, and how worried Canada should be (the interviewee was a bit on the fence between very and not so much so long as you start to do something to push back).
  • An episode about Orwell & things being “Orwellian” prompted by a new film called “Orwell: 2+2=5” which is part documentary part biopic about Orwell & his work (1984 in particular).
  • Weekly Wrap Up, obviously focusing a lot on the Mandelson scandal, but also a bit on the Iran war.
  • Start the Week, a bit on the Trump assassination attempt (dwelling mostly on how deadened to it all we seem to’ve got), and a bit on whether or not Keir Starmer lasts much longer as leader (they thought post locals at least).
• Oh God What Now
  
  • More on the Mandelson scandal from the perspective of what happens next in the Labour party, also a section with a guest who has written a book about how to prompt AI better (I was pleased to hear one of the panel say she was an AI refusenik, and also pleased to hear the guest say that the point of the book was that he doesn’t think people realise how little you can rely on the answers you get, but less pleased that he seems to’ve bought into the idea that these things have some sort of agency (e.g. referring to them being manipulative)).
  • The Trump assassination attempt, and the King’s state visit, plus a look at Reform’s promise to make school history lessons patriotic again.
• The Rest is Politics US
  
  • Obviously about the Iran war, and also about the sackings of a variety of senior military people. And a bit about the Democrats redrawing constituency boundaries in a particular state (this whole redistricting/gerrymandering thing feels weird as a non-US person, and like cheating).
• The History of Philosophy in China
  An interview episode, also with the co-writer of this series (Karyn Lai), as a celebration of reaching 50 episodes of the series. Looked at the schools of thought they’ve covered so far as a whole – Daoism, Confucianism & Mohism – talking about things like how much they were schools, how they overlapped or did not, and also about how looking at philosophy from other cultures not just one’s own broadens the mind even of a professional philosopher.
• The History of England
  After the Treat of Dover Charles II takes England into war against the Dutch again on the behest of the French, it goes poorly and not only do the English lose the war but Charles loses the respect of his people.
• Origin Story
  Recording of the live event they did a week or so ago – first half was a takedown of Matt Goodwin, both his career & his most recent book (which Dorian reckoned wasn’t completely written by ChatGPT as it would’ve been blander then which isn’t a compliment). Second half was films that have similar themes to the overall themes of the podcast & then a Q&A.

TV

• Egypt with Dan Snow
  
  • Travelogue rather than Egyptology, and really rather shallow even taking that into account. But pretty enough that we’ll watch more than just this episode (which was about Luxor & environs).
  • A bit of Nile cruise, and a bit around Aswan including going south to Abu Simbel, it remains rather shallow but pretty. Of particular amusement was them highlighting a cartouche while talking about the Emperor Hadrian as if it contained his name … it did not. It said “per-aa” which is the Egyptian word that has turned into Pharaoh in English, so not a specific king’s name at all!
• Arts Most Satanic
  Devils in art, and the evolution of the representation of the devil from fallen angel to demonic presence. A little taken aback by him using the Egyptian deity Bes as one of his examples of devils from other cultures, as Bes isn’t coded evil in ancient Egyptian religion.

Games

• Diablo IV
  Opened up Torment II, and got ourselves up to a Tier 26 Pit. Ticked off a few low hanging bits of the Season Journey but we were too busy & this season was too short for us to’ve got far. Think I enjoyed it more than J as I’d lucked into a character type that suited the season gimmicks.

Talks

• “The Arabic Excavation Archive from Qift: Digitization, transcription, and translation of the Arabic Diaries from the Harvard-MFA excavations in Egypt and Sudan, 1913-1947” Arabic Diaries project team
  The Egyptian foremen who worked for Reisner whilst he was excavating in Egypt and the Sudan in the early 20th Century kept extensive records in Arabic of the excavations they led. These diaries were rediscovered in the early 21st Century and this team is working on making them available to the public & other archaeologists as a resource and on getting what information they can about the workers etc that is recorded in these diaries.

Books

• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  In the introductory chapters Trigger is setting out what he’s doing in this book & why. I’ve only read the first one so far, which is setting out the two positions on comparing cultures. The rationalist one, which says that all human behaviour is driven by environment & biology and any given person would react in the same way to the same circumstance with just a bit of cultural flavour sprinkled on top. And the relativist one, which says that all human behaviour is driven by culture and so reactions to circumstances will be different depending on culture with no commonalities between different cultures. He says no-one is really at the extreme end of either of those positions, but that the literature does separate into these two camps. It’s a bit like the nature v. nurture debate in biology, and I suspect he’s leading up to the answer being “both, and”.

Podcasts

• The Rest is Science
  
  • A Q&A episode, which included a question about could bees be trained to be a universal Turing machine (no, but there’s a crab species that swarms that has been used to build a logic gate), and a Holocene Calendar website.
  • Categories, and how the words we use shape how we think about things, and how the categories we use are made up not inherent to the universe – using vegetables as the example, thinking about what vegetable is the most vegetable, and talking through various definitions.
• The Bunker
  
  • An episode on Elon Musk saying he’s going to merge SpaceX and XAI and build datacentres in space. The interview guest was a bit too keen to give Musk credit for being clever, but even so it wasn’t a terribly flattering to Musk episode.
  • Weekly Wrap Up, mostly about the Iran war.
  • Start the Week, almost entirely about the Iran war and Trump threatening war crimes, but tucked away at the end was a bit about the changes in employment rights which are coming into effect this week.
  • An episode about inheritance tax, which has become something everyone in the country is up in arms about despite fewer than 10% of estates being affected by it. The expert guest took the view that the best thing that could be done is to make it simpler so there aren’t the incentives to look for loopholes if you’re really rich, and progressive so it feels fairer overall.
• More Jam Tomorrow
  MI5, its history & current operation (in general terms, obviously), with a particular attention to how it used to be completely secret & not established in any legal sense.
• The History of Philosophy
  Nicolas Malebranche’s thinking on how God causes everything but in a general way not a particular way – he doesn’t intervene except in very special circumstances that aren’t comprehensible to mortals, but instead has set up the world to operate by rules he has chosen. I was left thinking that Malebranche had shoehorned God into a system that had no place for God simply because he believed in God.
• The History of England
  The story of Nell Gwynne, also Pepys the sexual predator, and attitudes to slavery & Africans in this time period. And how politics was affected by the way the king was led around by his … pleasures.
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • the Iran war & funding of UK political parties – and how the same problem underlies both, that the people concerned (the US & the big ex-pat/foreign crypto donors) suffer none of the consequences of their actions.
  • Q&A episode, including more on Trump in Iran and the way he’s treating so called allies, whether or not the King should do the state visit to the US given the things Trump is currently saying, some cultural recommendations.
• Journey Through Time
  Episode 4 of the McCarthyism series, looking at some of the high profile Hollywood cases, and the movies & plays that come out of this period (like High Noon & The Crucible) which are about the issues.
• Oh God What Now
  Discussion of how the zeitgeist is to hate politicians and whether this is new or just more intense & various ideas about what may be responsible. Also a bit on Liz Truss launching a MEGA movement.
• The Rest is Politics US
  
  • The Iran war, but also the birthright citizen case & the sacking of Pam Bondi.
  • The Iran war again, this time the unhinged social media post about Iran needing to reopen the Strait or the US would commit war crimes, and about the rescue of the crew member from the downed plane.
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  Interview with the President of Finland.
• Talk 90s to Me
  Talking about Jeff Buckley’s brief career and his death & legacy.
• Starship Alexandria
  Discussion about The Demolition Man by Alfred Bester. Which I may’ve read as a teenager & not really got on with, but that’s such a hazy memory that I’m not sure if I read it or just saw it in the library.
• In Our Time: The Columbian Exchange
  The discovery & subsequent colonisation of the Americas by Europeans ended a millennia long period of isolation for the Americas which had significant & far reaching effects on both Old & New World. Mostly the effects on the New World were negative: human population die off, ecosystem disruption by invasive species. The effects on the Old World were more positive – new foodstuffs which lead to a population explosion, and from there a boom in technology & science as there were more people with more time to devote to this. There was even a global effect on the climate – a current hypothesis is that the drop in population in the Americas lead to so much less agriculture that a significant amount of carbon was sequestered by reforestation, and this lead to the Little Ice Age.
• The History of Egypt
  Discussing the burials of the Apis bulls – one that Khaemwaset presided over in the reign of Ramesses II, which was still in the tradition of burying them in separate tombs, but this is also the point when the Serapeum began to be constructed.
• Empire
  Episode 3 of the Mao series, talking about what happened after the Long March for the Communists, and also about the Second World War in China.
• The History of Byzantium
  What happened to the last Roman Emperor when Constantinople fell – there aren’t any definitive accounts, so he was piecing together what’s said by a whole range of contemporary sources and came to the conclusion that it’s most likely that the Emperor fell in the final breach of the walls by the Ottomans, and was subsequently beheaded and his head taken to the Sultan so that it could be displayed.

TV

• The Roman Empire by Train
  
  • Episode 2 was still based near Naples, this time she was visiting Herculaneum (in particular a villa where a large library was discovered) and Capua (of Spartacus fame).
  • A very brief bit of Rome, then she moved on to look at the Via Apia & some Etruscan remains (which make it clear that a lot of “Roman” stuff started with the Etruscans). Then on to Florence & environs.
• AI Confidential with Hannah Fry
  Using a high profile case of a young man who tried to assassinate the Queen in 2021 as its jumping off point this episode looks at AI induced psychosis, in general as well as via chatbots that are explicitly set up to be your romantic partner. And also how this tech just isn’t properly covered by the laws we have (if that young man’s chatbot had been a person it would likely have also been charged with treason or some other serious crime, but the people who made the software aren’t held responsible at all). I thought Hannah Fry did a good job of letting the subject & the people she interviewed reveal itself/themselves as deeply fucked up. Tho it’s possible that’s in part me projecting as some of the examples gave me a visceral feeling of horror – both the founder of Replika and the found of another tech start up whose name I forget started off by wanting to be able to talk to someone who had died, and so made a chatbot based on that person. And the idea that I might talk to a fake version of my dead mother is, as I said, really quite viscerally horrifying.
• Rick Stein’s Australia
  An episode in the interior of New South Wales, on farms and in the outback. One roast lamb recipe, but more interesting was the orange & almond cake.

Games

• Diablo IV
  Did the dungeon for the end of Season Rank II, we’d timed it about right – left it long enough that it wasn’t much of a challenge but not so long it was tedious. Unlocked Torment I difficulty level and are now past the level cap, and have got up to Pit Tier 15.

Music

• “Honey Lingers” Voice of the Beehive
• “Don’t Bore Us, Get to the Chorus” Roxette
• Scant Regard (live)
  Supporting EMF – his merch aesthetic was 50s biker but skulls, and that sorta fit the music. He was playing guitar with backing tracks, and wearing a leather jacket & shades. Fun, tho we didn’t feel the need to buy anything.
• EMF (live)
  EMF are turning into one of my top 5 live bands I think, seen them twice now and even tho I don’t know much of their catalogue other than the big hits they are a blast live. This time it was a teeny-tiny venue with less than 100 of us in there, so you could see that they hadn’t walked straight out of the 90s on to the stage but they still brought that sense of joy & energy like the last time we saw them. A lot of fun.

Books

• “The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World” William Dalrymple
  Finished Tuesday 24 March 2026. A good & interesting book. Dalrymple argues that India has had an enormous influence on the rest of the world, both in terms of what might be called an Indosphere similar in scale to the Hellenised world that Alexander the Great created (only via trade rather than conquest), and in terms of gifting the West the numerals & mathematical principles that let their merchants & accountants take over the world. It’s overlooked in part because the influence on the West was mediated via the Islamic world in particular Spain, and in part because it all came crashing down around 800 years ago via a combination of Turkish invaders and the Mongols (who actually didn’t invade but it was a close run thing).
• “Shards of Earth” Adrian Tchaikovsky
  Only just started this and have only read the Prologue, so all I really know so far is it’s far future space opera.

Podcasts

• The History of England
  An interview with the author of “The Rage of Party”, about 18th Century politics & the formation of the Whig & Tory parties.
• Literature & History
  The history of the Abbasid Caliphate – coming up here just after I’d got to it in my book.
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • More on the Iran war, in particular Trump having been rude to all his allies then expecting them to be enthusiastic allies, also a bit on GB News and Ofcom’s failure to regulate them, and a bit on the appalling mess that is the water industry here.
  • The Question Time episode this week had a guest on – Karim Sadjadpour – who answered questions on the Iran war from a more expert perspective than Rory & Alastair could provide.
• Journey Through Time
  
  • Starting a new series on McCarthyism with an episode covering the first Red Scare before the Second World War.
  • The second episode covered the House Un-American Activities Committee before McCarthy gets involved, it’s already in the witch hunt & show trials mode at this point.
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  
  • An interview with Robert Malley, involved in negotiations between the US, Israel & Palestine, and also with some thoughts on Iran (recorded before the start of the war).
  • An interview with Olaf Scholz, the former Chancellor of Germany.
• The History of Egypt
  Telling one of the legends about the goddess Iset (Isis) which is found on a medical papyrus as part of a recipe for curing venomous bites.
• Talk 90s to Me
  About Björk, mostly during the 90s phase of her career. Lads Mags, mostly about Loaded as the interviewee was the chap who started Loaded (and it did start the genre).
• Oh God What Now
  
  • The Lib Dems suddenly being pro-nukes, Richard Tice’s remarks about tax and the dodging thereof, the new Manosphere documentary (a Louis Theroux one).
  • Have Reform peaked (too soon to tell but maybe), and more generally the rise of both Reform & the Greens.
• The Rest is Politics US
  
  • More on the Iran war (pretty depressing tbh, their analysis is that the window for deescalation is shut, although they don’t think it’ll spin into a world war coz no-one else has jumped to join in with the US & Israel, but boots on the ground, perhaps for a while, and conflict across the region with repercussion for the rest of us), plus some stuff on the domestic US politics talking about the bill about voter ID that probably won’t pass but even then that can get used as the reason excuse for “why Republicans lost the House”.
  • And more again on the Iran war. They aren’t quite as convinced it’ll inevitably escalate but still aren’t sure Trump & co are capable of deescalating.
• The Rest is Science
  
  • Can animals (other than humans) lie? Which involved a lot of discussion of what do we actually mean by the question – e.g. what counts as lying, does camouflage count? Also covered things like what does it mean to have a theory of mind.
  • A Q&A episode that covered stuff like what does space smell of, autologous & heterologous words (is heterologous itself heterologous or not?), whether or not science & religion are actually at war.
  • Another episode about how do we know where we are – both as in the way we can tell things like which way is up & how we navigate, and as in where do we think we exist within our bodies.
• The Bunker
  
  • Weekly wrap up (some domestic politics about Angela Rayner’s intervention, but also more about the Iran war).
  • A programme about how Russia isn’t doing as well in the Ukraine war as you might assume (and listening right now (a month later) it felt very resonant with Trump’s Iran war which he’s started assuming swift & total victory).
  • An interview with the author of “The Rage of Party”.
  • A discussion about the future of work if AI begins in a decade or two to do the things they say it will (and makes the point that even if it doesn’t it’s a scenario that politicians should be concerning themselves with in case).
  • Start the Week (obviously the Iran war featured heavily here).
  • A discussion about the purges at the top of China’s military about a month ago.
  • An interview with a UFO nut in the wake of Obama’s remarks (not the nuttiest of nuts but nonetheless a nut, I was a little surprised they interviewed him).
• The History of Byzantium
  
  • Continuing with the aftermath of the fall of Constantinople, covering how the conquest changed the Ottoman empire from a community ruled by custom to a community ruled by law.
  • And another episode covering what happened to the Christian inhabitants of Constantinople (some flee, some remain enslaved, some pivot to rise up in the ranks of the new regime).
• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  A programme on what’s going on in Yemen, via an interview with someone in the STC who have essentially just been invaded by Saudi Arabia who they thought where their allies.
• The History of Philosophy
  Antoine Arnauld & Pierre Nicole writing about logic & incorporating the ideas of Descartes.
• More Jam Tomorrow
  About motorways, when they were built, why they were built & why we don’t do it any more.
• The History of China
  The Opium War begins in earnest – and the Chinese start to find out just how dreadfully they have underestimated the British (their analysis was that no ocean going ships can sail up rivers so we’re safe from water attack, plus trousers mean you can’t fight on land).
• Empire
  
  • Moving on into the Bronze Age Collapse proper, they’ve got Eric Cline on as a guest (I read his book 1177 sometime ago), so are discussing this collapse as the interconnected system failing to cope with multiple shocks arriving at once and collapsing. He casually says in passing that if the 2008 financial crisis had arrived in 2020 instead we might’ve faced civilisational collapse ourselves, which isn’t a settling thought given that Trump’s idiocy in Iran in combination with all the LLM stuff (which is bad if it works and bad if it’s just a hype bubble) has set up us for perhaps similarly bad levels of all sorts of shit happening at once.
  • The second episode of the three was about the collapse and the immediate aftermath, what vanished and how life would’ve changed.
  • And then the third of these is looking at the building back which happens afterwards (so sort of hopeful but only if you’re not thinking about the people living through it).
• In Our Time
  An episode on The Code of Hammurabi: The Code of Hammurabi sets forth a compendium of laws but it’s not clear if those were applied in practice or were instead a way of indicating that the king cared about justice with individual cases still being judged individually. It tells us a lot about the society of the time if one reads between the lines, and other evidence of law cases shows us that the principles were applied to actual events even if they don’t reference the list. This brought back memories of learning Akkadian – I did translate some of the laws, they also go off on a tangent (ish) about omens, which I also remember translating examples of (they are horrid because they don’t make sense without all their cultural context so it’s harder to be sure you’re getting the words right).

TV

• The Age of Uncertainty
  Still watching the last episode, the second chunk we watched had them speaking over dinner, and getting quite a bit more snippy with each other, but also making some points that felt still pertinent – like the effect the newspapers & TV have on society which felt quite like modern discussion about media polarising subjects or going for the most sensational stuff. Then the following day they were discussing nuclear weapons rather more seriously (primarily the Soviet government advisor & Henry Kissinger).
• Barcelona v. Newcastle (7-2, 8-3 on aggregate, so they’re out of the Champions League)
• The Race for Ancient Egypt in Colour
  A two part series which we’ve watched all of this week. It mostly covered the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, in the context of what was going on in Egypt at the time, plus bits on the discovery of the burial goods of Hetepheres and the kings who were buried at Tanis. In the first episode it didn’t seem quite sure what it wanted to be – showing off the colourised photos which bring the period a bit more to life? telling us about the discovery of the tomb? telling us about the Egyptians seeking independence from the British? But the second episode settled down rather more into a critique of Western attitudes to Egypt (both ancient & modern) primarily in the 1920s & 1930s but also continuing on to the modern day.
• Rick Stein’s Australia
  Continuing to travel around the broader area that Sydney is in, with a focus this week on the Australian outdoors & how that affects their lives & cooking.

Games

• Diablo IV
  Completed the dungeon to finish Rank I of the Season Journey, I still really don’t like the mechanic in it where it’s too hot so you have to move between cooling refuges. Continuing to level up & tick things off the Rank II objectives.

Music

• “Let it Bee” Voice of the Beehive
• “Monsters & Angels” Voice of the Beehive

• “The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World” William Dalrymple
  The later reign of Empress Wu where she made Buddhism the Chinese state religion and the Indian influence on China was at its peak. The spread of Indian culture in the other direction – again by sea trade, this time to south east Asia. Initially Buddhism again, including another way of spreading into China & Japan via these sea routes past Java & Sumatra.

Podcasts

• The Rest is Politics US
  More on the Iran war, plus elections in Texas. More, of course, on the war in Iran, plus a bit on the sacking of Kirsti Noem. The war in Iran, again.
• The Rest is Politics
  More on the Iran war, focusing quite a lot on the reaction in the West and particularly by Keir Starmer (quite the argument between Rory & Alastair). Gorton & Denton by-election. More on the war in Iran, a lot about the way that the US seems to’ve done less scenario planning etc than Iran despite the US doing this as a choice.
• Empire
  The finale of their 1857 Indian Uprising series, the fate of Lucknow (not good, described by one historian as “urbicide”, the destruction/killing of a city). Two episodes on the Iranian revolution of 1979 with a compare & contrast with the protests in January (recorded in January, I’m late to get to this, so it is very much before the current war).
• The Rest is Science
  A Q&A episode (one question was about how small would a hamster have to be if it was to be dense enough to be a blackhole – 1 trillionth the size of a proton but it would be so unstable that it would immediate explode with a force of multiple Hiroshimas). An episode about data & science in sport, and whether that destroys all enjoyment of the sport – citing things like the way F1 car designs basically made the whole thing a foregone conclusion as once you were in front no-one could overtake.
• The Bunker
  The whole Greenland thing, recorded just post Davos (I’m only a month behind with the general episodes of The Bunker, but this felt like it came from a different year so much has happened since then). The Weekly Wrap up (obviously the war in Iran was a lot of it, but also the new rules for refugees in the UK). Start the Week (which was all about the war in Iran). January’s mad opinion column round up (I hadn’t noticed these were topical, some of the more entertaining backpedaling about Trump around about the Greenland stuff at Davos, some of the weirder takes on the Beckham drama). An episode on money laundering and how it has essentially won.
• The History of China
  A letter from the Chinese to Queen Victoria just before the Opium War telling her to make sure no-one came to sell opium in China (no evidence the letter got there). The continuing rattling of sabres after Napier’s untimely death, and the final cultural misunderstanding on the part of China that goes past the point of no return (essentially the Chinese mental model of the universe means they can only see the British traders as being akin to Mongolians raiding the northern borders, rather than seeing that they come from another state).
• The History of Philosophy in China
  Confucius in the Zhuangzi (the Daoist text), mostly being presented as rule bound and unaware of the Dao.
• Oh God What Now
  The Iran War & the Gorton & Denton by-election, plus a bit at the end about the ex-pats in Dubai who are now finding it less of a “safe-haven” than it once was. Labour’s newest immigration policies & how they’re counterproductive, plus how we create monsters from our discomfort with people/things which exist between our neat little categories.
• The History of England
  The rebuilding of London after the fire, more piecemeal than initially desired (in large part because of cost and how long it would take), and how coal was the key to the rebuild and to how London could be so large – it let England escape the photosynthesis trap, no need to turn large amounts of land over to trees for fuel and building material when you could use coal to fire bricks and heat your home.
• Journey Through Time
  The very immediate aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, where the Soviet secrecy makes things worse both in terms of the people who died from being near the reactor and in terms of the effects on the rest of Europe (as they didn’t let anyone know what was going on).
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  Interview with Bill Browder (who I think I’ve heard interviewed on another podcast), who went from making money in the Russia of the 90s/00s to campaigning for sanctions against Russia to hurt the oligarchs (& Putin) after the death of a lawyer working for him.
• The History of Egypt
  The life of Nefertari, in as much as we know anything about it.
• In Our Time
  The Roman Arena – a trot through the history of the Roman gladiatorial (etc) games, from funerary games in the early Republic to a way that the Emperor demonstrated his power to the people in the later Empire.
• Talk 90s to Me
  Disney villains of the 90s, with a theme of how queer coded they are.
• The History of Byzantium
  The immediate aftermath of the Ottomans taking Constantinople, and who got out and who did not.

TV

• The Age of Uncertainty
  What makes a good leader, and why democracy works, and how education is part of the key to the whole thing. This hit quite differently now, you feel Galbraith would not approve of the current situation in the US. One of his essential points is that the big weakness of a democracy is that it all falls apart if people cease to think that the government is theirs, and so pushing power out further towards the people (in the US with primaries that actually matter, and mass participation in elections) is key to making people as a whole feel like they chose the government they have.
• Newcastle v. Man U (2-1, despite being a man down for the whole second half)
• Digging for Britain
  The southwest of England & Wales this episode – some bits in Cornwall (including signs of tin processing on St Michael’s Mount), some bits in Wales. A bit of a “things aren’t always what they look like before you start” theme too (like a clearly Iron Age structure being full of later Roman coins). And some experimental archaeology showing what happens when you put different quantities of tin in your bronze (too much makes it very brittle).
• Newcastle v. Man City (1-3, so they’re out of the FA Cup)
• The Great Philosophers
  Episode on Gottlob Frege & Bertrand Russell, who moved philosophy from being about psychology to being about logic. I only really knew about Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica before, via Hofstader’s “Gödel Escher Bach”.

Games

• Diablo IV
  Did some end of season tidying up of our previous characters. Also ran a Mythic Prankster dungeon & got 5 mythics each, so souped some of them up and had a go at some Pits – up to Tier 69, which is the furthest we’ve got, I think.

Talks

• “Henry Salt and his first collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities” Marie Vandenbeusch & John Taylor
  Henry Salt collected Egyptian antiquities while he was the British consul in Egypt, and subsequently sold them to museums – his first collection was sold to the British Museum and arrived there in 1821. It includes a lot of well known pieces in the Egyptian collection there but arrived before the administrative side of the museum was well set up so the only documentation is a list of 128 objects or groups of objects that Salt provided. This talk was about how they have been tracking down which items were on the list, and are publishing the document with annotations to tell you which ones are identified.

Music

• Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat
• Starlight Express
• Now Yearbook 74
• Burning Shed – Sampler Three

• “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.

• Qarabag FK v. Newcastle (1-6), playoffs in Champions League


• 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.


• Man City v. Newcastle (2-1)


• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.


• Various “Now 12”
  

• “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.

• 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.

• “I Am a Strange Loop” Douglas Hofstadter
  Finished today. It’s about consciousness and what it is, and I enjoyed reading it. His central argument is that consciousness, our sense of “I”, is an emergent property of the brain and is essentially an illusion, a stable pattern of perception that arises from how our minds work but doesn’t “really exist”. It’s a product of a particular perspective – the one we usually use when thinking about ourselves and other people (and the world in general), where we engage only on the level of concepts and symbols. But underneath those concepts and symbols of the mind are the firings of neurons and when you describe a brain at that level the “I” vanishes. He totally rejects dualism, the idea that there’s something “extra” that’s non-physical and makes a conscious being conscious. Instead he’s saying that as a mind develops into a more and more complex system that models its perceptions of the world with more & more rich & sophisticated concepts then one of the things it models is also itself and its workings. And this feedback loop of self-modelling is what generates a stable pattern that feels like it is the self.
• “His Face is the Sun” Michelle Jabès Corpora
  A bit of a change of pace. YA secondary world fantasy in an analogue of ancient Egypt (New Kingdom in feel thus far). I’ve barely read any of it, but I did like that I recognised which myth the prologue was a retelling of, and I’m a bit unnecessarily narked that the map on the endpapers turns Upper Egypt into Low Khetara and Lower Egypt into High Khetara.

Podcasts

• The History of English
  The nautical terms that entered the general English language during the 1620s (plus the history of England in that decade).
• Empire
  The photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, a pioneering artistic photographer of the 19th Century. The start of a series on the First Indian War of Independence (also known as the Indian Mutiny), setting up the context of 1857 and the triggering event of sepoys forced to bite bullets coated in grease that was rumoured to be pork & beef fat.
• Journey Through Time
  The last of the series on A Christmas Carol, on how it changed the world and brought Christmas back into fashion. Start of a series on the Spanish Civil War and how it was an important prelude to the Second World War, this episode covered in high level terms the political situation in Spain in the run up, and the political situation in Europe in the run up.
• The Rest is Politics
  Mark Carney’s speech at Davos as a jumping off point for talking about the state of the world, Starmer preventing Burnhum from standing for election. Minnesota, Suella Braverman’s defection, the new centre right movement Prosper, the problem of technology enabled child sex abuse & what could be done about it.
• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  An interview with Samir Puri, talking about how the world is changing from a unipolar world focused on the Transatlantic region to a multipolar world focused on the Indopacific region (with minimal reference to Trump because he is not the only reason things are changing).
• The Rest is Science
  Modelling crowds using fluid dynamics, non-standard dice & non-standard shapes of standard dice (suffered a bit for me only listening rather than watching, first episode where that’s really been the case). Magnetism, what is it, how the Earth is a magnet, how robins seem to see the magnetic field (as an actual visual thing).
• The History of Philosophy in China
  Animal stories in the Zhuangzi and how they look at the world through other perspectives (and a compare & contrast with the Confucian dismissal of everything not human as not important).
• The Rest is Politics US
  An interview with the Prime Minister of Norway about Nato, Greenland, Trump. The further release of the Epstein files, what the outlook for the 2026 midterms is.
• Oh God What Now
  The Burnhum debacle, the Braverman defection, how media censorship works in our modern age, the middle class spending squeeze. A single issue guest episode about what’s going wrong with UK universities.
• The History of England
  1665-1666, the plague and the continuing war with the Dutch.
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  Interview with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia.
• Talk ’90s to Me
  Pulp Fiction.
• Origin Story
  Q&A episode for after their season on Socialism.
• The Bunker
  A look at how UK domestic politics sit and what Labour needs to do to turn things around (catching up, in world political terms this was post Venezuela but before the height of the Greenland stuff around Davos), Weekly Wrap Up, Start the Week, What Will Elon Musk Ruin Next? (which is actually about the AI hype cycle)
• The History of Byzantium
  This podcast has finished the chronological run, and now the episodes are sort of wrap up/overview episodes – this one covers 5 people who were influential in the East Roman Empire who didn’t come up as much in the political historical narrative.

TV

• The Age of Uncertainty
  This episode was a bit of an odd historical artifact – a look at the Cold War from the perspective of someone still inside it, first aired in 1977 and containing a lot of his reminiscences of being involved in the US administration. His analysis was that the Cold War had moved from a religious moral crusade to a pair of bureaucracies whose status & prestige were entirely down to reacting to the perceived threats from each other and creating ever more weapons. A trap that kept the military capability ratcheting up as each reacted to what it thought the other was doing (and often creating the thing they thought they were reacting to).
• PSG v. Newcastle (1-1, so they’re in the playoffs for the Champions League rather than going straight through to the next phase)
• Digging for Britain Season 13
  Scotland & the North West of England, the archaeology of Glen Coe (digging up the houses where the massacre occurred), Roman burials near Penrith (rescue archaeology before the M6 is improved), Roman bathhouse & temple in Carlisle, Somali “village” in Bradford (c. 1904, pretty appalling, these people were an exhibit essentially like they were in a zoo), and a 1970s skate park in Scotland somewhere I’ve forgotten (that was weird to see archaeology being done on something younger than me (it opened in 1978) and I’m also not sure why it was being done).
• Liverpool v. Newcastle (3-1)
• The Great Philosophers
  This episode was unexpectedly entertaining (the others have been informative rather than entertaining), as Bryan Magee started off in his introduction by explaining that he himself had written the best recent book on Schopenhauer, but he could hardly interview himself so he had invited Frederick Copleston who had written one of the other books. Which set the tone for the rest of it, it was quite a spiky conversation and they clearly had significant disagreements on how to interpret Schopenhauer and his ideas.

Games

• Diablo IV
  Up to a Tier 65 Pit but we failed that, plus ticked off all the Andariels and all the Azmodans. Did not do so well with an Infernal Horde on Torment IV, but did have a good run around in a Helltide.

Talks

• “Looking up! Uncovering histories of Egyptology on a journey through Paris” Angela Stienne
  A trot through various bits of Paris that have Egyptological connections, some obvious (the Place de la Concorde, the Louvre) and some less so (a house where the first director of the Louvre lived etc). She’s got a book out (in French) that covers more of this.
• “Animal cult in Tuna el Gebel: the animal necropolis and the priest settlements in Ptolemaic times” Mélanie Flossmann-Schütze
  A look at the development over time of the animal necropolis at Tuna el-Gebel, linking the various phases of building/burials with the phases of building at nearby Hermopolis Magna. And a discussion of the settlements nearby where the priests & other cult workers lived in 5 storey tower houses.

• “I Am a Strange Loop” Douglas Hofstadter
  
  Delving into the paradoxes that Gödel demonstrated exist within mathematics, despite Bertrand Russell’s best attempts to develop a formal system that eliminated them, which is relevant to Hofstadter’s broader point because they are strange loops. And then turning back to link this in to the discussion on levels of abstraction, and to explore how our sense of “I” arises from how our brains work without having a structure that is clearly where the “I” resides.

• The Rest is Politics US
  
  The whole let’s invade places thing, the ICE thing, Trump flipping the bird at a factory worker, will the Republican party ever return to its pre-Trump conservative roots, more focus on Greenland, is there a developing split between Joe Rogan & Trump (they think not really, it’s about tactics). Katty Kay was away for two episodes, and the guests were both ex-Republicans so there were two episodes of despair at what has been done to their party.


• Empire
  
  V. S. Naipul, who I knew nothing about before, Heinrich Hoffman (who photographed Hitler), Karsh (who photographed Churchill amongst others)


• Journey Through Time
  
  More on Black GIs in Britain during WW2 (where apparently one semi-official strategy was to try & persuade the British to be more racist, so as not to upset the white GIs), includes actual gunfights between parts of the US army in English villages and cities.


• The Rest is Science
  
  Binary, error correction in barcodes & QR codes, what planet would you like to live on if not earth; are we made of stardust, cosmic rays; drawing ellipses, planetary motion, which famous scientists (alive or dead) would you invite to a dinner party.


• Starship Alexandria
  
  The Royle Family, Greenwing, Invincible, Black Sails, The Thick of It, Arcane, The Leftovers, The Good Place, Avatar: The Last Airbender (animation), Blake’s 7


• The History of Egypt
  
  The colossal statues of Ramesses II (including the one that inspired Shelley).


• The History of Philosophy
  
  Two 17th Century CE resurrections of the idea of atomism as a break from Aristotelian ideas of how the universe was constructed (and pushing back against Decartes too).


• The Bunker
  
  Charles James Fox (a late 18th Century populist politician with some parallels to Farage or Trump but with a nicer attitude), Weekly Wrap Up, how & why the last 25 years have been full of chaos in British politics, Tommy Robinson in the context of his pivot to Christian nationalism, Start the Week, the Chinese biotech/biomedical boom.


• The Rest is Politics Leading
  
  John Swinney.


• The Rest is Politics
  
  Right wing attack on Rory Stewart, Minnesota, not visiting the US.


• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  Iran, and how it isn’t necessarily about to fall apart (it’s not a binary).


• Oh God What Now
  
  How the Tories keep defecting to Reform (entertainingly dropped just after Jenrick defected but they’d recorded it before Badenoch sacked him), corruption in the UK political establishment; another episode which was supposed to be entirely about leaders of the Labour party, but in light of events it was half about Jenrick’s defection.


• The History of China
  
  How China is primed to decline during the 19th Century. Which mostly boils down to being too successful to adapt easily, including in producing people who are highly enough educated for the bureaucracy in numbers that exceed the available jobs (which leads to corruption and dissatisfaction).


• Talk 90s to Me
  
  Stay Another Day, and East 17 in general (I had no idea this song was actually about the writer’s brother dying).


• Literature & History
  
  The Rashidun Caliphate (the current season of the podcast is early Islamic literature and he’s leaning heavily into the history angle at the moment).


• The History of Byzantium
  To mark the 1000th anniversary of the death of Basil II an episode about evidence about his sexuality.


• In Our Time: On Liberty
  
  First one hosted by the new presenter, Misha Glenny, which was promisingly had the same feel as the Melvyn Bragg ones (tho obviously not entirely the same). About John Stuart Mills, and the essay On Liberty that he & his wife Harriet Taylor Mills wrote in the mid-19th Century.


• More Jam Tomorrow
  
  Changing attitudes about women wearing trousers (it only became illegal to force women to wear a skirt to work in 2010 – well, you still can but you have to force everyone you employ to wear a skirt).


• The History of Philosophy in China
  
  About the differences between the Mohist & Daoist approaches to language. Interesting juxtaposition with the book I’m reading – the Mohists try to do something akin to Bertrand Russell’s systematisation of mathematics but to language, whereas the Daoists are more comfortable with the paradoxes & fluidity of categories.

• Newcastle v. Man City (Carabao Cup, 0-2)
  


• episode 4 of Guitar Heroes at the BBC
  A selection of music performances from the BBC, themed around having good guitarists (tho sometimes rather tenuously). This episode was nearly all from the 70s, so there was quite a lot of “what on earth is he wearing‽”.


• episode 6 of The Age of Uncertainty
  
  The Rise and Fall of Money: what money is, why we use it, how it moves from metal coins to bank deposits with the addition of paper money, how it all goes wrong when everyone realises the bank doesn’t have enough money to give everyone what they “have” in their deposits, and how the central banks attempt to control that.


• episode 4 of The War Between the Land and the Sea
  
  We’d dragged our heels on getting back to this despite ep 3 having ended on a cliff-hanger last time, but were sucked back into enjoying it. I do think it likely won’t bear much prolonged thought, it’s something to enjoy on a surface level.


• episode 2 of Valley of the Kings: Secret Tomb Revealed
  
  Good series overall, the archaeology of KV11 was interesting, but a bit padded (particularly the segment stuck in about Howard Carter half-inching stuff from KV62, which didn’t seem to link in to the overall programme anything more than tangentially – there was a bit of oooh could Carter have hidden stuff in KV11, but that was resolved really quickly as “no.”).

• Yard Act “The Overload”

• Diablo IV
  
  Did a Tier 60 Pit so we’ve attained Rank VI of the Season Journey, also ticked off killing Bartuc in the Infernal Hordes and did a bunch of Chaos Rifts so now we’ve ticked off that chunk of the Season Journey too. Some stuff on the way to Rank VII looks vaguely plausible, and we maybe have enough time to get to a Tier 75 Pit to finish up that rank.

Books

Listening

Games

Watching

Books

Fiction: still reading Neal Stephenson's "Reamde", and will be for a while yet - I think I'm only about a third of the way through. Still enjoying it, still not sure I know where the story is going yet, the introduction of complicating factors to the plot is still continuing.

Non-fiction: still reading Gerald Harriss's "Shaping the Nation: England 1360-1461" - finished off the chapter on urban life and started the one on the institutional Church (as opposed to religion which is the next chapter). Read about bishops, and was surprised to discover it was to large extent a meritocracy. Eventual bishops rose through the ranks in court administration (generally) before promotion to a see, most had a university education and over this period more & more had higher degrees. Generally educated in law rather than theology, except during Henry VI's reign when theologians were more promoted.

Maps: 800-200BCE - waves of empires in the Middle East (the Persians come & go, Alexander ditto). China fragments, and then re-coalesces (via the conquest of the First Emperor). India also comes together as an almost single unit briefly under Ashoka. Iron working spreads from niche tech to in use across Eurasia. And several of the great religions/philosophies are founded - Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism.

Listening

Podcasts: ep 2-28 of Renaissance English History podcast. Somewhat patchy to start off with, but it feels like she's beginning to hit her stride (and the dates on the episodes are getting closer together). It does feel like the most amateur of the podcasts I've listened to so far but still interesting.

Sunday podcast: ep 5 & 6 of Our Man in the Middle East - more Jerusalem/Israel in the 90s, the assassination of their Prime Minister which also killed the peace process.

Music: while running I've listened Prince, Scissor Sisters, Roxette and an 80s compilation.

Games

Diablo - bumped up the difficulty level a notch, and died loads as we're still adjusting to that ;)

Watching

ep 4 of From Russia to Iran - Armenia & finally Iran. This last episode felt a little padded, partly because there were big jumps in distance so they felt we needed more orientation. A good series, and a part of the world I knew nothing about before.

ep 2 of Reginald D. Hunter's Songs of the South - Alabama and Georgia (where he was born but left). Delved rather more into the racial tensions of the South along with the music (Confederate flags at Lynyrd Skynyrd concerts for instance), but somehow remained upbeat in tone.

Seven Days in Summer: Countdown to Partition - more about Partition. This focused on the absolute clusterfuck of the handover & division process. Perhaps the violence would've happened anyway, but I don't think the British Government of the time helped the situation one bit (like, some dude who'd never been to India before was flown in to draw the boundaries between India & Pakistan and the line wasn't even finalised till after the handover so people were in limbo & relying on rumour).

ep 3 of The Sweet Makers - our intrepid confectioners were pretending to be Victorians, and were perhaps a little more competent with this level of tech than the older tech. Fun series, but not as high quality as other living history type documentaries we've watched.

ep 1 of The World's Busiest Cities - Dan Snow, Anita Rani & Ade Adepitan visiting some of the busiest cities. This episode was Hong Kong, which has a massive gulf between the winners of capitalism and the losers (people living in cubicles no bigger than their beds, Filipino domestic servants whose days off are spent camped out in public spaces because they have no place of their own).

Books

Fiction: started "Girl Reading", Katie Ward. A series of linked vignettes each centred on a girl or woman being painted/photographed reading. I probably wouldn't've ever picked this up if the author wasn't a friend (I don't read much literary fiction), which would've been a shame as I'm enjoying it. Reminding me a bit of Kate Atkinson's "Life After Life" as I think there's some similarity of themes.

Non-fiction: still reading Gerald Harriss's "Shaping the Nation: England 1360-1461" - this week a bit about the governance of towns, plus the merchants and craftsmen.

Poets: Seamus Heaney (1939-) - as with Ted Hughes, I liked these but have a feeling there were deeper points I was missing.

And that finishes the poets, I've worked my way through the whole of The Oxford Book of English Verse over the last 18 months or so at a rate of two poems a day (ish). Some day I'll repeat the process, I'm sure. This time I found several poets I rather liked, and some it turns out I knew bits of their work without knowing it. Next book I'm working my way through in this fashion is rather different: "The New Atlas of World History: Global Events At a Glance", John Haywood. I'll be doing a map+timeline a day or so.

Maps: 8mya-100,000ya - early hominids, the beginnings of H. sapiens up to just before the appearance of anatomically modern humans. Did you know use of fire to cook almost certainly pre-dates H. sapiens by at least 100,000 years?

Listening

Podcasts: ep B19-B36 of The Ancient World podcast - the descendants of Mark Anthony & Cleopatra continue, we're now up to the Severan dynasty of Roman Emperors, and Septimius Severus's wife is one of the descendants.

Sunday podcast: an IOT about Louis Pasteur, which we were underwhelmed by. One expert clearly didn't cope well with the format, one kept going off on tangents (mostly it seemed when he was scared of the question), the other one was OK tho. Overall failed to ignite interest in the subject.

Music: while running I've listened to The Monkees, and a metal compilation called Corrosion.

Games

Diablo 3 - there's a new season, and we picked up the new DLC too, so we made new characters (J's playing the new Necromancer, I've got a Monk) and are blatting our way through the first chapter of the season goals.

Watching

ep 3 of Metalworks! - this time about Blacksmiths. Oddly distinct from the others in the series as there was no presenter, it also seemed a bit more incoherent and unable to work out what it wanted to tell us about (blacksmiths as artisans crafting fine hand-made wrought ironwork? Cast iron as the new wonder material that built the industrial revolution?). The series overall was a bit odd, but quite enjoyable.

ep 3 of Japan: Earth's Enchanted Islands - still full of woo, still pretty. Not the best nature series we've seen, I really don't get on with the "this other culture lives in such harmony with nature unlike us" nonsense that the narrative was peddling.

ep 1 of Secrets of Silicon Valley - how the tech being created in Silicon Valley is changing society, and not necessarily in a good way for everybody, and how there's little thought being put into how to ameliorate or work around the potential disruption. I think I bought what the guy was selling more than J did, but we both agreed this his proposed solution (slow down, don't introduce this tech) isn't viable and flings the baby out with the bathwater.

ep 2 of The Summer of Love: How Hippies Changed the World - pretty depressing, tho not as bad as it could've been, considering. The aftermath of the Summer of Love, as it all went sour. Also how it shaped a lot of modern society as bits of the culture went mainstream. Juxtaposed interestingly with the Silicon Valley programme, you could see how the "we're going to change the world for the better!" ethos of the bright young things of both eras were linked.