Margaret

Includes some spoilers for Doctor Who at the end...

Books

Fiction: Still reading "Memories of Ice" Steven Erikson - coming up towards the end of it now. If the relationships foregrounded in Deadhouse Gates were all travelling companions one might not've chosen (and betrayal) this book is all about mothers and children (and betrayal). With a strong helping of good intentions being the road to hell.

Non-fiction: Still reading "The Making of the Middle Sea", Cyprian Broodbank - moving on now to the period from 3500 BCE to 2200 BCE. Starting off with the developments in Egypt (which gets unified and runs through to the Old Kingdom in this time period) - even though it's outside the remit of the book he's covering Upper Egypt because it'll have that knock on effect on the Nile Delta & thus the Mediterranean cultures. One thing I'd not realised is that Egypt gets agriculture relatively late (compared to the Levant, for instance, which is only next door). He's stressing the nomadic pastoral origins of Egyptian culture, and how the increasing desertification of the Sahara was a driving force in their cultural development.

Shakespeare: The Comedy of Errors: Act 4 Scenes 3-4, Act 5 Scene 1 - and we're done, the last scene there's finally both pairs of brothers on stage simultaneously so the whole thing unwinds to its conclusion. jesuswasbatman suggested it fails as a play to read because you need the actors' body language, and that's right I think ... but it's also still one of my least favourite types of comedy.

Much Ado About Nothing: Introductory Material - which (among much else) points out the innuendo in the title, where "nothing" is a euphemism for vagina (no thing, ie no penis).

Listening

Podcasts: ep 263 of The History of England - looking at Edward's plans for the succession now that he's fallen ill, and considering if he was firmly under Dudley's thumb or acting on his own thoughts.

ep Eleanor 1 of The History of England Shedcasts - he's starting up a series of mini-episodes serialising the biography of Eleanor of Acquitane, this one setting the scene a bit.

ep 52-59 of The History of China - which covered the rest of the 16 Kingdoms period, and is just starting on the Southern & Northern period where China is dominated by two large powers.

ep 176 of The History of Byzantium - an interview with the podcaster from The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast about Byzantine philosophical thought in general and Michael Psellos in particular.

Sunday Podcast: an episode of In Our Time about Hope, or more descriptively about the philosophy of Hope. Which is more complicated than one might initially think. The programme started out from the Greek story of Pandora's box, where hope is left behind in the box after the evils are released - so is it a caged evil, an evil kept for mankind, a caged good, or a good kept for mankind? The Greeks were inclined towards it being an evil that Zeus intended kept for mankind to run afoul of. The Christians made it a virtue but then there's a tension between Hope & Faith because hoping for one's eternal salvation implies one doesn't have faith that it will happen. And Nietzsche thought it was a delusion that kept one alive (early Nietzsche thought that was a bad thing, later Nietzsche thought it might not be so bad after all).

Music: While running I listened to the "Greatest Mod Ever" compilation. In the evenings I listened to a couple of Beth Orton EPs plus the second disc of the "INCredible Sound of Jo Whiley" compilation (as there's a Beth Orton track on it).

Study Day: "Egypt's Shifting Capital" was the title of the Egypt Exploration Society's Study Day:

• "Predynastic 'Central Places': Naqada and Neken at the Dawn of the Egyptian State" Grazia A. Di Pietro - she's been re-examining data from previous excavations and has put together a timeline for how both sites were used over time.


• "Amarna (Akhetaten)" Barry Kemp - an update on what's going on with the Amarna excavations, he seems to've been focusing on road networks, and thinking about how the Egyptians conceived of the layout of the site (and the roads).


• "The Memphis Survey After Thirty Years - Where Now?" David Jeffreys - I found this a little incoherent and struggled to follow the thread between the various sites he's excavated at Memphis over the last 30 years.


• "Ancient Egypt in Islamic Cairo" Doris Behrens-Abousif - how the ruins of Ancient Egyptian culture around them did & did not have an impact on architecture in Islamic Cairo. On the did side, building in stone was clearly the way to be remembered, on the did not side was any detail of decoration or architectural style (unlike the re-use of Greek & Roman columns in mosques which had a bit impact on later Islamic stone work).

Museums

I Am Ashurbanipal exhibition at the British Museum - looking at the life & times of Ashurbanipal, mostly his conquests (gleefully recorded in his palace wall reliefs in gruesome detail) and his library (preserved by fire at Nineveh and now (mostly?) in the British Museum). Very well done, I particularly liked the use of lighting to colourise some of the reliefs and to tell the story on one of the large battle scenes. I'm now wondering if entertainments at the palace would include storytellers who used the reliefs as visual aids.

I, Object exhibition at the British Museum - fun, but rather slight. I'm glad we didn't make a particular trip to see it but instead tacked it on to another visit, but I'm also glad we did make it in to see it.

Early Egyptian room at the British Museum - I had a couple of objects I particularly wanted to see, and I also like looking at the Predynastic stuff, so I hung out in here for a bit while J looked at coffins.

Watching

ep 3 of Dynasties - Lions this time. The overall theme really is "nature red in tooth & claw". No pussyfooting around with cute shots of fluffy animals here, instead a tale of life on the edge between survival and disaster.

ep 1 of the Mediterranean with Simon Reeve - new series where he travels round the Mediterranean coast, starting in Italy and Albania. His normal format is to show you something cool or beautiful or awe-inspiring then tell you how humanity is fucking it all up. This episode was mostly skipping straight to the "how we're fucking up" stage. For instance the bit of southern Italy that is pretty much not part of the state of Italy and the local mafia "governs" it as a separate fiefdom.

ep 2 of The Lakes with Paul Rose - Derwentwater this time, still mostly a piece of fluff.

Discovering ... Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue - I think this will be a series, but not shown all at once. First 3/4 of the programme was talking about the piece - putting it in context, talking about the structure etc and listening to bits in rehearsal. And the last part was a full performance of the piece so you could hear what you'd just learnt about. I rather liked it.

Egypt's Lost Princess - about the tomb discovered in the Valley of the Kings in 2012, which didn't contain treasures like Tutankhamun's but did have all sorts of interesting things. It was originally the tomb of an 18th Dynasty princess and had been robbed and reused after that in the Third Intermediate Period. Voiceover man made me wince a bit at times, but it was a well done & interesting programme in general. (Tho as we'd heard Susanne Bickel talk at the EEG about the same tomb earlier this year there was nothing I didn't already know.)

ep 8 of Doctor Who - ( some spoilers )

Books

Fiction: Finished "By Honor Betray'd", Debra Doyle & James D. Macdonald - the end of the first trilogy of these books, didn't go where I thought it would at all. And continued the Star Wars flavour by ending with a big party.

Started "The Gathering Flame", also Debra Doyle & James D. Macdonald - this goes back a generation and tells the story of the parents of the main protagonists of the first three books. Continues the Star Wars flavour tho definitely the one-to-one mappings for characters are broken at this point.

Non-fiction: Still reading "The Mind in the Cave", David Lewis-Williams - he's now considering the layouts of particular caves in the light of his hypothesis that the art is to do with shamanistic beliefs.

Also still reading "The Rise & Fall of Ancient Egypt", Toby Wilkinson - into the 5th & 6th Dynasties & their increasing disconnection from the people they ruled.


The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: The Merry Wives of Windsor Act 5 Scenes 2-5 - finished this play, finally. Not particularly keen on it, but the humour (as I think I've said several times already) was mostly lost on me due to having to keep on reading the footnotes to spot the jokes.

Measure for Measure: Introductory material plus Act 1 Scene 1 - haven't read enough yet to have an opinion (tho the Duke is awfully long winded but I think he spends most of the play off-screen as it were).

Listening

Podcasts: ep 17-27 of The History of England Shedcasts - up to David I in the History of Scotland thread & more biographies of Tudor court figures in the more general one (including the one of Thomas Cromwell that I was particularly looking forward to).

Sunday Podcast: an episode of In Our Time about The Iliad - I was particularly struck by the idea that one of the things it's about is the gods learning they need to be more divine & stop caring so much about mortals, and the semi-divine like Achilles learning to be more mortal.

Music: While running I listened to Marillion "F.E.A.R", Paul Simon "Graceland" and some of the Ladykillers compilation.

Heritage Weekend

There were several buildings open in Ipswich for the two weekends of the Heritage Weekend, we only visited a few:

Freemason's Hall - I think J wanted to see if there was any Egyptianising decor inside and we've walked past the building often enough to be vaguely curious. Sadly nothing Egyptianising at all, and personally I found the evangelising from the Freemasons that were hanging about to be deeply tedious not only because evangelising of any sort tends to annoy me but also because of the deep disconnect between the fine sounding words they used and the institutional culture they described. I was spluttering for ages afterwards.

3-5 Silent Street - a late medieval building that used to be part of Curzon's Lodge, and more recently an antiquarian bookshop. Not much to actually see, but it's a building I've wanted to see inside for ages just because of the age of it.

Unitarian Meeting House - built in 1699, so slightly newer than 3-5 Silent Street. Managed to seem peaceful and welcoming, even full of a whole bunch of slightly nosy residents of Ipswich. Doesn't appear to've been modernised much, still a room full of high-sided pews arranged around the pulpit.

Willis Building - much much more modern, it's basically an office building but designed by Norman Foster & Grade I listed. We saw the garden on the roof, which freaked me out as I don't like heights and found the juxtaposition of the height & the garden a bit difficult. And the room where the swimming pool used to be, but now covered over with a false floor (and apparently the cause of the Grade I listing, obtained by the architect to stop them from removing the swimming pool in the 90s, or so said our tour guide).

Watching

ep 2 of Ancient Invisible Cities - this episode was about Athens, and so much more Scott's area of expertise & more suited to the format of the series too as there were underground aqueducts and mines to map out.

ep 2 of Burma with Simon Reeves - we kept putting this off, as it was sure to be depressing and indeed it was. Glad to've watched the series, I knew pretty much nothing about Burma beforehand, but still it was rather depressing.

Horizon: Jupiter Revealed - a look at what we now know about Jupiter after the most recent NASA mission, which included that it has a huge rocky core and that there may be a lot of water in there too (contrary to some previous results).

ep 1 of Ocean Apart: Art & the Pacific with James Fox - this episode focusing on Australia with an emphasis on indigenous art, both the stuff from before Europeans came along and after including much more recent art made by living people.

Workers or Shirkers? Ian Hislop's Victorian Benefits - another of Hislop's programmes that looks at a modern political issue by examining the history of the issue, in this case how the Victorian idea of the "deserving poor" and the "undeserving poor" still reverberates through the debate about benefits today.

ep 1 of Romancing the Stone: The Golden Ages of British Sculpture - Alastair Sooke talking about British sculpture, from the Middle Ages in this episode.

Pump Up the Bhangra: The Sound of Asian Britain - programme about the history of Bhangra music with its roots in the working men's culture of Punjabi immigrants to the Midlands in the 1960s through to the present day.

King Arthur's Britain: The Truth Unearthed - Alice Roberts looking at recent archaeological evidence about life in the Dark Ages (specifically c.400-600 CE). The framing device of King Arthur was a little tedious because they spent too much time building up the "was he real?" question (no, no he was not), but the archaeology etc was interesting.

Books

Fiction: Finished "2010: Odyssey Two", Arthur C. Clarke - enjoyed this, not sure I remembered very much of the story at all, not even a sense of familiarity so I can't've read it often as a child. I should track down the next two in the library and read them - pretty sure I've read 2061 but not 3001.

Read "Childhood's End", Arthur C. Clarke - one of my favourite books as a child, and although I wouldn't say that any more I'm still fond of it. I do now think he shouldn't've written an extra chapter 1 for the new edition in the 90s which punts the setting out into the 21st Century without also editing the rest to stop it being a very 1950s society that the plot happens in.

Read "The Lion of Comarre & Against the Fall of Night", Arthur C. Clarke - two stories which aren't connected except thematically. Lone young man with a thirst for knowledge pushes against the decaying grandeur of his world to find truth or bring change. Something about Against the Fall of Night really struck me this time, I found it very evocative & it conjured up a mood of nostalgia and of people who were aware they were living after the best days had been & gone. (I'm also pretty sure I've read "The City and the Stars", which is a re-write of it, but I don't seem to own it)

Read "Expedition to Earth", Arthur C. Clarke - a collection of short stories, some of which worked for me & some didn't. Covered quite a lot of genres/common tropes whilst all still being SFF - like a war story told by a retired soldier (but the action set on Phobos), like a version of The Cold Equations, another was explorers/surveyors visiting a new planet & meeting the inhabitants who are revealed to be our distant ancestors. And an earlier version of 2001 ("The Sentinel").

Read "Islands in the Sky", Arthur C. Clarke - boys own adventure story IN SPAAAAACE! Contains mild peril. It's definitely a kids book, I think I used to find it rather fun when I was closer to the protagonist's age but now it's just a bit childish.

So I read almost all of the above whilst feeling miserable with a stomach bug on Monday, that's why the sudden surge of books. Obviously this is a tiny part of Clarke's oeuvre and it seems to skew towards the early but I'd forgotten how different in mood Clarke's fiction feels to Asimov's or Heinlein's (to take those he's often on a pedestal with). He's definitely a Brit born at the end of World War One - a theme running through much of what I just read was of life after the Empire has gone, after the Golden Age is over. But other things reminded me of Heinlein in particular - like in passing world building details of polyamorous relationships and fixed-term marriages. Though in Heinlein such things are fetishised but Clarke seems to just drop them in in passing to illustrate how this isn't our society.

Started "Coma", Robin Cook - continuing reading the fiction on our shelves, I'm just a little way in to this book and despite assuming I had, I'm pretty sure I've never read it before. J bought it and I must've just got used to seeing it on the shelf. Medical thriller, made into a film I believe, set in the "present day" of 1976.

Non-fiction: Still reading "The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East", Robert Fisk - read quite a bit of this on my travels during the last couple of weeks. He's up to the aftermath of the first Gulf War & the uprising (encouraged by the West) which failed to overthrow Saddam and was then betrayed by the West.

Listening

Podcasts: ep 116-122 of The History of England - just covered the Peasant's Revolt of 1381, and the brutal aftermath, and now starting on Wycliffe. Continues to be both interesting & entertaining.

Sunday Podcast: ep 21-22 of Living with the Gods - one looking at how having many gods shapes one's society & authority structures, and the next looking at how having one god does.

Music: While running I listened to Imagined Village "Imagined Village".

BSS Study Day: "Tombs and Temples of el Kab: Current Fieldwork & Research" - 4 talks by different people:

"The Major Decorated Tombs: introduction and review", Vivian Davies - overview of all the decorated tombs in el Kab, who they were for & what they tell us about the history & society of the time.

"The Tombs and Temples: recovering history from visitors’ graffiti", Luigi Prada - the best talk of the day, a fascinating look at the Ancient Egyptian graffiti on the tombs & temples at el Kab and what it told us about the people who made it.

"Monuments from the Tomb of Ahmose-Pennekhbet and the Ramesside Shrines: a project of reconstruction", Susanne Woodhouse - a discussion of the bits of stone monument in one of the tombs & where on the site they'd originally been. Followed up with a joint talk from her & Prada about a new decorated tomb that's recently been discovered there.

"Elkab in Oxford", Liam McNamara - many of the archaeologists who did the work at el Kab from the late 19th Century onwards have been associated with Oxford and this was a look at what there is in the various archives & museums to do with this.

Talk: "The Tomb of Tatia at Saqqara", Vincent Oeters - the excavation of a small, relatively recently discovered tomb at Saqqara dating to the 19th Dynasty. This is what Oeters did his Master's thesis on, and he'd done things like figured out a plausible genealogy for the tomb owner (and subsequently revised it when they found something new).

Museum

A brief look in the Bolton Museum & Aquarium which is being refurbished - so the aquarium is (I believe) properly open but the Egyptian stuff is shut. The aquarium was fun, if a little odd to find in the basement of the library. The temporary display while the rest was shut was heavy on the stuffed birds and the gosh-wow child oriented labelling. We'll have to go back some time when the new Egyptian galleries are open.

Had an afternoon in the recently refurbished Egyptian galleries at the World Museum, Liverpool. Rather well done, I thought, with a lot of interesting stuff - worth the visit.

Watching

ep 5 of Secret Agent Selection: WW2 - finishing up the series/training scheme with a mock operation. I'd been dubious going in as it looked like it might be all a bit too reality TV, but it was really good.

Jeff Beck: Still on the Run - biopic of the most famous man I didn't know about. Well, I exaggerate for effect, I did know Jeff Beck was a famous guitarist but he also turned out to've been involved in more music that I knew than I realised and to be a pretty interesting chap. Did feel a bit like a programme the Beeb is banking for when he pops his clogs tho - it's the obituary/retrospective done with his input.

ep 1 & 2 of Pompeii's Final Hours: New Evidence - Channel 5 documentary with Bettany Hughes, Raksha Dave and John Sergeant. The last of whom could've been completely dropped from the programmes & nothing pretty much would've changed about the information presented - he's there as the "pretty face" or "glamorous assistant" whilst the other two do the serious history/archaeology. I've been sniping back at the TV a bit during this but actually it's pretty well done - a straightforward run through of how we think events progressed from T-2days through to the eruption, and a look at new archaeology on the site & scanning of the casts etc.

ep 1 of Africa's Greatest Civilisations - presented by Henry Louis Gates Jr, first of a 6 part series about African history running from the origins of humanity onwards. Felt a bit like he was over-egging the pudding at times, but some of that is that in this ep I'm hearing stuff I already know about only with the opposite biases to "normal".

Books

Fiction: Finished "Rainbow Six", Tom Clancy. It did finally click and I got sucked into the story. Nonetheless I was still somewhat appalled by the final solution to the problem of the tree-huggers-who-want-to-kill-humanity ... whilst leaving them to survive in the jungles of Brazil with nothing but their wits (literally, not even clothes) has some poetic justice there's too much of an indication of authorial approval, that Clancy feels this is how government agents/soldiers should operate and that law & order & the justice system just get in the way.

Started "The Bear & The Dragon", also Tom Clancy. Last of my Tom Clancys, after which they won't be my Tom Clancys as they'll go to the charity shop. I may write up something at some point about my conflicted feelings about them as a whole.

Non-fiction: Still reading "The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East", Robert Fisk - enjoying this so far, tho enjoying is perhaps not the right word. After a first chapter about his meetings with Osama bin Laden in the 90s he's gone back to talk about the roots of al-Qaeda and that sort of Islamist terrorism (or "freedom fighters" as we called them when they were convenient) in the 80s. Starting with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and now moving on to the overthrow of the Shah in Iran. He's telling it via what he actually saw & did whilst reporting on the events, so it's very much one man's view but it's not pretending to be anything else. (And given the book continues up to ~2004 when it was written/finished it's not like we're far enough away from the events for authoritative history to be written about them.)

Hidden Meanings: 8.1-8.29.2 - motifs for peace, which unsurprisingly overlap a lot with earlier chapters (particularly longevity, wealth & blessings).

Listening

Podcasts: 192-196 of China History Podcast - I'm up to date with this now. There were a couple of bios of people who either emigrated to the US in the 19th Century or from the US in the 20th Century, then the last couple of episodes were a history of the British East India Company (which he'd done to accompany the Taboo miniseries, I think? For an airline's entertainment package? I didn't pay enough attention to the details).

ep 158-162 of History of Byzantium - the ongoing narrative had got to end of Basil II's reign in the early 11th Century, so he's currently doing an overview of what the state of the world (from a Byzantine perspective) is at that point.

Sunday Podcast: ep 7 & 8 of Living with the Gods, looking at beliefs & rituals surrounding birth and coming of age ceremonies respectively.

Music: While running I listened to Deacon Blue "Our Town: The Greatest Hits", Everything But the Girl "Home Movies", Joni Mitchell "Blue", Duran Duran "The Greatest", Elton John "The Very Best of Elton John CD1"

Museums & Exhibitions

National Portrait Gallery - we just pottered about in the Stuart rooms for a bit, then I looked at the Tudors (including my favourite piece there, the cartoon for the Whitehall Mural) and J looked at Enlightenment scientists etc. A warm-up for the exhibition below (literally, we had half an hour to kill and it was too cold to hang about outside on Saturday).

Charles I: King & Collector - exhibition at the Royal Academy. I'm glad we went, I liked the concept of the exhibition (the first time the bulk of Charles I's art collection had been reunited since his head was cut off), and there were some impressive pieces to see. But my take home message was I wasn't keen on his taste in art in general ;) Nor his wife's - I was particularly appalled by the Orazio Gentileschi paintings she had in the Queen's House in Greenwich, I found the paintings themselves and some of their subjects rather creepy (e.g. Lot and his daughters; or e.g. Potiphar's wife).

Watching

ep 10 of The Vietnam War - one of the more depressing things we've watched, in the appalling horror for those who lived through it, the awful behaviour of pretty much all the senior figures in both military & government on all possible sides, and also for the inescapable resonances with more recent wars. Despite the soul crushing depressing nature of the series I highly recommend it, particularly if like me you're not from the US and/or are both too young for it to ever have been current events but are too old for it to've been history when you were at school. (If I write up my thoughts about the Clancy books, this'll tie in too.)

ep 3 of Civilisations - Simon Schama looking at landscape painting, starting with Chinese landscapes.

ep 2 of Immortal Egypt with Joann Fletcher - the 1st Intermediate Period & the Middle Kingdom. A few more places where I don't think I agree with her in this one but it continues to be entertaining & well filmed.

ep 2 of From Ice to Fire: The Incredible Science of Temperature - the middle temperature range, where water is liquid and how this is important for our very existence. Also looking at how temperature affects living things.

Putin: The New Tsar - bio of Putin to date (well, his career). Felt oddly like something he would approve of - in the "useful propaganda to keep people/countries from challenging him" sort of sense. Lots of emphasis on how ruthless he is etc. And a classic rags to riches story with an emphasis on how he just accidentally became president. Which may be true, I don't know one way or the other, but sounds like it was written by Tom Clancy.

The Irish Rock Story: A Tale of Two Cities - the story of rock music in Ireland, with a focus on Belfast & Dublin. Both how it brought people together and how it was affected by the violence tearing people apart. As an aside, I had no idea that Thin Lizzy were Irish, nor that their lead singer was black.

ep 2 of A House Through Time - this ep covered the late 19th Century, when the house was twice a lodging house rather than a family home.

While in London on Friday we took the chance to go the British Museum's new exhibition - Living with Gods. This is not really a review of the exhibition, hence ending up here rather than on my blog, more thoughts arising from it.

It was a bit of an odd exhibition as I'd gone in to it expecting to agree with it, and come out of it not. This wasn't helped by it feeling rather incoherent in itself - the collection of disparate objects didn't quite gel into a greater whole. There were also weirdnesses in the labelling that made me wonder how much I could trust any of the labels. Like they'd present something as a universal facet of Christianity (e.g. crucifixes carried in procession always wear scarves) which would make me go "wait? what?" and then I'd look closer & see where the object in question came from (e.g. Ethiopia) and realise it was probably specific to that region's flavour of Christianity. And so how many other sweeping statements about religions I've less knowledge of (e.g. I've been the crucifer in a C of E church and the cross wasn't wearing a scarf) were also more specific than they first appeared.

So the premise was that religion satisfies some innate need of human beings - that we shouldn't consider ourselves H. sapiens (wise man) but should instead be H. religiosus (religious man). And as I said, I sort of expected to agree with it. I mean, pretty much every society there ever was has a religion or many religions. Even in our current more secular age where many people don't believe in a religion (I myself am not a believing member of any religion despite my religious upbringing) there still seems to be a need that requires answering. Like people believing fervently in atheism as their focal point, or all the myriad of literature about finding meaning in one's life.

Talking to J about the exhibition afterwards clarified my thoughts - my divergence with them is that the exhibition was presenting religion as the answer to a singular need that could only have that answer. Whereas I'd say religion is an answer to a collection of needs, that we can answer other ways.

Like there's the desire to understand the world and our place in it. Most religions (as far as I know) have some sort of creation myth(s), some sort of reason people are here, some sort of explanation for weather, disasters, death, things that happen and so on. But science can do that too. And for the vast majority of people any given explanation is really on a par with the religious version - I mean "God made the world in 7 days" and "the universe started with the Big Bang" contain exactly the same amount of information on the surface. They're statements that someone who knows these things tells us is true - it's just that in the first case it's priests who teach us this and in the second case it's physicists.

And there's a desire for community, and communal worship/festivals/whatever provide focal points that make you feel in (or out of) the community. But again, other things do that - I've thought before that parkrun fits in the "church" slot for people's lives. You show up most weeks, to be a part of a community that's come together to do something collectively. If you're a regular you get to know other regulars, there's an emphasis on volunteering to help the community itself, of giving back to the wider community of the place (our parkrun does a carol service at a local care home each year, and gives the residents gifts). And if you're in a strange town, you can go to parkrun there and feel a part of the wider parkrun community. Many of the social functions of a (Christian) church, just no god and an emphasis on health in this life rather than a blessed afterlife.

And I do think there's a need for something transcendent* in life, but unlike the exhibition I don't think it can only be answered by a sense of the divine. I think that's what Richard Clay was getting at in the third episode of his Utopia series on TV that we watched a little earlier this autumn - he was talking there about the search for inner utopias. And one of his examples was the rave scene & house music, which does rhyme with my experience of live gigs. Not always, not even often, but sometimes, there's just something about being part of this crowd who are all responding to the same music in the same way - you're part of a moment that's bigger & more emotionally fundamental than just sitting listening to the same music on your own and thinking "oh I rather like this song".

*I'm not sure this is the right word, but I can't think of a better one, I hope it conveys something of what I intend it to!

And I think this leads me back to my knee-jerk reaction when I went into the exhibition - the first item was the Ice Age lion man sculpture, which is a gorgeous piece & I'm glad I had the chance to see it again. But my reaction was to the label - which said that as it took ~400 hours to make and life was hard in the ice age (so this was time away from pure survival), then it must be religious in nature. Why can't it be art for art's sake? Why invoke the divine when it could be a different answer to the need for something transcendent?

Books

Fiction: Still reading "Patriot Games", Tom Clancy which has rather been visited by both the sexism fairy & the racism fairy in the 15 or so years since I last read it. Not enough to make me stop reading it but enough to make me wonder if they maybe don't deserve a space in the house any more. See how the rest of them go.

Non-fiction: still reading Gerald Harriss's "Shaping the Nation: England 1360-1461" - I've now finished the chapter on England's relationship with France & with wider Christendom from 1360-1413. The war with France in this period sort of dribbled on with Richard II getting less & less interested (too keen on establishing authority at home) but with neither side decisively winning enough to enforce their own view of what peace should look like. Finally a truce (more of a stalemate) signed when Richard married Isabella of France, which came to an end after the French were scandalised by Henry IV deposing an anointed king. But they were too busy with their own civil war to really do anything about this - in fact both sides even invited Henry IV in to support their side, which reignited a sense in the English that they could make gains in France.

Maps: 1300-1492 CE - in this period it's the Mongols whose meteoric rise & conquest reshapes the world even after their political collapse & fragmentation. In the Americas the first two substantial empires have risen - the Aztecs & the Incas. As the world is on the cusp of European expansion there were also a couple of spreads about themes related to this - the trade networks pre-1492 and also the spread of writing systems across the world. Notable in both cases that Eurasia was all linked together, but the Americas seemed to be small enclaves with fewer lines of contact. Also, I hadn't really realised that the Incas are the only empire which didn't have writing.

Listening

Podcasts: ep 43-52 of Renaissance English History podcast. She's really hit her stride by now - and is interleaving solo episodes with interviews with someone from the Tudor Times website so there's two different sets of perspectives. Currently she's looking at rebellions during the Tudor period.

Sunday podcast: ep 11 & 12 of Our Man in the Middle East - 9/11 & the beginning of the Second Iraq War. So we got the bits of GWB's speech that made me annoyed at the time and the bits of Blair's various speeches that annoy me in retrospect as we now know he was lying.

Music: while running I've mostly listened to Voice of the Beehive and the 100 Hits Rock compilation. While J was out last night at the cinema I listened to more Belle & Sebastien, plus an album by Bellowhead (which I'd completely forgotten we had, and also forgotten that I enjoyed it). And now moved on to Belly, listening to several EPs and a compilation that has Feed the Tree on it (Ladykillers). I just listen to the albums (discs, folders, however you want to think of them given it's on the computer) in the order the computer presents them to me so I think I get actual Belly albums after the compilation.

Live music: Marillion at the Royal Albert Hall. Which was great - first set was F.E.A.R (their most recent album) and then after the interval they played a selection from their back catalogue.

Exhibitions

Visited the Scythians Exhibition at the British Museum - liked it a lot, they're steppe nomads from the 1st millennium BCE, and because of the conditions where they buried their dead (cold) they've not only found the obvious things like gold ornaments but also some well preserved textiles so we know what they actually wore.

Watching

ep 2 of Russia with Simon Reeve - the middle of Russia, which felt like it included a lot of the places that feel left behind by the growth that bits of Russia are seeing. And areas that had suffered particularly when the Soviet Union collapsed & the mafia took over.

ep 3 of Dangerous Borders - the end of this series, with the two journalists travelling the easternmost section of the India/Pakistan border. Perhaps the most distressing of the series too, there were places they visited in this one where it seems the violence sparked by Partition never stopped.

ep 2 of The Yorkshire Wolds - watched as a lightweight half hour antidote to the one above. Paul Rose walking the Yorkshire Wolds, which is a short enough path that it only took 2 half hour episodes to cover it. Rather odd series tbh, but fluffy & fun.

Glam Rock at the BBC - the BBC trawling their archives again to give us a selection of glam rock performances. Fluff, but fun.

Marc Bolan: Cosmic Dancer - a biography of Marc Bolan (i.e. the guy in T-Rex) who would've been 70 this year if he'd not died at the age of 29. Unlike many similar programmes about rock stars from the BBC this wasn't a hagiography. I didn't know much about Bolan going in (and I only really know a couple of T-Rex songs) but my goodness he came across as a bit of a dick.