I had a telephone consultation with Doctor Beales, this afternoon concerning my diabetes, and my blood.
When I went to have my leg attended to by Judith last week, another nurse pounced on me and said she had been told to take some blood, so I persuaded her that if she was taking blood, she should do an extra phial for diabetes too, and I asked Judith about the results, and she persuaded the front desk to print them out for me.
The diabetes result was not good as it came out as 59, whereas the margin is 42 to 47. Last time I was about 47 and he agreed that I should cut back on my fruit but not too much and said he would increase the Metformin to 1000 mg rather than 850. He said that 2000 mg was the maximum.
However, I was also alarmed by the blood test which was ordered by Doctor Strachan. The red blood cell count came out, at 10*12/ L whereas 4.5 to 6, was the norm, while the lymphocyte count came out at 10* 9/L when 1.2 – 4.0 was the norm. However Dr Beales said there is nothing to worry about that. My lymphocyte count had been high for some time, indeed it was slightly down from what it had been a year ago.
So I was both relieved and in a way, slightly disappointed. I had hoped that this had been the cause of my lethargy, and perhaps I could have been given some pills to cure it. But I must go on being lethargic.
Judith dressed my leg again and said it was nearly healed. Next time perhaps. Today was the day that the lockdown for shops came to an end and the car park at the Retail Park which had been totally empty was now crowded and there was queues outside Sports Direct and long queues outside TK Maxx. Surprising!
Our next door neighbours, Kirsti and Antii have left. They were Finnish and he was working in Switzerland while she and the two children lived here next door to us. They have decided that they should all get together in Switzerland in Zurich where he has been living by himself during the lockdown period.
They have been good neighbours, though sadly we did not see as much of them as we should have done. Their elder daughter was at the same school and in the same class as Max.
Let’s hope we get nice neighbours. The house is rented, the owner living in France, in Auch. Let’s hope we get some nice replacements.
it was our wedding anniversary on the third and Fiona organised it all for us. She sent us a lovely anniversary card which had arrived about a week before, and then she sent us some flowers. She ran up Robert and told him to buy some flowers which he then brought round to us from her. I think Robert also paid for the flowers, so it was all very satisfactory.
We had a lovely wedding present which I bought myself from Amazon, a new tripod for the camera which also serves as a selfie stick and we used it to take photos, first to beam to Fiona as we undid the anniversary card, and we then took some photos, as seen above. It was a lovely day!
The tripod has been a big success, and I also bought one from Amazon for Fiona to be delivered to her flat. Once she had learnt how to arrange the camera so it would take landscape photos which the tripod demands, she has just loved it has used it to talk to us every evening.
The Minoans
I have been turning my attention back to writing the book. First of all, I did a thorough rewrite of the Minoans, rewriting Knossos and the other palaces and then doing a read through and tightening up of the later chapters. I think it is now quite respectable, should any literary agent want to see some further pages.
Roman Britain
Since then I have then been turning my attention back to the golden age of Rome, and I have written an account up to the death of Trajan: should I continue to trudge through Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius? Or should I take a break and look at life in the provinces? I have decided to look at the province I know best , which means Roman Britain. Sadly, half my books are in the garage, but I have begun with the invasion of Britain, and I have just reached Agrocola, who having conquered Britain, immediately lost it. Having ignored Ronwen so long, I am now dictating to her once again. o
My leg is still giving trouble. On Tuesday I went along to see the nurse, Judith, at the Kew health centre and she said that the wound now seems to be dry, and that I don’t need to have dressings any more: I shall be without dressings for the first time since last July.
However, I should have been wearing my compression stocking but I didn’t. So during the week, it proceeded to weep with great large blisters and by Friday it was looking a mess and one of them was looking rather red So at 9 o’clock I rang up to make and got an appointment for 10.30 at East Sheen.
She was very displeased with me and said I should have been wearing my compression stockings and bandaged me up again, so back to square one. I see her again on Monday.
Literary agents
Otherwise I have been preparing to send off an application to the literary agent, Felicity Bryan in North Oxford and I have been writing yet another application letter. Let’s hope this one works!
First we made for the Rugger Stadium, which is quite a long way from Twickenham itself, right out in the fields. We went round the back and saw some of the fields.
We then made our way to Twickenham itself, driving right through the middle of it. It’s quite a long High Street and very broad and Wendy was very impressed. At the end, we went round Twickenham Green and then decided to visit Turner’s House on the way back there. We got lost, which meant we were able to see something of a very pretty waterfront.
We eventually discovered Turner’s house, which in itself is very pretty, but set in the middle of suburbia with houses all round – I wish I had taken a photo of the surrounding area.
But the original print from Wikipedia shows how pretty it must have been originally.
Then back to Richmond Bridge – an approach to Richmond I had not seen before. We decided to visit Lichfield Court, a block of flats in art nouveau style, which Wendy feels might be very suitable for Fiona. We went all round it, and we had a good look and even saw the interior courtyard and I took a lot of photos. Yes, it could be very suitable.
Then return and had omelettes for supper. We had a big delivery from Sainsbury’s on Saturday and they substituted boxes of 15 mixed eggs for 12 large eggs, so we must use them up quickly.
Last week I mowed the grass, which was beginning to look very straggly, but now looks quite smart
Tuesday was Jessica’s birthday and in the afternoon we all met up on Kew Green to celebrate. The lockdown has now reached phase 2, so we were allowed to meet, so Wendy and I drove over and managed to park, and then sat on a bench, while the others sat and played around on the grass. It was a delightful afternoon, we have been having wonderful weather, with hot sunny days and it was wonderful having a good talk with Robert.
The next day Robert came over and sat in the garden coming in through the Victoria Gardens gate and we had a long talk about the magazines and his plans for advertising campaigns in America. But I still can’t persuade him to do any promotions in this country.
Literary AgentsOur main task has been to try to find a literary agent to sell my book. I discovered a firm called Jericho writers, which produces a list of 800 or so agents, which can be sorted. I sorted it by those that have history in their description, and were in the UK and I got 251 names, which we downloaded and we then went through them all, looking at the individual names and eventually got about 20 or so, which deal with history at all seriously (most only dealt with social history and the like), and there are half a dozen which seen possible. We were allowed to consult the list for free for seven days, which we did. If you want any more it will cost is £30 a month, which is rather a lot. We are now sorting them all out and see which ones we should approach.
Mouse. And then there is the mouse. Wendy has discovered a mouse in the garden, and really got some old-fashioned traps from Robert, which were quite useless – the cheese disappeared and they traps were not sprung, but I got another couple from Amazon and we caught two straight away. I also bought some peppermint drops to spread round the back door.
Finally, I have discovered a lovely new game with Fiona. We make the bed together. I put the mobile phone on Wendy’s dressing table and set it up to do a video and then she watches me making the bed and shouts at me all the time. She just loves it – and it gets the bed made!
Friday, 22 May 2020
It was blowing today, so I mowed the lawn. Wendy came out and trimmed the edges then I came back in at and that about 5.30 I rang up Ronwen and dictated yet another version of my opening letter for the literary agents. I wonder what it is like?
In the evening I had thought that as a reward. I would watch some television, so I did a catch up on this series on Normal People with two young Irish students fucking each other.
In the penultimate session we had a breakthrough, where the girl was shown fully naked, with a picture of her black bush, and today in the final session we even saw the man’s penis, while he was being fondled by his naked girl-friend, which must be a breakthrough for the BBC.
Yesterday, he was the 75th anniversary of VE Day, so we had a street party organised by Laura at number 2. It was a fine afternoon and went off very well.
Wendy talking to Laura and her husband. Don’t know who the girl in the miniskirt is.
Andrew and Wendy at the VE Day party. Photo taken by Laura or possibly her husband
Me, standing in the road, photo taken by Laura
Laura sitting outside her house, with her grandmother’s parasol
In the evening. Wendy had ordered a meal from Rara which was very good.
My leg is still giving trouble from the ulcer. I have been along to see the nurse twice, once at the Kew retail Park surgery on Monday and then on Thursday at the Sheen Lane surgery. I am wearing stockings over the top of the bandage.
Jean, Wendy’s sister is apparently getting better. She has only rung up her daughter Jane once, but said that she is still alive and that the kidneys are still very poorly. Still we hope she is getting better slowly
I have not been doing much work on the book. At the beginning of the week I sent off an application to Coombs Moylett publishing agents, but have heard nothing in return not even a formal acknowledgement. I have finished my review of Greg Woolf’s book and sent it off to Matt. I have also been doing the final revision of my article on Roman Barcelona with a sad email from Carolina that Antonio’s wife has died from Corona virus and that he is in hospital.
I have started reading Peter Wiseman’s book on the House of Augustus.
I have been trying to make these Musings website work I do not know what success.
4.45
Have I just been out sunbathing naked in the garden – it’s a gorgeous day. However Wendy was sitting outside and when she saw me naked, she hastened to put something across my middle. But as soon as she went away, I took it off then 10 minutes later she came down and found something else to drape across my middle.
And why not sunbathe nude? to one side the Lithuanians have gone away, she has joined her husband in Switzerland for the shutdown and on the other side, they can only see me from an upper bedroom window, which I don’t think they used very much. So what the hell? In any case, Wendy is wearing her very short shorts in which she looks wonderful – she still has super legs!
May 12 2020
This afternoon, Wendy cut my hair!
Yesterday I dictated the house of Augustus to Ronwen, who sent it across and today I have been correcting it.
Yesterday in the evening I had a long session when I finally worked out how to transfer pictures from my mobile phone to the computer via a USB cable. It was a long process, but I eventually found the right click, hidden away, where you had to scroll down a lot of junk to see the crucial click.
But having done so I downloaded all my mobile photos of this year and some for last year and put them in the right folders . It is very good to have them all at full resolution
It has turned cold!
Today I have been preparing a long order from Sainsbury’s for delivery, 9 o’clock on Thursday evening. It already comes to £190
14th May
I had a good day yesterday. In the morning I put in some orders for Amazon for a jumpstart for the car and also some birthday presents for Izzi. But then in the evening I signed up to Jericho Writers to get some names of literary agents for my book. They give a weeks free access to their list of agents, after which it costs £30 a month. I signed up free for a week, but then I set to work, selecting those agents who mentioned ‘history’, and UK and found 251 potential agents. They come in seven batches and I downloaded the first batch on 10 sheets of paper and then went through them adding notes and found a couple of real possibilities.
I also thought of a new title for my book. Instead of Barbarism and Civilisation, how about How the Greeks invented Civilisation. I am inspired by this by seeing Matt Ridley’s blog about his new book he is about to get published called How Innovation Works. I thought I should try out the word ‘how’ in the title of my book. I think it works much better.
I have also been having some new ideas about how I present my philosophical ideas and I think the answer is to use the word ‘liberal’, or ‘liberalism’ or ‘classical liberalism’, but liberalism still sounds good and I can even add inspired by Hayek. I must now get down to rewrite all my introductions along these new lines.
Jean, Wendy’s elder sister, fell out of bed several days ago and broke her leg. She was taken into Taunton hospital where they operated on her successfully, but she lost a lot of blood. But Jean will not take blood transfusions and consequently is in danger of dying. Her daughter, Jane, who lives just round the corner rushed her into hospital but her son Haydn lives in Taunton and is the only one who can see her. Wendy is very upset.
The weather has broken but we have had a wonderful run of good weather, with unbroken sun and I did a lot of sunbathing on the lawn. But yesterday it rained almost all day.
Sunbathing in the garden
My leg is still giving trouble. The wound that I received on Hadrian’s Wall has gone bad. It has been bandaged but I tried not to wear a stocking for a couple of days and it healed up slightly, but then I began having pain in the middle of the night. I went to sleep for a couple of hours but I did not move the leg and the blood did not get round and it began to hurt and was relieved only slightly if I got up and walked around.
For nearly a week I was in the habit of taking paracetamol, which relieved the pain and allowed me to get back to sleep and when I woke up in the morning it had all gone. Yesterday I wore stocking for most of the day, and then I put the stockings on again at night and I slept through without pain, but the pad that I left under the stocking was very bloody. I think I ought to contract the doctors.
After forty seven years living in our wonderful family home at 9 Nassington Road in Hampstead, we have moved to a cottage in Kew, in West London. We want to be nearer the grandchildren.
Let’s start by looking at our old home, at 9 Nassington road
This is number 9 Nassington Road, where we live very happily for 47 years. We did not actually launch Current Archaeology from here —we spend our first three years in Islington at 128 Barnsbury Road, a small undeveloped Georgian terraced house. It had possibilities as they say, but it would not really have been big enough for a growing family, so my parents ‘downsized’ and enabled us to move to a somewhat larger house a couple of miles to the west in Hampstead.
It was an inspired choice, for Nassington Road has been a wonderful home, both for bringing up the children and for producing Current Archaeology, and it enabled me to participate in one of the great joys of life – bringing up our children.
It was in a wonderful situation on the southern slopes of Hampstead Heath – the Heath was just 200 yards away. The house faced north – this photo was taken in the very early morning —and from the front it had three storeys.
However from the back it was a different story.
The house was on sloping ground so one entered to the ground floor and then went down to the basement floor, which entered straight onto the garden.
There is the view of the house from the garden. The black plates were inserted following the very dry summer of 1976 when we were very worried that the back wall shows signs of movement. We need not have worried – the back wall has been rock solid ever since.
GMT
However, if you look out from the windows, you can see our wonderful view. The greatest advantage of Nassington road is that looking south, you can see the whole glory of London. To see the some of the features in detail, click here
Was it really 50 years ago that I wrote a major article in Current Archaeology on the excavation of the Roman Palace at Fishbourne? The following year a superb Museum was constructed over the remains, so in CA 340, Carly produced a celebratory article on Fishbourne at 50, with a wonderful article of reminiscences by Barry Cunliffe himself. And on Saturday 30th June 2018, a party was held to celebrate, and we were invited down on a wonderfully balmy day in the middle in a long spell of sunny weather.
The highlight was a wonderful speech by Barry Cunliffe himself giving some of the more indiscreet details that were omitted from the article in Current Archaeology. He began with the saga of the dodgy digger driver who dug a trench for a water pipeline, but backfilled it very crudely, leaving the lower spoil on the surface, so when the local society fieldwalked over the field, they found large amounts of Roman material, particularly mosaic tesserae.
Barry Cunliffe in full flow reminiscing about the original excavations, 50 years ago
It was clear that there was a major building, but they realised that the field was in the designated path for a major trunk road along the South Coast. Local volunteers led by Margaret Rule excavated, and a Cambridge undergraduate called Barry Cunliffe was appointed as director. The main initial task was to avert the motorway so the first objective was to uncover as much of the building as possible. On the last day they hit ‘treasure’ — the Dolphin mosaic, one of the finest mosaics ever uncovered in this country — and the front cover of CA 340: the line of the road was rerouted
Inside the cover building at Fishbourne showing some of the magnificent mosaics
Fishbourne Cupid on a dolphin mosaic
It was only in the next season that they were able to get down to a proper excavation with proper archaeological objectives of dating and interpreting the site. There followed eight or nine seasons of excavations, all done by volunteers, mostly in their late teens or early 20s between 80 and 100 in all, accommodated first in an abandoned cinema then in a local school. Barry maintained firm discipline during the day, working from 8.30 to 5: what went on after hours was another matter.
Barry Cunliffe cutting the ribbon for the opening of the Headley Trust viewing platform
Another stroke of luck was that one evening, just as he was locking up, an elderly gent appeared and asked if he could see around. Barry reluctantly showed him round, and the next day he was contacted by the Sunday Times saying that Sir Dennis Hamilton, the editor-in-chief had been very impressed by what he had seen, was there anything the Sunday Times could do to help? Barry was already in contact with two Sunday Times journalists, Kenneth Pearson and his (very pretty) girl-friend Pat Connor and between them they arranged for the Sunday Times to oversee the design and layout of the Museum and the whole site. Another stroke of Barry’s luck!
A further stroke of luck was a visit by Ivan Margery, a leading Sussex archaeologist and author of the standard guide to Roman Roads in Britain. He was also extremely wealthy and said that he wanted to donate a Roman villa to the society and had looked at a couple of possibilities already, but this seemed ideal. Could he purchase the site and donate it to the society? He approached the farmer, and bought the 12 acre field from him so that the dig could proceed on land that they owned. And this has formed the basis of the ability of the society to develop Fishbourne – it’s their own property.
The Collections and Discovery Centre at Fishbourne, a fine depository for all the finds made during the excavations
The main layout of the display remains essentially unchanged, but a lot of ancillary work has been done. A major problem was what to do with the finds from the excavations, which were kept in a shed, but now a magnificent new finds centre has been constructed at a cost of £3.75 million – £2.75 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the rest raised by the society. Of course it’s not called the finds shed any more, it’s called the Collections and Discovery Centre, and there are school room facilities for outside students.
The new colonnade alongside the cover building, looking out over the gardens. A fine place for dining!
Another useful addition has been a fine colonnade outside the building which was the ideal place for our buffet supper.
The Sussex Archaeological Society is one of the richest archaeological societies. It owns five or six other properties in addition to Fishbourne, notably Lewes Castle, which is fast becoming a fashionable wedding venue. Running all the properties means a continuous round of fundraising, but I do wonder whether the English Heritage Trust, – the new body spun off from English Heritage to be in charge of all the English Heritage properties, should come down to Sussex to see how they operate and then wherever possible hive off their properties to county societies. Surely it would be better to have properties owned and operated by a local society rather than have everything done centrally?
John Manley, the former chief executive of the Sussex Archaeological Society
And here is wonderful opportunity to meet friends old and new, notably John Manley , the former chief executive of the Society, now retired, and elevated to being a trustee, and also his successor, Tristan Barsham, and the Property Manager Katrina Burton and also David Baker who was the photographer on the excavations and who met his wife Evelyn in the traditional place for archaeologists to meet up, down in a cesspit.
Carly Hilts, the editor of Current Archaeology, with her friend Simon.
I was also delighted to see Carly who came down from Current Archaeology, bringing a friend with her. Carly is a keen Gilbert and Sullivan addict – she sings with a local operatic society, and I have been hearing stories about a young man who also sings G and S. He came along too – all I can say is, I hope he learns a lot of archaeology fast!
Our next door neighbours, Kirsti and Antii have left. They were Finnish and he was working in Switzerland while she and the two children lived here next door to us. They have decided that they should all get together in Switzerland in Zurich where he has been living by himself during the lockdown period.
