"And then he said..."

Bit late, this post, but what the hell. A couple of weekends ago we combined two of our favourite interests - good books and archaeology - in one visit to the excavations at Silchester Roman Town.

Every year, Reading University holds a dig for its students on Insula IX of the site, gradually uncovering four centuries (so far) of history. Each year they hold a couple of open days - we went to a previous one and were greatly interested - but this year they did something extra: a visit from one of our favourite authors, Lindsey Davis, who gave a talk, read from one of her Falco novels, answered questions and signed autographs.

There are a tiny number of writers whose story-telling ability is such that I will automatically buy anything they publish, as soon as they publish it, and Davis is one of them. The Falco novels are an entertaining mix - part gritty detective tales, part comedy, with all the human insights that a well developed set of characters and their sprawling family relationships can provide. They were conceived as a way of setting a Philip Marlowe-style PI novel in the mean streets of ancient Rome but, as they have progressed, Falco's dreadful relatives have elbowed their way into the narrative, and Falco's adventures have also taken him across most of the empire - including that nightmarish rain-swept near-barbarian province to the north called Britain.

And you didn't have to spend long at the open day to see why the Romans must have hated it.

We had a quick look round the site in blazing sunshine, then went to Davis's talk - held in the marquee where the student diggers had their meal breaks. She was - as anyone who's read her pugnacious website would expect - entertaining, erudite and witty, with a to-the-point, no-nonsense attitude. Afterwards, we joined the official site tour, where one of the senior archaeologists took us around the edge of the trench and explained what was going on within it.

At this point, a thunderstorm materialised and the heavens opened.

Most of the diggers were, fortunately, on a break - most had dressed up in costume and those stranded outside, where they had been tending nail-making demonstrations, giving out directions or selling books, swiftly found that torrential rain turned bedsheet togas transparent, worked its way into all the nooks and crannies of plastic breastplates, and transformed realistic ancient British tunics back into heavy, itchy, sodden blankets.

We sheltered at the plant sales stall and watched the information Portakabin fill to bursting with summer-clothed visitors, then as soon as the first fury of the rain subsided we nipped back to have a look at the diggings - when you're relying on interpreting features from different coloured bands of earth, wet ground is so much easier to understand than dusty, dry ground. Strangely, no-one came with us.

We headed back to the car park as the rain continued to fall, passing ever more drenched visitors, our books bundled up tight in a plastic bag to keep them dry - a good day. Here's some photos:

The author and her public
Lindsey Davis signs autographs for fans after her talk, held in the marquee where off-duty diggers eat, rest and - to judge from the stereo on the other side of the tent - party after hours.

The road that used to be
A senior member of the digging team explains what's going on: she's on the fourth century road surface, behind her the excavations have reached the first century ground level. Running alongside the road is its drainage gully and a row of postholes from a late roadside arcade that have been driven through the earlier achaeology. The larger holes were all wells (apart from one cesspit) and the whole area behind the road was workshops.

Storm
At the height the storm, everyone's fled for cover. But see how the ground in the trench is now darker, more varied and therefore so much easier to interpret?

The Romans in Britain
How they must have hated it here… costumed students shelter from the rain after striking down a display of finds.

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In Big Brother, that is.

Last night's announcement that they're letting four evicted contestants back into the show, and one of them could win, shows there is no longer any point in spending your money voting to evict someone. If Endemol don't agree with your opinion they'll just put them back in and make them eligible to win.

Whoever makes it back into the main house - and we all know who it's going to be - will arrive back too late to be evicted, and slap bang in the positive voting stage where you can't even vote against her.

It just shows utter contempt for the viewer.

Well, screw them.

“                                      
                                                   “

Society sometimes picks the oddest yardsticks to measure itself by. Here's two passages from today's media:

Life after Lea
Grace Dent's brilliant Radio Times Big Brother Blog
Optimistic Spiral is still certain that six weeks in the BB7 house is going to be one long “par-tay”. “I like to party!” he tells Big Brother, “Where there's a party! That's what I'm all about!” Why the stupid boy didn't get an easyJet flight to Ibiza and spend summer giving out flyers, dancing on bars and copping off with pretty, E-addled teenage girls wearing thong bikinis is anyone's guess.
Instead he's incarcerated in a house with bikini-clad Jayne, who looks more like Fred Dibnah, watching her dance to Pete hitting a grill with a hairbrush for 15 hours at a time.

and

Welcome to the world diving awards night, sponsored by Louganis
Stan Hey counts down the top ten World Cup dives in the Independent (story will disappear behind subscription-only barrier in a day or two)
5 Mark van Bommel (v Portugal)
Wins the Fred Dibnah Award for impersonating one of the late demolition man's falling chimneys after being head-butted by Luis Figo. The Dutch midfielder is as hard as Gouda, so Figo's attempt at a “Scottish kiss” should have been laughed off. But this was a game that Don King could have promoted, so Van Bommel was adapting to the misrule. Failed, though, to get Figo a red.

I'm fairly sure it's not National Dibnah Day today or anything like that. Yet here he is, used as a point of comparison twice on the same day by writers who are clearly confident that their readers (demographically very different) would know perfectly well who the Bolton steeplejack was, and why mentioning him would be humorous, even a couple of years after his death. Who would have thought it?

Well, maybe the man himself would have if this quotation from his Wikipedia page is anything to go by:

“It's a funny thing this celebrity. If you don't wave back you're a miserable bugger, if you do wave back you're a big-headed bugger. I don't know.”

Blimey! I just looked at my referrer stats and discovered that the Wikipedia page for Halo Jones quotes from, and links to, here!¹ How cool is that?

¹ Note: This refers to the JournalSpace version of this blog, where this post originally appeared.

Heartbreak - those crazy kids didn't make it after all…

In my household we tend towards the view that Douglas Adams wasn’t, in fact, a novelist but instead a philosopher and a researcher of the infinite who chose to present his theories and conclusions in the form of radio scripts and sci-fi novels. He was also - despite most of his work being set on other planets - one of the most observant chroniclers of London since Dickens.

Just after six he returned to Fenchurch’s house in the alleyway, clutching a bottle of champagne.

“Hold this,” she said, shoved a stout rope into his hand and disappeared inside through the large, white wooden doors from which dangled a fat padlock off a black iron bar.

The house was a small converted stable in a light industrial alleyway behind the derelict Royal Agricultural Hall of Islington. As well as its large stable doors it also had a normal-looking front door of smartly glazed panelled wood with a black dolphin door knocker. The one odd thing about this door was its doorstep, which was nine feet high, since the door was set into the upper of the two floors and had presumably originally been used to haul in hay for hungry horses.

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

Adams famously drew on the parts of Islington he knew well for details to throw into the Hitch-Hikers’ Guide trilogy - for example, phone numbers as probability odds and the estate agency Hotblack Desiato as a minor character’s name.

The old Royal Agricultural Hall is still there, only it’s not derelict anymore, it’s the Business Design Centre and I work there a day or two a week. After Beloved Other Half reminded me of the passage quoted above I went off in search of the nine foot doorstep one lunch break.

Since I forgot it was down an alleyway I didn’t find it, but I did grab a few pictures of the sort of streets in the area - typical north London streets I suppose, except north London’s not my manor and the typical looks exotic to me still. Where I am, out west, we don’t have long rows of brick terraces like these and I was fascinated by the contrast - only yards apart were roads where the homes looked like elegant town houses and roads where they looked pokey and proletarian, despite being almost identical in design.

I found it easier to imagine Douglas Adams walking along the pavement than I did Arthur Dent floating above it.

Anyway, here are the pics.

This year's Big Brother is, to all intents and purposes, already over - despite only six days of its 13-week run having passed.

The truly dreadful Shahbaz, a walking exemplar of everything defective in the human psyche, has left the house, but not before becoming the victim of a shocking extended period of bullying in which almost every single other contestant behaved quite appallingly.

I have to say that had I been in the house I would certainly have joined in with them - Shahbaz went so far out of his way to be obnoxious to as many people as possible that I think any collection of strangers would have eventually formed a pack to hunt him down without mercy. The villains are Endemol for creating the situation in the name of entertainment.

Meanwhile, 12 of the remaining 13 housemates are about to be hit by a backlash of monumental proportions. Shahbaz is being reinvented as a poor, sad, deluded loon who was wildly irritating but nevertheless didn't deserve to be on the receiving end of such uncaring savagery. A firestorm is gathering pace, and even long-running BB addicts on the Digital Spy forums are shooting off complaints to broadcasting watchdogs.

However, there is one person in the house who is likely to escape most of the criticism, and that's Pete - the amiable singer whose basic compassion and good sense are never entirely obscured by the tics and whistles of his Tourette's Syndrome. He was already the bookies' favourite to win, and the sight of him in the diary room after Shahbaz left, in tears, saying “I didn't know *how* to stand up for him”, has simply cemented it.

So - Pete to win, everyone else to get roundly booed as they leave. Probably, it would be best if they just called the whole thing off now and saved us all a lot of bother.

Here's a brilliant - though very heavily academic and statistical - piece of research on voting patterns in Eurovision. If you're not up to the numbers (they made my brain hurt) then skip to the discussion section (point 4.1 onwards) for the conclusions.

Basically, it establishes that there are a number of voting blocs that can be mathematically proven to support each other, and asks whether it matters, or whether the battle between the New Warsaw Pact, the Balkan Bloc and the Viking Alliance is a pointer to what the future holds for Pan-European politics.

What it leaves unsaid is that countries outside a voting bloc - like Britain, France and Germany who pay for the contest - have no chance of winning for the foreseeable future.

Here's a pretty picture of the voting blocs:

Never let it be said that elections don't produce representative results. The voting in our household last night exactly reflected the UK Eurovision voting, in that the British 12 points went to the latex-covered Finnish rock Gods Lordi - Beloved Other Half's choice - and the 10 points went to my selection, the besuited and terribly direct Lithuanians whose song repeatedly chorused “We are the winners of Eurovision”.

They weren't, but the Finns were, which is one in the eye for bland white-clad “we are all brothers” Euro-schmaltz (Israel, Switzerland) and leggy blonde plastic pop tarts (far too many countries to name and shame - pictures here from the BBC).

I thought the British entry was actually rather good - a long way from the usual forgettable formulaic pap we usually enter. A bit individualistic, very catchy - the political voting blocks meant its chances of winning were always going to be slight, and Finland and Lithuania were ahead of it in the “quirky gimmick” stakes, but I'm surprised it didn't finish top 10. It deserved to.

It's no surprise Russia, Serbia and Sweden scored so well but I'm astonished Malta was last, the song wasn't at all bad.

I sort of wanted to liveblog the contest, but I feared my brain would melt and blood would start running out of my ears if I tried. But this is what I might have written if I'd tried:

Switzerland:

Dull beyond belief. Deserves to finish with zero points. That sort of 'we are all together' drivel went out years ago.

Moldova:

Actually quite good. Catchy. Male singer is rather good-looking but the girl's slow strip seems a bit too forced to work.

Israel:

Like Switzerland. Only worse. Not a good start to the contest, could be a long night.

Latvia:

Clearly, Latvia have decided they don't want the expense of hosting the contest again. This is one of the worst songs I have ever heard.

Norway:

Some energy here, and the fiddles work well, but overall it's barely adequate. Another bunch dressed in white!

Spain:

At least they're not wearing white. But this is a hollow song - good production but dire vocals. Could have been a cracker, instead it's a damp squib.

Malta:

Strong performance, I thought. What do I know?

Germany:

I love watching Germany - they always put on great big productions that scream “we expect to win” and then fall flat on their faces. No difference this year, though as a pure country song it's pretty good.

Denmark:

The Danes lost the plot for a while but this is right back to form - catchy, energetic and a possible winner.

Russia:

Pretty-boy pop star with existing fanbase and plenty of block-vote support sings classic Eurovision number: will be difficult to beat, and rightly so.

FYR Macedonia:

Embarrassing. Just embarrassing.

Romania:

Wow. This sounds like a Eurovision winner from start to finish - put it in a lineup of past winners and you'd have a hard job spotting it was the imposter.

Bosnia:

Uh-oh. Sparkly lights and a ballad sung by an ugly, earnest male singer. I hate songs like this but unaccountably the voters often like them. And it's a Balkan country, so there's block votes to be harvested.

Lithuania:

WTF? This is bloody marvellous - similtaneously mocks and celebrates everything Eurovision stands for. Hysterical.

UK:

Never heard it before tonight and it grows on you rapidly, with a chorus out of Oliver and an acceptable rap. Could soar, could flop, but at least it's distinctive.

Greece:

Hyperactive overacting. Don't like it.

Finland:

The song's not actually as good as it might be, but the overall package is a winner. If Europe keeps its sense of humour and the Baltic block vote falls the right way then this contest is over.

Ukraine:

They won it a few years ago with Ruslana, who blended folk and pop perfectly: this is Ruslana-lite and it suffers for it. Not bad, but could have been so much better.

France:

The toilet-break, put the kettle on, song. Why did the French even turn up if this is all they can offer? It's not bad like Latvia is, it's just utterly pointless.

Croatia:

Doesn't quite work - it's so nearly a barnstormer but I can't quite put my finger on why it fails to ignite. An honourable attempt.

Ireland:

Another ballad, and a powerful one at that. Were it not for the block votes, it could win. Top 10, certainly.

Sweden:

The Swedes keep churning them out, don't they? This is just like all their other entries and, just like all their other entries, it will score heavily.

Turkey:

Not quite sure what this is all about - it's like someone took notes from a badly-recorded bootleg DVD of past winners and then constructed this from memory.

Armenia:

Who knew Armenia counted as Europe? This is good - catchy, fun, energetic. A great debut.

In the end, Finland won from Russia and Bosnia. Not sure who was next, but Sweden, Romania, Ireland and Lithuania did well. We were stuffed - not humiliated, but soundly beaten. Malta, France and Latvia polled badly, and Switzerland would have done so as well if they hadn't fielded a Maltese singer, earning them the Maltese 12 points.

So - off to Finland next year. I'm looking forward to it already!

Edit: 24 hours on, I have two songs - and only two songs - from the contest stuck in my head, going round and round. The first is the Moldovan entry, and it has nothing to do with the singer's bikini - it's actually a very catchy song in a 'lazy afternoon under a coconut palm' sort of way. The other is the poor old Brits. We wuz robbed, I tell you!