Browsing local auctions for furniture etc. in preparation for a *fingers crossed* upcoming move to a Victorian terrace and the quality of 19th/early 20th century furniture you can buy for perfectly reasonable prices remains astonishing

Ethereal light just now on the train between Reading and Didcot, the setting sun shining weakly through a storm ahead of us, a pale brown-yellow sky over the green fields.

Almost a decade ago, I helped write a policy document saying that the mayor should push for this line. Nice to finally ride it in a quite different place and stage of life.

@ourcs.bsky.social you may be amused to know/pass on to the commentator that the James Kennedy subbing into New College M1 later today is the same James Kennedy who was at bow for New College M1 at Eights 2009

Somehow did not occur to me that salt and pepper grinders could ever be made of material that would cross into the triple digits in £££ never mind into quadruple ££££, but Peter Murrell managed to find them

the discovery of my dinner party risk mitigation matrix - scoring each friend by their flakiness and their conversational added value - has caused disquiet among my guests

And this is why, as all epigraphers know, you *have* to be careful and pick the right stone, and location, to erect your eternal monument. No point in carving your name in foot high letters if it'll be worn away next millennium.

I wonder what terrible choice Starmer will make in his resignation honours list

Fifty years ago today, Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" was published in the pages of @newyorker.com. What a poem!

@jacktindale.bsky.social truly, a man may contain multitudes

This term's second home/place of work looking very fine in the April sunshine

That the number is so small is a little disconcerting

First of a new series, on coins I come across in my work open.substack.com/pub/astrocla...

Not sure if I think The Drama was a good film, or if a film involving a posh British curator in a complicated transatlantic relationship is worryingly closely targeted at me, specifically

First of a new series, on coins I come across in my work open.substack.com/pub/astrocla...

What a beautiful, optimistic moment this is.

A lovely bit of Roman glass from Koblenz, Germany

I once got a shouted ‘whatthefuckyuhthinkyerdoin?’ From an upstairs window of a house. ‘Your house got bombed on the 27th April 1942, I’m recording the evidence.’ ‘Oh, did it? blimey, that didn’t come up in the survey.’

hey man. me and a few of the guys were thinking about attempting the transition from seasonal foraging to early sedentary city-state status later if you're down ?

Coinage and a Conference in the City of World's Desire: Istanbul, Part 1 open.substack.com/pub/astrocla...

@youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com I feel you will appreciate this tiny gold hand from the Istanbul Archaeological Museums I saw today

Trundling by train across Wessex on a day of perfect blue skies, apart from brief patches of dense fog, and all outlined by hard frost, the British countryside in Winter cannot be beaten.

Argument for "Steal away" as the single best piece of music to ever come out of America?

Final push for this piece

My first substack post can be found here: open.substack.com/pub/astrocla...

One sad/amusing part of this is that his take was politely queried by an expert in Roman law (and not on political grounds) and Vermeule chose to have strop and unfollowed him

Working on the material for a paper I'm giving in Istanbul in January, and in a day's work I have increased the number of questions, and not come to any firm answers.

@bretdevereaux.bsky.social the hoplite blog series is making its way onto all my undergraduate reading lists as I do my post-term revisions and updates, it really is a fantastic set of discussions

the twelve days of christmas - and I cannot emphasise this enough - are 25 December - 5 January. we are not currently in a day of christmas. marketing departments stop it. STOP IT

Come back quite often to Weber's viva, and what a moment this must have been (from this article on Weber's Dissertation journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...)

Since I start tomorrow, I thought it was time for a bio update: excited to say that I'll be taking up a half-time role as Curatorial Assistant for Greek coinage at the Ashmolean. So expect/beware more Greek and Roman Provincial coinage from this account over the next few years

Excited to discover which mad branch of French pretenders is rushing to hold a coronation with the stolen jewels

Am I being blind, or has the BBC website not published an article on the death of Tony Harrison?

The presenter on Radio 3 describing Newman as an Anglican priest in his intro to tonight's performance of Gerontius somewhat missing important developments in his career!

dudes rock

@youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com the name list, Marie, the name list. Laugh! Listen! Act! is the name of a CBBC show from the late 90s with an earworm theme tune (at least one presenter has since suffered damnatio memoriae for obvious reasons)

Rereading Aristophanes before I lecture on him this term and well difficult to escape the truth that honestly we've not innovated that many jokes in the last 2.5 thousand years, they are all already here

Thanks to @yuanyiz.bsky.social 's review this astonishingly stupid quote from Clegg's new book is going to be rattling around my head all day

Fascinated that In Our Time is one of the BBC’s most popular podcasts among under 35s. The young people demand three academics and a peer discussing Demosthenes, apparently. And they’re right to do so.

Watched every episode of House with my mum, who loved the show, as a consultant paediatric radiologist. She did always enjoy working out what condition the scans they put up *actually* showed vs what the show claimed they did.

My two favourite examples of this: 1) Marine Science centre in Newport, Oregon, allowing me to send videos of the amazing fog generating machine 2) halfway along the Grand Canal onboard a vaporetto

Very jealous of whoever gets to spend several years zapping the *first* coins with subatomic particles

HOW COOL IS THIS!?! A fully funded doctorate using cutting edge technology to study electrum!!! I can vouch for this being a truly open search with some of the best minds in both fields!! www.arch.ox.ac.uk/article/exci...

Never ask postdocs what they'll be doing next year, that's considered terribly offensive in their culture.

Tom Lehrer was simply the funniest man, and I'm forever grateful for the chain of passing down appreciating his songs from my grandmother to my mother to me.

Some of the coolest work in the field being done by @tsommerschield.bsky.social and others! Amazing productivity gains for researchers.