The debonair Basil Marigold's

While in County Durham we visited the nearby village of Blanchard. It is a picturesque village. Imagine, if you will a small village in any agatha christie novel and you have Blanchard. It's tiny. It had a beautiful looking pub, but It seemed to possess only three shops, a post office general store, a deli and a hat shop?! The kind of shop every village in the middle of nowhere is famed for; the obligatory bespoke hat shop, because they don't sell hats in towns or cities so you'd drive miles to an almost ghost village to buy a hat. Bizarrely we did see someone drop off people for the hat shop while we were there! But it wasn't at the hat shop because the lady whom I presume runs the hat shop had a notice on the shop door saying, she was at home and please go and see her there. There was a giant hat attached to her house's driveway gate as a help. But here are some photos from the very lovely but strangely empty village of Blanchard Bay Bridge This was taken fr

 were in the fortunate position of being asked by a couple of our friends if we fancied a small escape to the country recently. After the birth of our second child, it seemed almost perfect timing as with these events a certain amount of tiredness starts to become ingrained into the psyche gradually wearing you down from the inside out until you begin fraying a little, like old jeans. The destination was County Durham, a place I have never been too and actually hand on hand probably would not have been my first pick for a holiday destination, my knowledge of the Prince Bishops County is limited to the fact that it contains Durham. That's not a lot of fact-ige. So to start with it was perfectly timed and promised a whole new county to experience in a holiday cottage that promised a 'games barn' too! The only compromise, if you can call it that was a complete and total loss of Phone signal and internet (internet accessed through the wi-fi in the games barn). Having no phone s

At the symposium tonight there was a question and answer session at the end. The best question of the night was, coincidently, mine and here it is; 'in the introduction you seemed to imply that the nature and presentation of Roman sexuality was fairly homogenous throughout the empire. Do you believe this to be the case? Or is there also a possibility that the nature of roman sexuality might vary with the input of local influences of the provincial culture?' A good question I thought which at least prompted two of the speakers to disagree.

Minus of course, the boys. I was allowed out and I have been flying solo. The destination was a pre-arranged symposium on Roman Sexuality to compliment an exhibition of artifacts from the british museum. Which could be described as 'one cup and a hundred varieties of penises'. The cup admittedly was the 'warren cup', which pre 1970 was refused, when offered for sale by most british museums and not to be outdone, turned away by a customs official in the US, in the 50's. The reason? The Warren cup is the only as yet discovered silver cup, Roman in origin, depicting 2 scenes of men engaged in homoerotic acts. The attitude and the law changed and so finally the Warren cup was finally bought by the British museum and was the centre piece of the exhibition. Its near perfect condition after 2000 yrs is incredible. Depressingly, out of the 4 arranged speakers, all of whom were goood, only by the 3rd did we reach a speaker who exceeded my academic qualifications; this depres

A very sad last few weeks as the space shuttle Discovery flew and landed its final space mission. To be decomissioned and put out to grass at a museum. Children will now have the opportunity to walk around one of the most amazing vehicles man has ever created and say to themselves, 'this is what a visionary country can do, with the right resources and drive'. Space and its exploration should never be seen as a luxury. It is vital to our survival our race.