“Where’s episode 4 Mr Teijens?” “She’s bloody well left us in Egypt Miss Wannop.”

Everything is finally repacked in a bag I haven’t tried lifting yet and I’m off to Iraq. In my 48 hours in the UK I’ve washed almost every item of clothing I own, applied for a post-doctoral research fellowship, been to the dentist and eaten an extraordinary amount of meat. The packing process hasn’t gone totally smoothly as I appear to have left my case of DVDs in Egypt; how am I supposed to cope when I still have two episodes of Parade’s End left? And it contains all eight disks of Evangelion, and most of my superhero films. I’m left with the dregs of my DVD collection – Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood, some old episodes of Hornblower and series 2 of Blake’s 7. It’s going to be a long old season. I’ve assembled an ambitiously intellectual range of books, mostly the ones I didn’t read in Egypt because I couldn’t be bothered with them and borrowed Harry Potter 6 and 7 from the dig house library.

The emptying of bags and shoes: if I save, one day I’ll have enough for a desert of my own

My parents have been very understanding about me arriving, throwing all my possessions over the floor, filling the washing machine with sand, filth and misplaced artefacts, eating everything in the fridge and demanding that we don’t watch The One Show. But then, they had a lot of practice all those years I was a student. My dad gave me £100 when he saw the state of my clothes; this is really quite embarrassing when one is over thirty (but not so embarrassing that I didn’t take it and buy some socks with only the hole that you put your foot in).

I also bought my sixth watch of the year and replaced another defeated sand-filled camera. The recently deceased camera made it over the 12 month mark which counts as a good innings in my tender care. I shouldn’t be given nice things. A fresh victim was delivered this morning thanks to Amazon’s one day delivery.

The glorious dream of bacon

I don’t want to go back to the airport, I didn’t like it there.