Oh what a long time since my last blog, but I’m always a bit lost in the Middle Eastern archaeology off-season. As I’m not digging I only have tangentially archaeological things to ramble on about, but there’s not much change there. Here’s a round-up of events:

At the end of April I went to Vienna for a week for the big biennial Near Eastern archaeology conference, where in time-honoured fashion I spent twice as much time in Viennese bierkellers as I did listening to academic papers. There was also a dreadful quantity of coffee and cake which had to be seen to. I gave a slightly sweaty paper about the work I’ve been doing in Erbil and had to answer a lot of difficult questions about what the hell I think I’m up to. I took one day off to go to the military museum and look at the tanks.

 

I don’t know what happened to May, there’s nothing in my diary. I spent the first part of June being unwell after over-exerting myself at the Cambridge Beer festival, which traditionally represents three or four days of systematically dismantling my immune system. I did a guest speaker turn at a New Zealand Women’s Association lunch in London, which went down surprisingly well after I decided to just stick to funny stories about landmines. I had to help my sister try on wedding dresses which is a horror I never thought I’d see in my lifetime.

A hugely disabling factor over the last couple of months has been my becoming unhinged over the EU referendum. I love politics, especially nowadays when there’s hardly any proper sport on the BBC, but this one has totally fried my political loyalties, philosophical principles and logical reasoning. After weeks of mental anguish, a genuine feeling that I was losing the plot and an angry drunken rant in the pub to several EU nationals who work at the British Museum, I finally found a way of resolving the issue. On the solstice, by the light of the full moon, I went down to the bottom of the garden at midnight. Over the grave of a jackdaw I buried there eleven years ago I cut out a square of turf with a big kitchen knife. I took a large terracotta bowl containing flour and oats, laid my postal voting forms and propaganda leaflets from both sides on top and set fire to them. I mixed the hot ash with the flour and oats and stirred in fresh milk anticlockwise with a silver spoon until I had a warm dark-grey paste. I moulded this into the shape of a human heart (anatomical, not Hallmark) and buried it in the jackdaws grave before carefully replacing the turf (I bet some of you think I’m joking). It was enormously satisfying on some Dark Age level and made me feel much better.

(A, you can’t tell mum about this, I told her I voted Remain).