GhostOfClayton

The Grand National was run this weekend. For those who don't know about it, it is the biggest horse race in Europe. The reason I mentioned it in my blog is that something caught my ear this time, and that was when, after the race, the BBC commentator said, ". . . there were no fatalities this year", in a tone that indicated a degree of pleasant surprise. Think about it; it's worthy of a mention that no-one died in this one off, 10 minute sporting event. That's like a football commentator saying, "and eight or fewer of the players died during the match . . . how good was that?" I'm not complaining. I just thought it was worthy of comment.

Lynch mobs of one belief system against another? Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!

My 50 year old prostate is clear and unambiguous proof of some extremely unintelligent design. I would elaborate, but I've just got to nip to the loo again.

OK. I'm going to nudge this one back to the top of the list with another question. How do I search for Roman remains in Italy? Websites? Literature? Maps?

The devine Charlie Brooker is also having a good old moan in The Guardian about Dickie 3's funeral. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/24/why-tug-our-forelocks-to-richard-iii-a-king-whos-such-a-diva-that-he-needs-two-funerals

When I’m away, I rarely get the opportunity to enjoy any telly. Partly because it’s quite tricky to get hold of UK TV channels when abroad, but even when I’m in the UK, I don’t have the time. I know I shouldn’t, but I do tend to over indulge when I get back. It’s like coming in from the cold and wrapping yourself in the warming comfort of an old, familiar duvet. There’s been a bit of talk on other blogs about what’s on the telly, so I thought it might be a nice idea to make a list of the Top 10 TV programmes I’m enjoying this particular time I’ve fallen off the TV waggon. So here we go. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. NB I’ve done them in a sort of reverse order to allow them to build to a crescendo. 10. Click This is the BBC’s flagship technology programme. However, UK technology geeks would be forgiven for not even knowing it exists, tucked away as it is on BBC News 24’s daytime schedules. Perhaps they think it doesn’t matter when it goes out, because tech-heads will be watching it on catch-up anyway. Anyway, I like it because its apparent low budget means that it cuts to the chase, rather than cluttering up its on-screen time with competitions, prizes and reading out live tweets from people whose attention is divided between the show, and their iPhone (and hence whose opinions are worthless). 9. Big Bang Theory This is the first of two US imports I’ve chosen, that air as part of E4’s ‘Quite Big Thursday’ (the other being ‘Brooklyn 99’; see next item). Believe it or not, there are people in this world who have never seen an episode of Big Bang Theory. My heart goes out to them. They truly do not know what they’re missing. As an aside, an Admin Assistant in one of the places I sometimes work looks like Penny, and so it’s a happy day for me when I go there. 8. Brooklyn 99 This one snuck up without fanfare. As mentioned above, this comes as part of E4’s ‘Quite Big Thursday’. The trouble with E4’s ‘Quite Big Thursday’ is that it’s littered with fairly lacklustre and formulaic US comedies that are only ‘quite’ funny. Something about this one, however, caught my eye, and after the first episode I was sold. 7. Bear Grylls: Mission Survive This is a little like “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here”, in that a load of celebs are taken into the jungle and made to do many things they’d sooner not do. There the comparison ends, however. IACGMOOH is hosted by those cheeky Tyneside Eric-and-Ernie-alikes Ant & Dec. Mission Survive is hosted by an unsympathetic ex-SAS survival expert who famously rehydrated himself by In IACGMOOH, you never get the impression anyone will actually die as a result of eating bugs or getting covered in rats. With Mission Survive, it’s always a puzzle how any of the celebs manage to still be alive at the end of the episode. The viewers vote off celebs in IACGMOOH, whereas in Mission Survive, Bear Grylls dispatches them humanely with a small hunting knife before their incompetence can kill anyone else (that’s not strictly true, but by the time you’ve watched the first couple of episodes, it wouldn’t surprise you). 6. Bear Grylls: The Island Once Bear Grylls has euthanised the last of the celebrities in Mission Survive, Channel 4 will segue him seamlessly into this particular offering. The premise is this: Bear Grylls leaves a group of a dozen or so overweight office workers on a small, swampy and dangerous, deserted island with no food, water, survival kit or training. He then goes back after eight weeks to see what became of them. You think I’m joking? I am not. Lord Of The Flies can’t hold a candle to the horrors of the last series. In series 2, the ante has been upped. There will be two islands and two groups; one of men, and one of women. Oh, the humanity! 5. Raised By Wolves Every now and again, Channel 4 delivers up a new comedy that is like nothing that has ever come before it. ‘Father Ted’ and ‘The IT Crowd’ are obvious examples, and you may remember ‘The Comic Strip Presents’. The most recent to fit into that category is ‘Raised By Wolves’. Written by Caitlin and Caroline Moran, whose writing career doesn’t seem to have edged into TV before, this is the story of a very unusual West Midlands working class one-parent-family, and their sundry misadventures. Wow! 4. Inside Number 9 Back for a second series, this darkly comic (emphasis very much on the dark, rather than the comic) anthology of one-off dramas is written by Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, two of the powerhouse writing team that brought us the deeply disturbing ‘League of Gentlemen’. The only connection between these half-hour stories is that they all take place in Number 9, be it an ordinary house, a gothic mansion, a dressing room, or a rail couchette . . . oh, and there’s always a knock-you-sideways twist in the tale. 3. Only Connect It only became apparent to me after watching ‘Only Connect’, but there live amongst us a race of super-intelligent alien entities, disguised as ordinary human beings. They created this quiz show to test their immeasurably superior intellects; to compete amongst themselves by performing mental feats so amazing to ordinary mortals as to make them nearly dizzy at the cerebral capacities involved. For humble men and women such as you or I, it is a feather in the cap to even understand the answers given, let alone come anywhere near providing one. It bills itself as ‘the toughest quiz show on TV’, and I see no reason to doubt that claim. It is hosted by Victoria Coren-Mitchell, who must surely be the sexiest woman on whatever planet she comes from. 2. 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown Born of a one-off experiment by Channel 4, ‘8 Out Of 10 cats Does Countdown’ has shoehorned two very different shows together into one. ‘8 Out of 10 Cats’ was a long running panel show where comedians answer questions on statistics. Very funny, but just one of many similar panel shows. Countdown was a number and letter puzzles gameshow, shown midweek afternoons, and mainly watched by students, and retired people hoping that exercising their brain cells will stave off dementia. The format is simple, and it’s the longest running gameshow on the planet (interesting fact: Countdown was the first show on Channel 4). Anyway, surprisingly enough, you put these 2 ordinary shows together, and you get ab-sol-ute dynamite. The whole is so much bigger than the sum of its parts. Funniest thing on telly at the moment by a long chalk. 1. Life on Mars I saved the best until last. OK, so this isn’t showing at the moment. I found the complete series 1 & 2 going cheap on iTunes, so I loaded it onto the iPhone to take away to Austria with me. I didn’t really get chance to watch it, so I’m catching up on it now. If I had to make a list of my top five TV shows of all time, this would probably be at the top. Gene Hunt is such an inspired creation, that Life on Mars would be at the top of the list on that character’s merit alone, but the rest is all superb too. Other highlights of my square-eyed habit are ‘Family Guy’ and ‘Banished’. My wife says I should watch the new ‘Poldark’, but I’ve already nailed my colours to ‘Banished’s flagpole, and there’s only room in my life for one Redcoat-based period drama. And anyway, I think she only watches it to see Aidan Turner’s six-pack.

US imported TV series I'm enjoying at the moment: Big Bang Theory Brooklyn 99

I’ve just been through a course of treatment for premature ejaculation. I’m OK now, but for a while it was touch & go. <rimshot> Just getting in the mood, because I’m starting to fit jobs around our annual visit to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. For as long as I can remember I’d heard tales of this legendary festival, and longed to go, but never did. I wasn’t really sure why, but if I’m honest I was probably a little over-awed by it. It is after all, the largest festival on the planet by a very, very considerable margin. It . . . is . . . HUGE. Absolutely city-wide, and during practically the whole month of August. Hundreds of venues host multiple shows each day, all day. There’s barely a pub in the city that doesn’t also have something going on, and if that weren’t enough, the streets are packed with street entertainers surrounded by crowds. The whole city is one long party for four weeks, starting before lunch each day, and pushing on well into the wee-small hours. The atmosphere is truly electric. Notoriously, however, even if you can find somewhere to stay, the price of accommodation in the city is hiked up during the Fringe Festival . . . and with so much going on, just where do you start? You can go and see people you’ve heard of, but that’s all very safe and predictable, and not really in the spirit of the Fringe (and it tends to be a bit pricey). The Fringe is all about those kind of shows you’d never see anywhere else. . . that just wouldn’t work outside the context of this avalanche of music/theatre/comedy/dance/arts. You need to see the nobodies, the ones yet to be jaded by wide-audience appeal. You want to be able to hear that Johnny Come-Lately’s sold out tour of mega-arenas is once again packing out the O2, and say with pride “I saw him in a 50-seat venue above a pub at the Edinburgh Fringe, and it only cost me a fiver”. In short, it’s all about taking the risk and seeing something different. Now you can see why I was a little intimidated by the prospect. But eventually, I bit the bullet and went for it. I was so glad I did, and have been every year since. So here’s my guide to enjoying the Edinburgh Fringe, without breaking the bank. Sunshine on Leith Do you remember bespectacled, sore-footed and overly-Scottish musical twins, The Proclaimers? They did a song called, and appeared in an excellently feel-good film called, ‘Sunshine on Leith’. Leith is the answer to your budget accommodation problems. There is an abundance of hotels, B&Bs, bunkhouses, etc. to cover all pockets. It’s easy to get to, just north of the City of Edinburgh, and served by myriad cheap and regular bus services. The place I use has a bus stop right outside, where every 10 minutes, a bus takes you into the city centre in just 20 minutes. There’s your accommodation sorted. Next question: How long should I stay? It’s a fair question. One thing is for absolutely certain, unless you have a bottomless bank account, and a time machine or an army of clones, you will undoubtedly leave without having seen the vast majority of what you wanted to see. So just plan to stay as long as you want your trip to last. I usually arrive early afternoon on a Friday and leave mid-afternoon on the following Monday. This year, I may go up on the Thursday. Next question: How much planning should I do? The first year, I planned everything right down to the last minute. Every show booked, and tickets purchased in advance. This gave us a number of problems: I had no idea just how big the festival was, and so how long it took to get between venues. We ended up running between shows on at least couple of occasions. I didn’t really factor in time for some evening meals (eating is Future OfClayton’s problem, obviously!) We didn’t have the opportunity to explore The Free Fringe – a sort of shadow Festival that operates on a ‘just turn up and pay what you think it was worth’ basis. This tends to be much cheaper than the main Fringe. You tend to become aware of good shows while you’re there. Bill-postings, talking to people in pubs, leaflets, that kind of thing. You don’t get the opportunity to use the half-price ticket booths. A good number of shows will release half price tickets on the morning of the show (if they have any left) There was little chance to stop and watch the many, many excellent street entertainers. We got to see a lot of shows, which meant we spent more money. Last year, I really did just turn up and did no planning whatsoever. This meant many of the shows we decided to see were sold out. So the key is to plan a few, but leave plenty of time to just spontaneously drop onto shows, especially the Free Fringe and the street entertainers, or shows where you see a poster and think – “ooh, that looks good”. On the subject of leaflets, when someone hands you a leaflet, take it and read it. It’s an excellent way of happening on a show that you didn’t know about. Quite often the person handing out the leaflets will be one of the artistes themselves, so they’re well worth getting into a conversation with. Meals? Obviously, you’re gonna need to eat out to a degree, and if you drop into a restaurant every night, then your cash will dwindle quickly. Here are my tips: We tend to choose accommodation where no breakfast is provided. That way, we can provide my own breakfast, and so save a bit there. We take a picnic lunch into the city, and eat it in one of Edinburgh’s many excellent public parks. I’ll recommend a couple of very good value eateries: The Mosque Kitchen (Corner of Nicholson Street and Nicholson Place) This is a remarkable place. It is exactly what it says it is – or started out that way; purely to serve a cheap meal of chicken and rice to those going to Friday Prayers. After 9/11, it threw open its doors to anyone and everyone. Now, you queue up, get a dirt cheap curry in a box, and sit at large tables with everyone else to eat it. It is located very close to many of the Fringe’s big venues, including The Gilded Balloon, Assembly George Square, The Pleasance Dome and the Udderbelly. Ali Bongo’s Cafe & Bistro (Teviot Place, opposite Bristo Square) Also conveniently located near the Udderbelly, Pleasance Dome and Gilded Balloon, this serves good Eastern Mediterranean cuisine at reasonable prices. It is far better than it looks from the outside, which has the added advantage of meaning you can usually get a table (often a problem during the Fringe) Drinks? Sorry, but beer is expensive in Edinburgh, especially at the big Fringe venues. However, the atmosphere in those big outdoor bars tends to be very enjoyable, especially on a warm, cloudless night. The Pleasance Courtyard, the Udderbelly, or the Gilded Balloon are the best. Either drink less, or account for the cost. How do I find my way around? This is a fair question, as the Fringe covers a large area of the city. If you have a Smartphone, they release an app for that year’s Fringe a few months in advance. This is by far the best way. I suppose my last piece of advice is, don’t fail to go just because you don’t really know what you’ll do when you get there. Once you’re in Edinburgh during the Festival Fringe, it will draw you lovingly in, surround you, and look after you. You WILL have a great time.

Oh - you mean the Constantinople Hippodriome.

Would it be Prima Dens?

My Honda Whateveritis has a rear spoiler. You could have a go in that if you wanted.

The relationship between a society's health and its wealth are very complex. We're all living longer, and it's widely believed this is due to improved standards of healthcare made possible by a wealthier society. Is that the end of the story? Of course not. We also eat and drink more, making us far more overweight than previous generations. If you look at the post WW2 populations, they were all very poor, with very little food about the place and loads of manual work to do. Pre-NHS and very poor, yet very healthy (apart from too many ciggies). Yet there are plenty of counter examples of populations where poverty is causing shortened lifespans. The relationship between wealth and tax levels is also complex. A higher nett income after tax is no indicator of what we usually think of as 'wealth'. Availability of goods/housing/services, inflation, social infrastructure, crime, etc. all impact on how wealthy we feel, whether or not we have money in our pocket. Lastly, we're all human beings, so we never feel 'wealthy'. We percieve the world in relative terms, so we only ever feel 'wealthier' or 'less wealthy' than other individuals, other countries, or ourselves last year/next year. I think we've now reached consensus that this study is b*ll*cks.

I think they'll replace the whole bunch of 'em. The show was getting a bit tired, anyway, and it'd be nice to see some different ways of doing it. I'd like to see some folk from totally left field. Chris Evans is an obvious choice, but everyone knows him. What kind of job would (for example) Frankie Boyle do? The bleep machine would be red hot as he battled his Morris Minor through dense, sub-Saharan undergrowth (maybe chased by Dara Ó Briain in Del-Boy's Reliant Robin, and Katie Hopkins in a VW Camper). A woman on Top Gear? I know! I'll go and wash my mouth out with soap. In fairness, though, she IS massively racist.

For reasons I won’t go into, Hiking-Hols-R-Us will be sending me to a place called Sestri Levante (just south of Genoa, Italy), later this year, and it’s quite possible I just might get some free time. Does anyone know of any Roman stuff round there that’s worth seeing? Or know of somewhere i can look to find out?

Don't get too hung up on the rear ditch. (NB It's technically known as 'The Vallum' for reasons I won't go into here). It was not part of the original wall design, but added some years later. it isn't a ditch in the classic sense, and is certainly not a mirror to the northern ditch (a traditional V shape with ankle breaker in the bottom). In fact, in the central section, it runs almost a kilometer south of the curtain wall. There has been plenty of speculation why it exists at all, but no answers. It's an easy trap to fall into to think of the wall as serving the same purpose as a city- or fort wall, and then try to draw parallels based on the function they served. Limes, and especially Hadrian's Wall, did not serve the same function.

You'd be surprised how many Brits are unemployed and complain about Polish neighbours, as well.

Surely there's a German speaking equivalent of Hyderabad? . . . . The former East Germany? I may be on the cusp of crossing some kind of line there. No offence meant to anyone either in Hyderabad or the former East germany.

Hi Doc. Really good to see you back . . . and please send Mrs OfClayton and my best to Mr OfLove. Someone on a panel show over here said Top Gear could never work outside the BBC, because all the expensive cars they slagged off would be being featured in the ad break . . . until the manufacturers realised and pulled the advertising. But anyway, I can put your mind at rest. The UK has an abundance of over-opiniated middle-aged men to fill Mr Clarkson's boots.

Just to expand on my postulation. The turf part of the turf wall was designed to be a barrier in its own right. Any woodwork placed on top of that would have been for the purposes of protecting soldiers patrolling atop the wall (and not to add to the invulnerability of the rampart itself.) There is negligible evidence of any wall-top patrolling taking place, and certainly it's difficult to find any value that such patrolling would add. As I mentioned, the Lunt guys blamed rabbits for their turf rampart reduction. Someone from Vidolanda once told me (before I spoke to Lunt) they'd lost half a metre in 25 years. At the time, I assumed it was due to drying out, rotting of vegetation, spread, and general settling that must happen with turf ramparts. However, from the photos posted by Onosander, it's apparent that rabbits are present at Vindolanda, and so they are surely to blame there. To touch on the funding question at The Vindolanda Trust. They will need funding for many years to come, and use the vast majority of funding for further archaeological excavation. They've still got many decades of digging to do at Vindolanda itself, and even when they've finished that, they also own the largely untouched Hadrian's Wall/Stanegate fort of Magnis. It's my impression that funding isn't a huge issue for them at the moment, but obviously the more they get, the faster they can dig.

For completeness' sake, I should point out that English is just one of the languages traditionally spoken in 'Britain'. The other widely spoken language is Welsh, which stills owes a lot to Latin (or Llattinn, which is no doubt Welsh for Latin - joke.) The same could be said of Cornish (no longer spoken as a native language) and Scottish Gaelic (rarely spoken as a native language, if ever). presumably, this is due to the westward displacement of the Roman-influenced Celtic natives by Anglo-Saxon invaders.

I spoke to the guys at Lunt Roman Fort, who had a smilar issue with turf rampart 'sinkage'. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Lunt_fort_baginton.JPG Unlike Hadrian's turf wall, in a fort context, the wooden pallisades would clearly be needed, and Lunt seem to be sidestepping the sinkage problem using planking. They deliberately didn't fix the problem, as an experiment to see how the ramparts would age. Not sure what the value of that experiment is, given the contemporary presesnce of rabbits. (Which they blamed as the main culprits, and weren't present in Roman times - allegedly) If I were a betting man, I would say that there were no wooden installations of any kind on top of the turf walls. That is a very controversial, but far from unique, theory. Unlike the stone wall, there is evidence of provision of access to the top of the turf wall. I am happy to expand on that evidence, if requested. I will ask Vindolanda next time I'm there (not this year, sadly), but I suspect the original build was an archaeological experiment, rather than an ongoing visitor reconstruction, and they weren't prepared to spend money on upkeep once it was complete. It is totally falling down now.

Keep this under your hat. There are a number of political parties that would peddle this as scientific proof that ordinary citizens thrive in a low tax economy, conveniently ignoring JK Galbraith's slightly more contemporary works.

Hello, and welcome to my blog. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin. The law of unintended consequences I was listening to Nigel Farage being interviewed on the radio this morning (the picture isn't him, by the way). For those who don’t know him, he’s the leader of a New-Kid-On-The-Block-Far-Right-We’re-Not-Racist-But-We-Have-To-Keep-Saying-We’re-Not-Racist political party in the UK. Now you won’t be surprised to learn that I don’t agree with very much he says. However, this morning I found myself agreeing with him. He has an aspiration to reduce immigration to the UK, and the figure that’s being bandied about is 50,000 per annum. He was being a little evasive when pressed about that target though, saying it was more of an aspiration than a hard and fast target to which UKIP should be held if ever they (God forbid!) get into power. I know what he meant though, he sees it as being more of a strategy, something that would influence the way they would govern. It would be the ‘spirit’ of what they do rather than some we-must-reach-50,000-at-all-costs-no-matter-how-we-do-it goal. He didn’t want this target to stop the ‘right’ people immigrating. This is fair enough. I don’t like hard-and-fast targets, because they tend to change the motivation of people. If you phone an IT support desk (for example) with a problem, sometimes you get the impression the operator is motivated to close your call, rather than provide the help you need. That’s because he or she is some poor sap working in a Hyderbad call centre, and how much money he gets to spend on feeding his or her family is directly dependant on how many calls he closes, rather than how much help he provides. I would be the same, and so would you. And these kinds of targets have caused as much harm as good within the National Health Service for exactly that reason. Staff are motivated to meet the targets, rather than being motivated to care and cure. My heart bleeds for them Mr Farage went on to say that he didn’t want to set a target because people are bored with them. That’s where I stopped agreeing with him. I’m frustrated by targets, but not bored. Go on, ask me what people ARE bored by. I’ll tell you. It’s just how often you hear rich people moaning about how bloody awful it is to be rich. Let me quote talented singer/songwriter Adele, talking about tax: "I'm mortified to have to pay 50%! I use the NHS, I can't use public transport any more. Trains are always late, most state schools are shit, and I've gotta give you, like, four million quid – are you having a laugh? When I got my tax bill in from [my album] 19, I was ready to go and buy a gun and randomly open fire." Let’s ignore the last phrase and hope it isn’t an early sign of a major psychotic episode on her part. Instead, let’s do the maths (translation for US readers: let’s do the math.) She had to pay 50% tax, and this totalled £4,000,000. Let me get may calculator out, so she had . . . clickety-click-click . . . £8,000,000 to start off with. (Concentrate; I know there are a lot of zeroes going on here, but bear with it). So let me just work out what she’s left with to spend . . . . erm . . . oh yes, £4,000,000. Is that all? I’m so sorry I doubted you, Adele. Your life must be really shit! Maybe we can have a whip-round for you. I’ll tell you what, I don’t pay much in the way of tax. Wanna swap incomes? But it’s the irony of what she’s saying that must be lost on her. Maybe if people like her started doing their bit for the society that made them multi-millionaires in the first place, the state schools would be a bit less shit. The other main gripe you’ll hear from rich people is “I may have lots of money, but I work hard for it”. It’s apparent to me that this statement is rarely, if ever, true – the more people earn, the less hard they work. What people are doing when they say this, is mistaking the concept of “working hard” for that of “working long hours”. The people who pick the vegetables that find their way on to your dinner plate? They work hard. A&E nurses work hard. Coal miners work hard. Sitting in an office on the top floor of a Canary Wharf tower holding a teleconference with the New York office until 10:00pm is unwelcome, inconvenient and irritating. It may even be stressful. Though, if you’re stressed by the prospect of losing your job and having to live out your life on what miserable few million pounds you can eke out of your stock portfolio, then you’re not seeing the bigger picture. My heart bleeds for you.

Good work on the painting, though the full title is "The Romans Cause a Wall to be Built for the Protection of the South". A typically over-verbose William Bell Scott title. Do please PM me while I desperately try and think of a prize. I'm not sure quite where you're thinking about wooden-wall-wize. All I can think of is the recreation of the turf wall at Vindolanda. This was built in the 70s, and to my knowledge hasn't been repaired since, Not a realistic archeological experiment, given the presence of rabbits in the UK that weren't (arguably) there in 122AD. The turf wall should have been a defence in and of itself, but it has been argued that it may have had a wooden pallisade along the top for patrolling. I won't go into the various arguments for and against that here. I don't go to Vindolanda very often, but I know the turf wall has lost over half a metre in height since it was built, so I imagine gaps have appeared beneth the pallisade. Do you think that's what you meant? If not, do you have a photo or some such i can have a look at? The wall itself was very much a cowboy job. Very poor quality. I once had a job in an Engineers' Stores. The odd-job man was asked to brick up a hatch and, not being a skilled brickie, made a total mess of it, with no brick ending up parallel to any other, or indeed perpendicular to the force of gravity. So, he rendered it, got a plank of wood, and dragged his thumb along it in the wet plaster to create a perfect brickwork effect. he then painted it white. It looked pretty convincing in the end. I often think that's what was happening with the plaster they found at Wallsend. For completeness, I will say that there's no evidence of render anywhere else along the wall.

Can I recomend a visit to Fort George in Niagara-on-the-Lake, if you're ever visiting Niagara Falls. Easy to get to by bus. There's also Old Fort Niagara on the US side, but I haven't been, so can't give a recomendation.