It's also, in my experience, an online phenomenon - everyone of a certain age I talk about what it has been like for my generation in person has enormous sympathy/can barely believe what it's like now

I had gone several months without thinking about the Holiday Special, damn you

It doesn't matter! Write a good story and people will enjoy and remember it! Write a bad one and no one will! (Funnily enough, this process is happening with Tolkien's works where the books and the original trilogy are fully embedded, while neither the Hobbit trilogy nor Amazon's show are sticking)

I want these people to imagine that they're saying "But your story doesn't align perfectly with the canon of Arthurian legend" to any of the last c.800 years of writing in that world

And hence why it is no.1 on my recommendations for anyone going to the Peloponnese with a car

It has everything, really - enough uncovered to give you a sense of the whole city, but still fading into farmland where you catch glimpses of the odd carved stone, the magnificent wall circuit, the landscape with Ithome high above, and all from the period which often gets ignored in Greece.

Messene is such a wonderful site, and inevitably (and happily) you share it with about 2 other people

Imagining an Anchorman-esque fight between the different groups

"And you will hear extracts of all them this evening at the event people are calling the dawn of a new cultural moment, indeed a new movement"

(These readings end after 4 events held at 5 locations, leaving a trace only in a faintly depressing instagram profile with under 200 followers and 6 posts)

That's right

*raises hand* but can I put them all on the back of giant space wolves called Thunderwolves?

Campaign to give former PMs their proper earldoms

Putin sending a generation of young Russians to die, where the demographics are already dire

(Mirko Canevaro of Edinburgh gave an excellent paper on how they tangle themselves up constantly in such contradictions inherent in slave societies such as this a couple of days ago - the whole conference would have interested you I think turinhumanitiesprogramme.fondazione1563.it/research-pro...)

"Fun" fact which definitely won't lead to terrible discourse as people misread it: this is similar to the arguments made in ancient Athenian legal thought about why you shouldn't mistreat your slaves as they tried to thread the needle between "these are people" and "legally, they are objects"

These days the Internet has mostly abolished this tradition, except in Turkey, where finding out which museums and sites are open is part of the adventure

Long, hot walks through hill towns to discovern signs on churches and galleries reading "chiuso per restauro" were an important part of my childhood

One of the loadbearing tweets of the last decade