New Year

I can't believe that the New Year is almost upon us.

Well, the new university teaching year, at least. It's not as much fun as the real New Year - fewer fireworks - but it's still quite exciting. And terrifying.

Soon the streets of Durham City, shaken from their summer hibernation, will be swarming with students new and old, the former recognisable by their bewildered looks as they wander the twisting streets of the Peninsula in forlorn attempts to locate lecture halls and/or colleges and/or bars. Amidst all this you might see harried lecturers rushing about with faces scarcely less bewildered, forlornly attempting to locate lecture halls and/or offices and/or pubs.

As the kid says at the end of Terminator: viene la tormenta.

On Saturday I drove out to Stanhope, a merry little town in the Pennines, and spent a solitary morning up in the hills. It's late enough in the year that the moors have a touch of autumn about them, but not so late that it feels bleak. The ground was soft to walk on, the heather still warmed by a purple hue. It was good to have some calm before the storm.

Strange to think that four years have passed since I arrived in Durham. It was meant to be only a temporary teaching post. Mind you, that was fine by me at the time. I'd just finished a PhD, which involved living in poverty through my 20s. I think the most extravagant thing I bought during that decade was a bread maker.

Three whole years of employment? Seriously?

To a post-doc, a three-year post is like gold dust. I also figured it would give me a chance to decide if the whole academia lark was really what I wanted to do.

My other career option, if 'option' is even the right word, was writing novels. The one good thing about seriously wanting to be a novelist is that it makes something like medieval history look like a rational career choice. Something to fall back on.

As it turned out, the temporary job became a permanent one, and the left-field plan to get a book on the shelves of Waterstones also worked out. Both happened last year, within three months of each other. It was a year of big changes, good and bad.

Of course, this means that I now I basically have two full-time jobs. This is why the blog got so quiet over the summer, as I buried my head in teaching prep and redrafting the second novel. Luckily there was a lot of crossover between the two.

I don't want to say too much about the second novel before it hits the shelves next year, but it's epic. Truly epic. For all the hard work it's been, I really, really love how it's shaping up, and I can't wait for it to get out into the world.

Ruins of the imperial palace, on the Palatine Hill in Rome

In the meantime, there's the Durham Book Festival coming up next month, which is going to be awesome. On October 12 I'm on a panel with the classicist Peter Jones, author of Veni, Vidi, Vici - should be fun!

Back in Rome

Has it really been twelve years since the last (and first) time I was in Rome?

Well, to be accurate it’s been twelve and a half years. My first day in Rome turned out to be a day to remember, wherever you happened to be – September 11, 2001. I was a naïve 21-year-old backpacker who had just interrailed his way through Paris, Marseilles, Nice, and Pisa, and had arrived in Rome without thinking to book accommodation in advance.

The city’s youth hostels were fully booked, and I didn’t have the cash for a hotel room, so my 9/11 was spent frantically heading from one tourist office to the next, studying my hopelessly inadequate Rough Guide map to work out where places were, darting between public phones (no mobile in those days), and fumbling with loose change to call pensiones that inevitably turned out to be fully booked as well.

Every time I entered a tourist office, all I saw on the TV was the image of the Twin Towers. Tourists were staring at the screen in that strange suspension of horror and belief we all felt that day. As evening drew on and the tourist offices closed, I had the added fear that I might end up sleeping that night on a bench in Termini Station.

Eventually, through sheer luck, I ended up staying in the spare room of an old Italian lady who spent the whole evening in front of her TV, watching the news coverage from New York. She spoke no English, and I spoke no Italian, not that it mattered. ‘Mammia mia,’ she muttered, over and over again, shaking her head.

Thankfully my second arrival in Rome has been less eventful, and this time I’ve even got a place to stay for a week. I’ve also come properly equipped for some hard-core Roman sightseeing.

• Filippo Coarelli, Rome and Environs: An Archaeological Guide (2007)
• Amanda Claridge, Rome: An Oxford Archaeological Guide, 2nd edn (2010)
• John Beckwith, Early Christian and Byzantine Art, 2nd edn (1979)

Together, these books offer an unbeatable guide to Classical and Late Antique Rome. They point the reader towards some lesser-known sites, as well as revealing the more arcane secrets of the necessary tourist traps of the Colisseum, Forum, and so on.

Needless to say, there’ll be some intense (and overdue!) posting on this blog over the coming days, as I explore ancient Rome to a depth I’ve been dreaming of for years... please subscribe to the mailing list above, to make sure you don't miss a post!