Unfamiliar with the quaint customs of the south-east, when I first read the title of this monograph I assumed it had been written for the demented. Discrete enquiries subsequently revealed it’s actually based on the local saying that if you’re born to the east of the river Medway you’re a ‘Kentish Man,’ and west of the river you’re a ‘Man of Kent.’ Read more
Like Vincent Vega in the opening scene of Pulp Fiction, describing to Jules Winnfield why he digs Europe, what has struck me most about working as an archaeologist in Britain and Ireland are the ‘little differences.’ Not just the differences in terms of the sites or artefacts that I actually found, but also the differences in how the archaeology is actually dug. Example: compared to the long-handled Irish shovel, the British shovel has a short handle barely three feet long, and they swear that anything different would break their backs. And in Ireland the archaeology cops (council archaeologists) can’t tell you what to do. Read more
‘Shoot for the stars, and you might hit the moon,’ the kindly teachers used to tell me whenever I wanted to do anything more complicated than tie my own shoelaces, and I’m sure they said the same thing to Louis Armstrong when he said he wanted to walk on the moon. Read more
