Well. It's been a bloody long while, hasn't it? After our joyous 'Drawing on the Past' conference in late 2018 (about which I see I did not blog - why not?!), much of 2019 was spent rigorously preparing the book proposal for an edited volume in Palgrave's 'Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels' series, which to our collective delight will be finally coming out in September as simply Comics and Archaeology. Massive thanks to our contributor John Swogger for allowing us to use a panel from his chapter 7 chapter-as-a-comic as the beautiful cover image. Between getting the contract and setting a deadline for receiving first drafts of 1 April 2020, so much happened between the pandemic and ill health that I don't even know where to start. In summary, though, thanks to my wonderful co-editors Zena (Kamash, RHUL) and Katy (Soar, Winchester) we managed to carry the volume through to completion, but I wasn't in a position to advance any other projects. Sort of on-the-go or fairly well conceived are:

• I have not yet looked into following up on my text-mining idea (nor checked whether anyone else has advanced this in the mean time) but I'm still really interested in how one could set something up (& the results it would generate). Also still dead chuffed that this post was one of Neville Morley's 'best blog posts of 2017', because I really rate him, and also his wee book Classics: Why it matters (you can get that here and anywhere for under £10).
  
• The journal article draft of my 'War with Words' conference talk is still languishing at about 90% completeness.
• I've not yet worked out whether I want to do anything with my thesis in terms of turning it into a book, or separating some bits of it out as journal articles. Chapter 1 came out as the Wily Wetlands chapter in Landscapes of Dread (ed. D. Felton) in 2018, but I've not taken any of the rest of it forward. The Germania chapter in particular, I think, could end up being something fun if reviewed. Excitingly, though, I had an enjoyable email exchange in 2020 about my discussion of the Ampsivarii passage in Annals 13 with somebody who was setting up a PhD project (no idea whether that ever emerged, but still exciting), and somebody's Master's thesis at Brandeis ('Provincial Identities in the First-Century Roman Empire: Imperial Literature and Discourses of Division and Integration') engaged with my PhD thesis this very year of our Lord 2022. So! People do occasionally read these things, which is heartening.
  
• My investigation of my Flemish maternal grandfather's history textbooks from secondary school, printed in the 1930s as he'd have been in secondary in the early 1940s (born in 1927), and how they frame Roman history with regard to the history and nationhood of Belgium (via Caesar's Belgae), hasn't advanced at all. I would quote from it the bit that piqued my interest, but they're wrapped up in a jiffy bag at the moment and waiting to be despatched to the lovely Dan Smernicki (check out his beautifully handbound notebooks for sale here) who will employ his formidable book-binding skills in shoring up their cheap and crumbling bindings.
  
• My thesis should have had a lot more Caesar in it, as pointed out by my lovely external examiner Diana Spencer at Birmingham (who gave me the best annotated thesis copy back), and indeed a lot of Caesar had to be cut from it before submission. I really want to do something Caesar-based about the Gauls and space and stuff, though whether it's to improve the bits of the thesis that could benefit from Caesaring or whether it would be a standalone thing remains to be seen.
  

I've just opened my 'Ideas' Word doc (last accessed 13 July 2017, for shame) and the rest of what is in there is a bit pants. So I won't pursue any of those. Funny what a bit of distance can do.

Anyhow, that's where we're at. I must see about carving out some time for some of this. I definitely still like thinking, and exploring new ground, but whether I'm up to bouts of Bodleian and commentaries and going down rabbit holes such as Festus as I did for the thesis, on top of the day job, is a bit of a question mark for now. Watch this space...?