February Roundup
Hello and welcome to this highlight reel of my February. I hope you had a good month (Happy Leap Year!). Anyway, that's enough pleasantries; let's move onto what I've been up to! It's been a month of exciting days and evenings out, interspersed with seeing friends - and plenty of writing!
To start the month, I had an amazing concert experience at Concorde 2 in Brighton. To Kill a King is a band I remember really getting into over the countless hours dedicated to GCSE art. It was fantastic to hear them play through their first album for its ten year anniversary - my first time seeing them live, and the first time I was by the barrier at a concert. The support band, Fours, was incredible, and half of Bastille were there too! It was perhaps the best, most-connected music experience I've had. Everyone was singing along, and I got to tell the band afterwards what their music meant to me.
A few days later I was back on the history-research/education train, firstly with an online talk by Chris Stringer about the puzzles in human evolution, the other hominids that once roamed the Earth alongside us sapiens. It was hosted by Creswell Crags - the rock art site I visited last year, and will be writing about soon!
But that was only the tip of the history-research/education iceberg. (I'm going to keep using the hyphen and slash combo despite not being that fond of it.) This year I've joined the British Museum's membership, which not only means more online talks like one on mystery cults or Mesopotamian dreams, but free access to the exhibitions within the museum.
So, I had a very full day, not only visiting the Legion exhibition on the Roman Army, but another exhibition about the history of Myanmar, as well as now one-hundred percent-ing the museum, having seen every room and soaked up/photographed everything I could.
The Legion exhibition was the real highlight, though, with artefacts from all over assembled in one place, so many small finds telling a story, as well as plenty of reliefs.
That day, however, I didn't just visit the museum. Six hours and six hundred photos later, I made my way to Conway Hall in Holborn to attend a Darwin Day Humanist talk on 'Humanity's Superpower'.
Alice Roberts - who I know mainly from Digging for Britain, and for her many books on my shelf, including fiction set in prehistory like elements of mine - hosted the talk by Dr. Rebecca Wragg Sykes. It was a mixture of ancient, 19th century and her own family history, a really well-crafted hour explanation of our differences from Neanderthals, but really our similarities with every other living thing, with some paradigm-shifting insights for me on the 'spread' of prehistoric art.
I was back in London later this month for a day out with the family to Greenwich. We walked around the park, popped in the Maritime Museum, walked through the Naval College and along the Thames to the nearby bookshops and market. We also walked across Blackheath to look at some more books there, but on the way I popped by the site of the Roman temple in Greenwich park, a little mound with a sign where the complex of buildings on the road leaving London once was. I've written about the temple already on my empire-spanning gem journey short story but it was nice to revisit and try and imagine the view two-thousand years ago, when there were no skyscrapers beyond the trees.
I liked the back-to-back treat days of Pancake Day and Valentine's Day this month - well done, calendar.
That photo's actually looking back from the barrier to the tiers of Koko in Camden. Last week, I went to a Poppy concert - she's an artist that I first found through reactions to her artsy content on YouTube. It was definitely a stimulating experience (perhaps overly so); it was the first time I'd been standing so close to such a noise and lightshow. It was amazing though to attend her first UK tour as I'd been witnessing her musical evolution from afar since 2016.
The London experiences continued earlier this week, with a full day out with the family. First, was a visit to Tate Modern for a general look around but specifically to see Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms. I thought there'd be more than two, but I enjoyed the insight into her mind and process, and the two rooms that were there were amazing experiences.
Next, we headed to St. Pauls. I didn't know how nice it was inside - all the gold and mosaics were more like Italian sites I've visited, and being up there in the whispering gallery was great. Then we went higher.
Hopefully you can find the landmarks mentioned above, but yes, many spiralling steps later there were views of London all around, really showing the size of the city to the horizon.
Above is the Golden Hinde, well worth the £6 to pop in on the walk from London Bridge to any of the sites I've just talked about. After walking by so many times, it was nice to finally see the interior (though it involved a lot of crouching). Still, the museum aspects were great, but it was extra special for me as I'm planning to use the boat in an upcoming short story, which brings me to...
Writing Update
Throughout the month I've been working away on the gem story, which is now heading into Rome. I've written all about Portus, its warehouses, monuments and large hexagonal basin, and I've been researching Rome through books and 3d reconstructions, ready to launch into this turning point for the gem's journey.
I've also been working on another project that I actually have a deadline for! And I've entered six competitions over the month, two of which are still open, in case any of you readers feel like entering.
The Edinburgh Short Story Award is open until midnight tonight!
And the Writers of the Future Contest is for sci-fi/fantasy stories up to 17,000 words and open until March 31st.
This month's books
This segment showcases the new additions to my research and fiction collections.
That Self-Same Metal is historical fantasy (related to the Globe in the view from St. Paul's golden gallery a few photos ago), a book I'm looking forward to reading as its author is such a lovely person online. Brittany and her husband recently talked more about the structure of the book with interludes across London - similar to what I'm trying to do with my current novel's interludes. The author couple's Inkbottle podcast recently made a return and I'd really recommend listening: Inkbottle Podcast on Apple Podcasts
Neil Gaiman's retelling of Norse mythology should be a good read to help inspire a third of my next novel, as will that old English Heritage book.
It's the sad end of some of these stories, but the beginnings of the comic adaptation of the amazing Thrawn Alliances novel. It's one of my most re-read Star Wars novels so to see it all visualised will be an amazing treat...
Thank you so much for reading. I'm still mulling over opening up this newsletter again for some different sorts of emails. There's even more exciting things coming up this year than I had confirmed in January, so I may write more about those, as well as actually writing some essays about my pop culture and historical interests - maybe combining the two. You'll be the first to know, of course!
Please share this with your friends and family and ask them to subscribe - that would mean the world to me as I do love sharing my various exploits with you all, and would treasure having more people with me on my writing (and life) journey!
Cheers,
Harvey