Ruth Downie

…but this one made me laugh: http://www.aroundmd.com/whitechristmas/

There are celebrations at Downie Towers tonight as one of the editors has just OK’d the final changes to Book 3 and it won’t return here until next year, when the copy editors have spotted all the things the rest of us missed.

Tonight’s festivities will take the form of a glass of chilled white wine, followed by an assault on the mountain of ironing that we have been moving from room to room for the last three weeks in the vain hope of losing it.

I’ve just spent the last two days in bed surrounded by a chaos of medicines, tissues, drinks, phone and laptop wires and a happy cat who doesn’t usually have someone to sleep on during the day. All of which has led me to realise just how divorced from real life fiction is. When did you last read a story where a major character had the flu?

Admittedly it’s hard to get involved in exciting action when your legs are made of jelly and your brain has turned to blancmange…  It’s not easy to write blog posts either. Maybe flu’s absence from fiction indicates that it’s really not very interesting to anyone else.

Ah. Sorry about that, then. I’ll go back to bed now.

One of the problems with writing about ancient Britons is knowing what to call them. There’s a distinct shortage of names in the surviving record, and some of the ones we have simply don’t work for twenty-first century readers. I’m hoping never to be desperate enough to use ‘Enemnogenus’.*  Maybe they  used abbreviations when they spoke to each other? Or maybe conversation was slower in the Iron Age?

Anyway, it’s a joy to run across a name that’s relatively simple and doesn’t sound ridiculous. Welcome, Rianorix. Anyone who’s read ‘Ruso and the Demented Doctor’ (‘Terra Incognita’) will hopefully remember him as a local with an attitude problem. His name came from a reference book, but last weekend he and I finally met – or at least, we came as close as we ever will.

Rianorix’s tombstone is in the Senhouse Museum at Maryport, on the Cumbrian coast. It nearly wasn’t, having been ‘borrowed’ from the collection while it was in storage, but honesty prevailed and now it sits near a collection of grand Roman altars. It’s a simple and badly battered slab with uneven lettering bearing the words, ‘Rianorix vixit annos…’  Tantalisingly, the rest of the line is illegible.

The tribute was raised by an unknown mourner who evidently spoke Latin. It rests amidst the work of professional stonemasons: a silent reminder of the people who lived in Britain before, and after, the Roman army.

The fort at Maryport was part of a chain the Army built to keep an eye on the dangerous Northerners, lest they decide to sneak around the western edge of Hadrian’s Wall. This, from the museum watchtower, is their view across the Solway Firth to what’s now Scotland:

You'll never spot the marauders if you stand there reading the information panel

*’Taximagulus’ won’t be appearing anywhere soon, either.

A note today from the German translators asking when the next book will arrive (soon, really!)  reminded me to check on what had happened to Book 2, and here it is.

The translators are great: they’re very keen to get the details right and we have frequent email exchanges to clarify exactly what I meant by certain things. This has been known to reveal that I’m not sure myself…

Hard to know where to start this post, and even as I type, a little voice is whispering over my shoulder, ‘Deadline! You should be working!’

Dearest editors, should you chance to read this – I WILL be working in just a few minutes.

Meanwhile, it’s a delight to be able to stop and draw breath. It seems to be one of the rules of this game (or maybe I’m just very disorganised) that the fun things you get to do as a writer all happen at a time when you’re supposed to be sitting at home hunched over a hot computer. This is the first day for weeks when there’s been absolutely nothing in the diary apart from ‘deadline -15′. I’m sadly excited by the prospect of a day drinking coffee, chewing gum and tapping out deathless prose only to delete it ten minutes later.

One or two edited highlights of the last few weeks:

New Discovery Number One – Those beautiful timbered buildings in the middle of Chester (see the Photo Gallery) are just as amazing inside. After the chairs were cleared away I snatched a couple of pics inside Bishop Lloyd’s Palace, where Dug and I met a roomful of lovely people as part of the Chester Literature Festival. It’s in Watergate Street – the route Ruso would have taken down to the jetty in search of missing furniture, housekeepers, etc.

I’d like to blame the Bishop for the luggage spoiling the photo, but it’s mine. Here’s one looking the other way:

New Discovery Number Two – the context that the traditional photos of Chesters bath house (on Hadrian’s Wall) don’t show you. This is the archaeology shot that appears in all the books:

Below is the picture you don’t see, showing the scenery. As I’ve said before, those Romans knew how to pick a location.

Old haunt number one is below -  the Ilfracombe coastline.

Old haunt number two was Housesteads Fort on Hadrian’s Wall. The idea for the Ruso books began to germinate after seeing a caption there which read,

“Roman soldiers were not allowed to marry, but they were allowed to have relationships with local women.”

The caption’s not on display now but the model soldier is still on duty:

Is it just me, or does anyone else wonder why the local women would want to bother?

Apologies to the nice people I met at Guildford Book Festival today – the address I gave for Dr. Martin Weaver’s website (where you can see the other reconstructions of Dug) was WRONG. It should be www.mweaver.co.uk. Hope that didn’t cause too much confusion!

UPDATE, January 2009 – the photos of Dug’s “brothers” are no longer on the site but if you want to make a reconstruction for yourself, there are details of the next course Martin will be running at Madingley Hall.

Well we didn’t do too much walking, but I am now in a position to write the definitive guide to Hadrian’s Wall Teashops.

Hadrian’s been busy lately. He’s had a hotel in the village of Wall for years, but now he’s been starring in an exhibition at the British Museum whilst finding time to organise a footpath, tarmac his own Cycle Trail, set up a bus service and bake biscuits for the tourist shops. All of this is marvellous for those of us who want easy access and good facilities – altho’ in places he’s been the victim of his own success, and his footpath looks more like the scene in ‘Dances with Wolves’ where Kevin Costner surveys the brown swathe cut across the prairie by herds of migrating buffalo.

Speaking of Kevin Costner, we paid our usual homage at Sycamore Gap, famously used as a location in ‘Robin Hood Prince of Thieves’. A photo will appear somewhere here eventually. This was the film in which the world discovered that Robin could walk from Dover to Hadrian’s Wall in an afternoon – a feat which surpassed even the Roman Army. Presumably there were no tempting teashops on the way.

Off to visit Guildford Book Festival tomorrow, then Chester Literature Festival on Thursday. Details are on the diary page. If you’re around, please come and say hello.

I should really be stuffing things into a rucksack, but it’s much more fun to play with computers. Tomorrow three friends and I set off for a reprise of the first walking trip we ever did together: the central section of Hadrian’s Wall.* The good folks who live there have now installed a footpath all the way, so there’ll be no more dicing with death and fast cars along the sections where the paths used to run out.

There have been other changes over the last 14 years. Gone are the pre-walk planning meetings, the warnings from our families to ‘be careful’ (of what?)  and the intense discussions about whether or not to take a hairdryer (yes, this is an all-female expedition). Gone is the grim determination to carry ALL our stuff with us from one stop to the next. It seems that one’s willpower decreases over time, in inverse proportion to one’s ability to sniff out teashops.

Photos, should there be any in which we all look suitably windswept, will appear here in due course.

(*if either of the editors is reading this,  you should know that I WILL be working on the amendments to book 3 in the evenings…)

Here are the remains of the Roman fort in Ilkley, Yorkshire

….and now you see quite a lot of the rest of it:

… re-used by medieval builders and currently housing the local Museum and Art Gallery.  It was a delight to meet many of the Friends of the Manor House last week. They were running an event in conjunction with the Ilkley Literature Festival.

In fact the whole town was getting in the mood – here’s a photo which doesn’t do justice to the display in the window of Betty’s Tea Shop:

It was a fun evening, due in no small part to the hard work of Mary Bentham, the Education Officer at the museum, who’s realised that the secret of drawing an audience is to offer food and wine in the ticket price. Here are some of the wonderful Roman snacks she created, based on recipes from Apicius and Cato:

I’d never been to Ilkley before, but it’s well worth a visit. The Romans knew how to pick a good site. Looking north-east from the fort they would have seen this:

…and looking south, they had a fine view of the famous Ilkley Moor:

Rock art stretching way back before the Romans has been found up on the moors. A short walk up there (certainly not without a hat, it was cold) revealed that the locals are continuing this fine tradition:

although somebody ought to tell Ronaldo and Jason (whose work will not be dignified here with a photo) that using a felt-tip is cheating.

Something’s gone horribly wrong with our email system at home. If you’ve been in touch in the last day or two and not had an answer, I apologise. Please try again when it’s fixed, something I hope to be announcing here very soon…

5th October… Hooray! They’ve mended it.