Time up?

I've been watching Time Team since the first episode in January 1994 when they went in search of  what might have been King Alfred's base in what would then have been the Somerset marshes around Athelney. Physically, I'm not sure what they found, probably not very much, but that didn't matter because the producers had stumbled on TV gold dust. That came in the format '... and we have just three days to find out' and the chemistry between the team, which took a little longer  to gel.

Tony Robinson, who had made an indelible name for himself as Baldrick in Blackadder, was the front man. His enthusiasm for history oozed from the screen (the first time I'd seen him on TV was reciting a monologue for children, Odysseus, the Greatest Hero of Them All). He cheerfully admitted he didn't know a thing about archaeology ... but he knew a couple of people who did. They came in the form of the wild-haired, rainbow-jumpered Professor Mick Aston, and granite-jawed, beer-swilling digging machine Phil Harding. If I remember rightly, relations between them at the start were a bit stiff, but over the years Time Team turned into a sort of cheery archaeology-loving family who visited your living room on a Sunday night.

In those early years, the search for archaeological evidence and historical truth was the be all and end all of Time Team. It was a niche programme for history lovers who salivated over the churned up remains of Roman mosaics and the slightly darker stain in the earth that might be a Saxon post hole. Nobody was all that bothered about building a big viewing audience.

But that audience came, and with it came changes. Time Team turned a bit tabloid. The three day format remained, Phil got a bit more to say, the geo-phys team got better equipment, Stewart got to go up in a helicopter, but now they were expected to have revelations and come to conclusions. I began to get a bit annoyed when Guy de-la-very-posh-Roman-expert would look at a bit of pottery and tell the world that it changed our whole outlook on Roman history, when it patently didn't, or Francis Pryor studied a hole in the ground and turned it into a neolithic temple, despite there being no real evidence for the claim.

You could tell things were getting strained when Mick would tetchily turn to Robinson and say 'no, it doesn't mean that at all. It might mean it, but it might not'. And in the latest season, the straw that broke the Samian ware dish: Mary-Anne Ochota, a very scenic archaeologist and former model, with a nice smile, brought in to co-present with Tony and bring a bit of glamour, as the producers, in Aston's words as he announced his decision to quit the show, decided to 'cut down the informative stuff about archaeology'.

I don't like the new format as much. I know TV shows have to move on and do things differently, but it's all a bit too forced and there's a desperation to find things that aren't there. Earnest and often po-faced, Mick Aston brought the gravitas and genuine learning to the show that kept me and history lovers like me watching for almost twenty series. There have been other changes over the years, but without him I'm not sure Time Team will be Time Team. I met Tony Robinson once, when he opened a dinosaur exhibition, (don't ask!) and he seemed a very likeable, easy going chap. I have a feeling he might be thinking the same.

The days of sunshine and hunting big cats

There's a black and white picture I meant to upload for this blog, but it seems to have vanished somewhere so I'll try to describe it. At the top, on a high stone plinth, stands a tall, shirt-sleeved young man with a vaguely aristocratic air and floppy fair hair that hangs over his eyes. He's holding what looks like a lead, which in turn is attached to a truly enormous lion who lies sleeping with his great maned head pillowed by paws the size of beach balls. In front of the plinth is a slightly rougher character also in shirt sleeves, but with dark hair, a dodgy moustache and an air of mischief in his eyes.

The one with the dodgy moustache is me, aged about 27, and the chap at the back is my friend and then journalistic jedi apprentice, Benjie. The picture was taken in the 80s, when we still had proper summers, and reminds me of the carefree days of local newspapers. Benjie was fascinated by the recurring sightings of 'big cats' and I'd promised that I'd find him one, so one day off we went into the blue, safe in the knowledge that nobody would mind as long as we came back with a story. Then, as now, I put such sightings on a par with alien kidnappings and Scotland World Cup qualification, events so unlikely as to be preposterous, but I knew I'd find a big cat at fascinating Monteith's Aisle, otherwise known as the Douglas Mausoleum (you can see some excellent pictures here), which stands on Lilliardsedge, north of Jedburgh. The Aisle houses the tomb of General Sir Thomas Monteath Douglas, 1787-1868, who now lies forever beneath a domed roof pierced with stars, with a tall angel at his head and feet. Sandstone lions, one asleep and the other awake, guard the entrance.

Benjie very sensibly left journalism to become a merchant banker in London, where he now doubles as the Makar or poet in residence to the City. I loved working for the local papers in Jedburgh, Kelso, Melrose and Gala, because you were in a unique position at the very heart of the community and if you knew what you were doing you could get a story out of just about anything. You never worked nine to five, you spent most Saturdays on a muddy touchline, and you never knew what you were doing from one day to the next.

Occasionally reporters from 'the nationals', hoary, grizzled creatures who smoked too much and spent most of their time in the pub working out how to maximise their expenses, would descend on your patch. They'd pick your brains, file their stories and if you were lucky buy you a pint. Their one universal piece of advice was 'stay where you are, son. Better off in the locals'. Of course, they were right, national papers are just one long grind of constant pressure, tight deadlines and demands for more and better stories, punctuated by the occasional bollocking when you get something wrong. But there's also a magic to them, an illusory glory that meant the advice just had to be ignored. I spent longer in nationals (Scottish variety) than in local papers, but my fondest memories are not of great scoops, or incredible news days like 9/11 or Dunblane, but of days like the one with Benjie, covering the unchanging rituals of the Jethart festival, or delivering competition prizes up in the Cheviots on a rutted one-way track that started in Scotland and ended somewhere in England.

The skeleton in my cupboard

Although I've published four historical novels and a thriller, I keep banging on in these blogs about my, as yet unpublished, crime books. There are a few reasons for that. I think Brothers in Arms and War Games are as good as any of my other books. They were fun to write, because there was no pressure. I learned a lot from them that I was able to inject into the thrillers. And the main protagonist is the only one of my characters who actually talked to me.

It's true. When I finished the first draft of The Emperor's Elephant, the book that would become Caligula and Claudius, I had no idea where to go next. I knew it was good, but not quite good enough, but I didn't have the knowledge or experience to rewrite it. So what should I do? The obvious answer was write another book. I can't remember whether I decided it should be a crime novel, or whether he started creating himself in my head, but I remember getting up in the middle of the night to write everything down. The result was a book in the first person, told with a kind of Chandleresque commentary running through it. I read them again the other day when I finished the latest rewrite of Avenger of Rome, and they felt fresh and new. Who knows if, when or how they'll be published, but I think they will. The people who inhabit them are real to me and I think they deserve to be introduced to a wider audience.

The lead character is a Falklands War veteran with a special talent and a dirty secret, a wife with problems of her own, and nowhere to run when the members of his old platoon start getting knocked off one by one. 

I thought I'd give you a taste. Here's a flavour of Brothers in Arms.

CHAPTER 1

Failure isn’t unusual in my line of work. It’s not an exact science. Sometimes the dead call out to me, sometimes they don’t.

We stood among wet heather on a patch of bare hillside overlooking a quarry where a canary-yellow earthmover worked steadily to shift rocks and mud. My companion was silent, but I knew what he was thinking. This hill was indistinguishable from the others we had investigated. The quarry could have been the same quarry. Why should he believe me this time? 

‘She’s here.’

‘What?’

‘I said she’s here,’ louder this time, raising my voice above the howl of the wind and the machine-gun rattle of rain against Gore-Tex.

The Scots have a word for this weather. Dreich. But even it struggled to convey the dull, impenetrable leaden grey of an April afternoon when the rain came off the hills horizontally and so thick you could catch salmon in it. I stamped my feet to try to get some feeling back into them, but only succeeded in splashing mud over the top of my newly-acquired green wellies - the kind I always associate with people called Jeremy who slaughter grouse for fun. My companion gave me a look I’d come to recognise over the years. The sort of look you keep for the man with the manic twitch who sits down next to you on the train. I gave him what passed for a reassuring smile. I always feel vaguely guilty about letting people down, especially people like Assistant Chief Constable Johnny Gordon, who aren’t in it for the glory and who have put their faith in me. Most people question what I do; I’ve learned to live with that, but I don’t have to like it. I also resent the knowing ‘I told you so’ smirks on the faces of the sergeants and the constables who didn’t want me here in the first place. Bastards.

It hadn’t been a murder investigation at first. Only missing persons. An anonymous middle-aged conwoman who’d booked into a back street bed and breakfast had walked out without paying the bill. So what’s new? The B&B owner was brassed off and not a little let down. She may have been a little frayed around the edges and she liked a bit too much of the sauce, but Jennifer Doyle had seemed a nice lady, who made pleasant conversation and complimented the owner’s missus on her cooking. She just didn’t seem the type. But you live and learn.

A few days later they found the blood soaked towel down a drain in the guest house car park and the missing woman’s suitcase in a nearby builders’ skip.

The disappearance was mysterious enough to make front page news for a while, but, as the weeks passed, the investigation slipped down the priority list until it fell off the bottom. But not for Johnny Gordon. Johnny is one of your old-fashioned cops who doesn’t like loose ends and is more interested in people than targets. With retirement staring him in the face, giving up wasn’t an option. So he called me.

           In other circumstances, I would have been flattered - any business is good business, right? In this case I should have run a mile.    

 I looked around at what little was visible through the smears of squall sweeping down the valley on a sharp east wind. When people think of Scotland, they see the saw-toothed skyline of the Cairngorms or the majestic grandeur of the Trossachs. This was different. The Cheviot Hills can’t match the Highlands for scale, but their bleak, tree-stripped heights and spectre-shadowed valleys have a brooding aura that, in certain lights, can be ominous in the truest sense of the word. They were ominous now. The electricity of Jennifer’s presence was everywhere around me on the hill. I could feel the pulse of it through my body from the soles of my feet and it pounded in my brain like a roadman’s jackhammer. But there was something else, too. Something I didn’t fully understand. A sense of terrible foreboding that filled the air like a thunder cloud and was so obvious I wondered why the others couldn’t feel it.

A shout echoed around the quarry and the digger driver cut his engine.

‘They’ve found something.’ Johnny’s voice betrayed his relief. He moved off downhill, his boots squelching noisily in the damp peat. I stayed where I was.

My hand strayed to the round piece of metal deep in my pocket, worn smooth by the touch of her fingers so that the symbols on the surface were barely visible. I’d recognised that piece of metal the moment I’d seen it because I have one that’s just about identical at home. It was easy to imagine her rubbing obsessively at the silvery cupronickel as she sat in front of the fire in the drab little front room of the last place she would call home. In its own mysterious way, that little piece of metal had led me here. I took no joy in being proved right. Success would not make Jennifer Doyle’s heart beat even one more time, or fill her lungs with a single breath. All the same, I felt that familiar old flutter of relief. It hadn’t deserted me.  

Call it a gift.  Call it a curse. I’ve had it since I was ten years old.

The white-suited forensics officers worked steadily in the quarry below. There was no urgency in the way they moved. Why should there be? Jennifer Doyle wasn’t going anywhere. They picked their way meticulously over the ground, photographing anything that might be evidence, and then carefully bagging it. Half an hour passed before Johnny Gordon struggled his way back up the hill towards me. I could hear him swearing under his breath.

‘The animal,’ he spat, the hot blood of his anger mottling his face purple.

‘What is it?’ I had been expecting thanks or at least appreciation, but not this. Gordon had led a dozen murder investigations and seen a hundred bodies. He had an old-time copper’s acceptance of death, but what he had seen down in the quarry had shocked even him.

‘Is this some kind of fucking joke?’ The hand he held out to me shook, so it was difficult at first to see what was in the little plastic evidence bag. Then he thrust it in my face. I couldn’t read everything that was on the soggy, blood-smeared, once-white business card, but then I didn’t have to. It was mine.

Thought for the Day

I haven't gone away, I've just been very busy with my rewrite of Avenger of Rome. I will write a new blog soon and it WILL be interesting!

Roamin' with the Romans

I took the chance during the countdown to Christmas to do something I'd always planned; walk at least part of Dere Street, the Roman road between the Scottish border and the fortress at Trimontium. My wife dropped me off at Jedfoot, close to where the road crosses the river Teviot and I set off up what looked like a muddy farm track that headed directly south towards the Cheviot Hills.

The legionary marching camp at Pennymuir in the Cheviots is where I made my first real connection with the Romans as a 16-year-old labourer on a Youth Opportunities Scheme. Every morning during the summer of 1972 I'd be packed off in a smelly old van driven by Taff, the Arnhem veteran, and put to work by Jock, the tall, wiry foreman of the labouring gang. The camp had been ploughed up by the Forestry Commission to plant trees and our job was to turn the peat back into its original position in the three foot furrows. The turf banks the Romans created at Pennymuir to protect their camp are still there and it's always struck me that using my mattock and shovel to cut the peat into manageable chunks, I was doing exactly what the legionaries would have done to create the place in 80AD or thereabouts.

Dere Street begins in York and continues as far north as Edinburgh, probably following the line of march of governor Julius Agricola's invading force. Most of it now lies under the A1 and A68 trunk roads, but there are sections between Pennymuir and Jedfoot which still exist more or less as they did when it was built, with the ditches and banks still visible and a carriageway as much as twelve paces wide. It's what we call 'clarty' underfoot, but wonderfully atmospheric and you can imagine yourself meeting a marching century round every corner. Look back north from any rise and the road heads arrow straight for the triple peak of the Eildon Hills which gave Trimontium its name. Agricola's cavalry would have scouted this route ahead of the main army and it doesn't take a lot of imagination to work out the reaction of the locals to the arrival of the armoured might of Rome.

I walked out about five miles to Cappuck, where there was a permanent Roman cavalry station as well as at least four marching camps. The signal station was built by the Twentieth, the legion which was home to my character Valerius, and we know at least two of the men who were stationed there. Aulus Julius Severus, a tribune of the Gaestetae auxiliary cavalry, and Gaius Quintius Severus, who commanded the First Cohort of the Faithful Vardulli, left altar stones which are now built into the fabric of Jedburgh Abbey, and have incredibly survived two thousand years and the ravages of half a dozen more invading armies.

Look carefully and you can just see the peaks of the Eildons

The Romans have still left their mark

You can just imagine the legions marching north 

Cappuck: these fields would once have thronged with infantry and cavalry

From Cappuck, I walked back over the hill to Jedburgh, for a pint at the Tavern with my mate Iain and brother in law Jimmy, and a perfect end to the day.

These boots were made for walking

Today I took my old walking boots for a last wander through the Ochil Hills between Sheriffmuir and Dumyat before they're put out to grass. It was a poignant occasion, because I've had them for fifteen years and they've been to the top of Mont Blanc. Not I hasten to add with me in them, but with their original owner, my late and still sorely missed friend and colleague Tim Harper.

Tim sold me them for a tenner sometime around 1996. He was an incredible character who threw himself into everything he did with huge enthusiasm, whether it was his job as chief sub of the Daily Record, climbing an alp or casting a fly at a rising trout. The seven mile walk I did wouldn't even have counted as a stroll to a man who could do two Munros before breakfast and still be looking for more at the end of a ten hour day in the hills.

He died on the way down from an ice climb on Ben Nevis in early 2001. Totally professional in everything he did, the rescuers who recovered his body praised his equipment and preparation. It was just one of those things: an ice shelf that gave way beneath his feet.

I never put those boots on without thinking of him, but they've done their bit and into the cupboard they'll go. Next year I plan to get back into the hills properly, so Santa will be bringing a pair of cracking new boots and an all-weather jacket. It was a fantastic day for a walk, with frost on the ground, the air scalpel sharp and crystal clear and the Trossachs a glorious saw-toothed wall of white in the distance. I saw thrushes and redwings by the hundred in the woods, flocks of bullfinches, chaffinches, great tits and blue tits, and dozens of blackbirds in the hedgerows making the most of the last of the berries. When I reached the highest point on the moor I sat on what looked like an old burial mound and watched a falconer flying an eagle or a big hawk through my binoculars. It followed him around like a dog while he probed the ground with some kind of electronic gizmo that emitted high-pitched sounds, presumably to spook the rabbits below. Tim would have loved it.

Every foot of the ground I walked over has been touched by history. Great armies roamed these hills during the battle of Sheriffmuir. Dumyat was the fortress of the Maetae, the warlike tribe who had to be bought off  by the Roman emperor, Septimius Severus, during his invasion of Scotland. Signs of habitation dot the bleak landscape, whether it's the ruins of old shepherd's cottages and field boundaries or the moss-covered stumps of standing stones above intriguing earth barrows. On the way back down I pondered over what came to be Bridge of Allan would have looked like two thousand years ago. I suspect that the focus of habitation would have been the shelf of land occupied by the rich folks of Upper Bridge of Allan these days. It would have looked out over an incredibly rich and diverse flood plain where the Forth, Teith and Allan rivers meet. The waters would have been filled with salmon and trout, and the marshes with waterfowl. Otter would have provided furs and there would have been deer and wild boar aplenty in the woods on the hills around. If ancient life was ever idyllic, then this was one of the best places in Scotland to be.

None of that would have interested Tim much. The past didn't draw him as it does me. He was that fascinating paradox: a man who lived for the future, but managed to treat every day as if it was his last. There's a message there somewhere that I'll carry into the New Year with me.

As Private Fraser would say: We're all doomed!

Today my blog celebrates its fourth anniversary. When I started it on December 17, 2007, I had very little idea what a blog was and, cliched though it sounds, the world was a very different place.

My motivation was to give people, particularly unpublished writers, an insight into what it felt like during the countdown to my first book, in all its excitement, exhilaration and downright terror. It pledged to be a warts and all account, but, of course, it hasn't been entirely transparent; there are some inner fears and conflicts you have to keep to yourself for your own sanity. Yet looking back over 166 posts and four years, it pretty much sums up my life as it has been lived.

The highs have been the books and their launches, the support of my family, the reacquaintance with old friends and the making of new ones: finding a courage and confidence I didn't know I had to walk away from a perfectly good job into an uncertain, but always exciting future. There are more books on the way and the ideas keep coming. The lows? The usual mundane stuff about surviving until the next pay cheque comes through. An occasional feeling of aloneness that is more imagined than real.

They have been four momentous years, but the next four promise to be more momentous still, and for all the wrong reasons. When I look at the world today compared to that day in 2007, the future is filled with threats. Unemployment as I write is the highest for 17 years, particularly among the young, and it will continue to rise, possibly even to Great Depression levels. The lost generation will not just be a convenient political soundbite, but a reality. 

Polarisation between left and right, rich and poor, and north and south has never been greater in my lifetime. Take a look at political forums or the comments on national newspaper stories and the language is ever more extremist. If you listen carefully, even at the highest levels, you can hear the sound of sabres rattling. A week ago, a Conservative MP talked about France using EU laws as "an Exocet aimed at the heart of the City", a deliberate and inflammatory harking back to the Falklands War. Yesterday, I heard a steely-eyed government minister describe with relish how Typhoons and helicopter gunships will be deployed above London during the Olympic Games at the same time as thirteen and a half thousand British soldiers are helping 'secure' the event. Why not go the whole hog and put a Challenger tank on every street corner? It will certainly come in handy when the inevitable riots start as the dispossessed see the fruits of their sacrifice go up in smoke in a multi-million pound fireworks display.

On the one hand we have an immature, elitist cabal who think it's a good idea to target chemotherapy patients for benefit cuts, on the other a leaderless, demoralised sham of an Opposition whose toothlessness opens the way for the champagne socialists controlling the unions to start throwing their weight around. The only good thing about our political system is that one way or the other the Opposition has the ability to expose and occasionally curb the worst lunacies of the lot in power. If there is no opposition where does that leave us? In Scotland, Labour is about to elect a leader who will guarantee Alex Salmond's place as First Minister for as long as he chooses. At the same time, support for independence grows, not because there's a huge appetite to break up the UK, but because the alien, fundamentally selfish, political philosophy currently in vogue in the south is anathema to most Scots. The irony is that we've never needed unity and mutual economic support more.

Time to stop when a blog turns into a rant, but I, like, I suspect, most of the disempowered Centre, am angry and fearful. I make one last prediction. The thing that brings it to a head will be the lack of understanding or genuine care amongst the current incumbents of Downing Street. Understanding of the real terror when you don't know where the next mortgage payment is coming from and your home is drowning in negative equity. Understanding of what it's like to graduate with a good degree and a one in ten thousand chance of getting to use it. Understanding that, when the world is falling apart, people don't need lectures or more pain, they need hope.

Oh, yes, and a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all my readers.