Twelve Days in the Year: 27th March 2025

Woke from a deep, largely dreamless sleep at seven on the dot – which is six in British money, but still represents a significant improvement over the regular weekday alarm time of half five and the regular weekday cat-demanding-breakfast time of five, let alone the total lack of sleep the night before due to cat shenanigans. I would never be without cats, and am far too soft-hearted to lock them out of the bedroom – actively encouraging Buddy to spend the night on the bed, which is A’s current socialisation programme, may be a different matter, as he growls whenever one of us moves let alone when one of the others hoves into view – but there are times when it becomes a bit too much. High on the order of business for this morning is writing to apologise to the friend whom I blew off last night due to being at the end of my tether and desperate just to find hotel and crash – the fact I had managed to make a vaguely coherent contribution to discussion in one panel session that afternoon was an enormous, unappreciated achievement.

Naturally the hotel room doesn’t have tea, but it does have a small coffee pod machine – albeit one that produces more liquid per brew than the mugs provided can accommodate – so I can have a gentle coming-round phase. One of the great disadvantages of the European Social Science History conference, the reason why I’m here in Leiden for two nights, is that the organisation thinks half past eight is a good starting time for the first morning session every day, and, while the conference as a whole is enormous, the Antiquity strand is small enough that absences from panel audiences are a bit noticeable. The good news is that the Antiquity strand is small enough that there isn’t a panel in every session, and the first slot this morning is clear; in other circumstances I might look elsewhere in the programme for something interestingly comparative, but today I am taking it easy.

So, leisurely catch-up on the less unbearable news, shower and shave (slightly tricky when there is no sink plug at all, rather than the usual inadequate plug that does at least slow the flow of water slightly), and stroll down the road to the bus stop, feeling confident after yesterday evening that I have grasped the local public transport system – if I can manage it when sleep-deprived, I can do it any time. I’m out in a north-western suburb of Leiden, halfway to the coast, as Exeter expenses rules preclude any of the hotels in the centre, even with conference discount – and I am happy enough with this, having successfully found my way there without any trouble, whereas my first ever experience of the ESSHC involved finding that I’d booked a chalet in an out-of-season holiday park on the coast, miles out of The Hague, half a mile beyond where the bus stopped out of holiday season… It’s a glorious morning, and we pass a patch of open ground with the usual ditches, sheep, geese and other water fowl, and a pair of storks. I love storks, so this brings joy.

The bus terminates at the central station and I then walk into the centre along the usual picturesque canals to find a well-recommended cafe for breakfast; good coffee (Dutch flat whites retain a considerable kick, whereas in the UK they have tended to become slightly less milky lattes) and a spectacular confection, listed as a local speciality, called a Speculoos Croissant – croissant stuffed with the ubiquitous whipped cream, plus speculoos syrup and chocolate flakes. Well, I don’t have to eat anything for the rest of the day… Slightly embarrassed to be told off politely for breaching the ‘no laptops’ rule in the downstairs seating area (no laptops at all Friday to Sunday, of which I approve), but in my defence the notice was in Dutch. Actually it’s interesting that despite my obvious lack of facility in Dutch one barista stuck to that language despite clear evidence that she possessed the usual perfect English; I honestly don’t know if this was making a point – the impact of the new right-wing nationalist government, even – or she was just assuming that my limited responses are typical of Old People; what is striking is that I can grasp almost everything she’s saying.

Onwards to the conference, arriving conveniently five minutes into the coffee break. By lucky chance run into one colleague from Scotland and then another from Munich, so plenty to talk about – trying not to spend too much time lamenting the state of UKHE and the identikit strategic hack’n’slash plans of management teams, but this isn’t easy. Into a panel session on Hellenistic taxation, not a topic I know much about but with enough structural similarities to things I do know about, and anyway the whole point of attendance at this sort of thing is to broaden one’s knowledge and learn new things.

I had sent a message to the aforementioned friend, and we’d arranged to meet for lunch at the cafe of the Leiden Botanical Gardens round the corner – very busy, given the combination of a conference full of hungry historians all looking for lunch at the same time and the glorious weather, but she’d found a table. Very good spring soup, decent quiche, and a very enjoyable catch-up, including something with a sufficient resemblance to progress in thinking about the chapter we are, very slowly, writing together, at least insofar as we’ve agreed that we’ll both potentially write about Friedrich August Wolf in drafts of our respective sections and worry about how to make these fit together later. We head back to the conference, late for the next session, and after some hesitation (mostly from me, being too British for words) crash into a panel on Roman agrimensores and their early modern reception five minutes into the second paper. This does mean that when I want to contribute to discussion I have to draw attention to this by apologising for the possibility that the question has already been answered before I arrived. Chat to.a few colleagues afterwards; realise later, from emails, that there were also people avoiding me for fear that I might hassle them about overdue book reviews. In fact I have been too busy identifying potential future victims, not least for a couple of books on Roman agrimensores that I believe will appear on the review pile in the next month or so.

Rather than going to another session – again, there is nothing specifically related to antiquity or to any of my other interests other than one incredibly vague-looking panel on historical theory – I have booked an early table in a brew-pub which I wanted to visit years ago, when I visited Leiden to give a talk to postgrads and got stranded for an extra night (I cannot remember the reason why my flight was cancelled; snow, possibly) and found it was booked out. Walked along more pretty streets, seeing lots of cats in windows and enjoying the sunshine, to relish two very nice beers brewed on the premises, a saison and a milk stout, and some excellent fish and chips. Then decided to walk back to the hotel rather than take the bus, partly to work off some supper and mostly in order to get a photo of the storks – and a grey heron who landed right next to me and looked rather surprised.

The twenty-eight days of February mean that the last entry I wrote for this series was also covering a Thursday, and so I find myself doing exactly the same thing as last time, eschewing any academic activity (not in this case skipping a free dinner) to attend my online jazz composition class, at least after ten minutes of trying to persuade Teams to work – the joys of having both a work Microsoft account and a student Microsoft account at a different institution means that I can no longer log into Teams calls for work at all except by clicking on someone else’s link, as it automatically forwards me to my student login – and this evening it insists on autofilling my work credentials, which of course don’t work, however hard I try to input the correct password.

Eventually I join the class five minutes late. We are continuing to explore modality, which I really like (and I’m pleased to realise, having checked up on last month’s entry, that I’m making much better sense of it than I was then). However, there is a constant issue with composing anything that doesn’t sound exactly like a cheap imitation of Herbie Hancock’s ‘Maiden Voyage’. I’m the only one with any homework to look at this week – does everyone else hate modes, whereas I’m the Eurojazz fan? I get a pretty positive reception from the tutor for something that was, to be honest, largely hacked out as an afterthought after he told us that we shouldn’t generally use melodic minor modes for more than about 25% of any given tune, whereas my previous composition was entirely melodic minor. Interest was expressed in hearing the latter, so maybe I’ll tinker with that rather than trying to write something completely new for the final class of term next week.

Afterwards I call home for updates on the cats, apologies for completely forgetting to give A. details of where I’m staying, and reassurance that I can’t wait to be back tomorrow. It’s now going on for ten, Dutch time, so a brief bit of reading and sudoku then crash, not least because tomorrow starts with an 8.30 session…