Well, here you are in Rome. Thanks to some great colleagues at Central St Martins UAL you have been invited to contribute to a conference in which ideas from history, archaeology, technology, fine art and philosophy search for common ground or exchange ideas in an interdisciplinary way.

You have had a long, tiring but wonderful day already, yesterday, and this morning you gave what academics call a ‘paper’ to contribute to a day-long symposium.

A couple of weeks ago you blogged in such a way that you ‘killed two birds with one stone’ and you think you are going to do that again today. The reason is that you are again again a bit nervous about the ‘paper’ you are going to give and you can use the blog as a kind of rehearsal, to see how it feels to an imagined audience.

 It’s strange perhaps how, after teaching successfully…