For sure. I went on a school trip (from the UK) to China when I was seventeen, and was consistently stared at like I was an alien the whole time I was there because at five foot ten, I’m taller than most people in China. Not as bad as a couple of girls with red and blonde hair, though, who were grabbed by random…

The daughter of some of my parents’ friends got a lovely chocolate labrador puppy a few years back, because she wanted a chocolate lab, despite the fact that she and her boyfriend both work full-time. The dog is basically an accessory. She had all kinds of problems with him messing in the house and destroying her…

Thank you!

Seconded. My uncle thought it would be a good idea to announce my dad’s death like that. My mother and I nearly murdered him.

Oh my gosh, that’s awful to hear! I have been there and done that, and it is absolutely truly awful, but you will get through it. My dad died in September from bladder cancer, at 63. They thought originally (the previous August) that they would be able to do a few rounds of chemo, remove the bladder, and move on, but…

Sorry for your loss :( my dad died at the end of September from cancer, but at 63. It is the fucking worst.

Well, ultimately, over time and space, people are fundamentally all the same. Differences in culture stem from environment and experience, but human beings pretty much always want the same things, although the way they perceive and go about their aims may differ. And even over thousands of years, human nature is…

This is where I live! For once something cool is happening in this godforsaken part of the world!

Fellow UCL Institute of Archaeology grad here (Egyptian Arch, natch). Your brother and sister-in-law clearly have excellent judgement ;) I’m glad they were able to pursue their dreams, but they were probably better off doing it at that stage in life than straight out of school like I did - as others have said, there…

My mother’s had one since she was eighteen from where she hit her head really hard on a low doorway (hazards of being tall). She likes it, and always asks our hairdresser to avoid it whenever she gets highlights put in!

As a Brit who spends time in Egypt, where you do sometimes see people (mostly police, uniformed or plain-clothes, but not always) with guns, my initial reaction to seeing a man walking around in public with a handgun, either in a holster or tucked into the back of his trousers, is mild panic. A lot of the time, the…

Seconded; also (mostly), I love your Elizabeth Peters username!

No joke, there’s every chance that the side-chamber could just be full of wine or beads. Probably beads, as this is Egypt. And some poor soul will have to sit and catalogue all of them.

A couple of thoughts on this whole hidden chambers in the tomb of Tutankhamun thing. The tl;dr: this is really exciting and potentially really important, but we need to go carefully. As you were.

Have you seen any of those compilations of photos of products in the Waitrose Essentials range (their own-brand economy range) which most people generally wouldn’t think of as being strictly essential? They are quite amusing, just because of the unfortunate name that Waitrose picked for their cheap stuff (Sainsburys…

For sure, but I was trying to be diplomatic on the open internet. He is the worst and it’s all for the good that he’s no longer running anything except his own PR.

I seem to remember that a few years back, Zahi Hawass, who used to have the job which is now Minister for Antiquities in Egypt and can be found on repeat on National Geographic in basically any programme about ancient Egypt, visited the UK and lobbied again for the return of the Rosetta Stone to Egypt. This was at the…

Seriously. The number of times I’ve walked past that replica Rosetta Stone that people are allowed to touch in the Enlightenment Gallery and overheard or seen people clearly not realising that it’s not the real thing is mind-boggling.

My school ran a history trip to Berlin when I was seventeen, and one of the places we visited was Sachsenhausen/Oranienburg KZ. I didn’t really know what to expect, other than expecting that a place where people were imprisoned and killed (notably Dietrich Bonhoeffer) would have a really bad aura about it. The weird…

Seriously, I have to translate a bunch of hieroglyphs from a coffin lid for homework this week, and I’d take that sentence over those tricksy little bastards any day.