Asthma of Caves

Oct 05, 2025

Outstanding in my field

8346/21265

Writing about my son’s piano lessons and taking my daughter to visit secondary schools has made me realise that this year marks the 40th anniversary of me leaving school.

This time forty years ago I was having a year off before University (no “gap year” crap back then) and in the autumn was on the archaeological digs that I would later write about in Excavating Rita.

I did two archaeological digs and it was maybe 6 or 7 weeks of my life, but that whole year of my first forays into freedom was so intense that it feels like much longer.

I wondered what had become of the who I kissed on the last day of the dig and stayed in contact with for a few years and I managed (I am 99% certain) to find her online. It can be hard to find women who you know by their maiden name (we can’t be calling it that any more, can we?) if they have got married, but luckily she’s not got a double-barrelled name, keeping her own surname (we can’t still be calling it that, can we?) and adding (I presume) her partner’s.

There’s not much about her online (certainly compared to me) but she’s still working in archaeology and living in Canada. I didn’t feel any compunction to get in touch, but nice to see her again after four decades. It’s a sweet, warm feeling as much as being nostalgic about your own shared foolishness as anything else and confused about how that thing from yesterday is 40 years old.

I wonder if she’s still got all my Japan tapes (I’d loved the band at school, but then gone off them). She gave me a cool Dutch hoodie in return (I don’t have that any more).

She’s the reason I became vegetarian (for the next decade and a bit). It wasn’t just to try and make her like me, as I only changed my diet after the dig had ended and we’d gone our separate ways, but like I say, those few weeks (that first dig was four weeks max) had a big effect on my life.

I remember returning home (after less than a month) and feeling like I’d been away for years. I’d broken up with my teenage girlfriend before I went, fallen in love with the one girl my age on the dig, then returned home and fell back in love with my girlfriend again. I was just in love with whoever was right in front of me.

Ah youth, the folly of your zest!

RHLSTP Book Club with Andrew Lownie, talking about his explosive book about greedy, wasteful, sex pest, stupid royals, Entitled. It’s hilarious and horrifying in equal measure (actually more horrifying).

Buy the book here.

8347/21266

There was a special event in Hitchin and Hermitage Road was closed and there were some rides and classic cars and other things to do. Ernie had excitedly rushed to go into a display that gave you an experience of caving, but after he’d done it became scared. “I forgot that I had asthma of caves,” he kept saying. He meant claustrophobia, but I think we should change the term now.

Later on a dog walk I walked past a tree that had shed it’s weird curly soft pine cones (they are catkins apparently). I felt like I was walking over Nature’s Wotsits. My son is not the only poet in the family. It made me sad that if Adam and Eve fancied a Wotsit, they had to eat a weird pine cone. For most humans who ever lived, this would be the closest they got to one. I ate a handful and they just weren’t cheesy enough. Proving once again man’s superiority to nature.

On another dog walk, for some reason, I thought of the time when I was a baby that my parents had left me in a car on a sunny day. I don’t remember this one, well not consciously, but subconsciously it may have had some effect on my whole life and explain my hatred of abandonment and green houses. I don’t think they were gone for long (though it’s crazy that 1960s parents thought it was OK to do this - I once accidentally left baby Phoebe in the car for a couple of minutes as we searched for Catie’s mobile and felt like the worse parent ever - though I got an episode of Relativity out of it).

I don’t think I was left in the car for very long and they’d cracked a window (giving access to any baby snatchers in the area), but on their return I was very red and crying. Luckily for me I didn’t die and was just mentally scarred for life, but I thought of the alternative timeline where I hadn’t been so lucky and how my parents’ lives might have gone. I suspect not very well. I mean it was the 1960s so they probably wouldn’t have gone to prison because all parents left their kids places then, but how would you get over something like that?

Hopefully this blog will lead to them finally being prosecuted.

As parents we’ve all got stuff like this. I still wake up in a cold sweat thinking of the time I had baby Ernie in a front facing sling and was packing stuff in the car and basically forgot he was there. I went to close the boot of our people carrier, which I would usually have done with a slam, but luckily this time went more cautiously. As it descended I remembered Ernie was there and that the boot door would hit him in the head and stopped in time. But man, that could have gone a lot worse.