Small Finds - the beginning

Where did it all begin?

It began with Paulus Aurelius Sendico and his friends, and family, back in the 380's

That's AD 380

Specifically, it began with his nephew, Septan, but Septan was not yet born or even thought of in the 380s. Septan, his sister Helen and their friend Lydia were simply a dream conjured out of nowhere, an idea.

Septan and Helen led to their mother and their mother led to Paulus Aurelius Sendico and to his sudden departure from these shores and to his subsequent adventures in the world of the Late Antique

I'm getting ahead of myself. 

Although, in another sense, I am only now catching up with myself

That is how we got here, to the archaeolgical dig in a field just outside the village of Lynchcombe Sandicott, not far from the town of Ancester, Roman Antium, in the county of Gloucestershire in England, on the eastern fringes of the Cotswolds, in the year 2010 

That's AD 2010

2010 CE

It starts with a mess and gets messier and messier as the dig progresses

Monday 28^th June 2010

You know what it’s like. Things are going along just fine and then someone pulls the rug out from under your life and everything starts falling in on top of you, like Sampson in the Philistine temple. That’s how it feels. Falling masonry.

When he arrived on site, it was like a scene from a film about Passchendaele: all mud, water and ruin. It put him in mind of the poets Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen and of Vaughan Williams’ second symphony. 

It had been the wettest June on record. 

The story continues here:

Small Finds Chapter 1

Sendico - novel #4

 I've been digging into the archives. 

I knew I had something somewhere but, could I find it? No. I dug away all day, went though every file, every box. Nothing. I was sure I had seen something, found something, a week or two back. 

Why couldn't I find it now?

The whole day wasted, I thought. I felt depressed. 

Then I had a brainwave. It was an inspiration. 

Perhaps. 

There was something underneath that pile of stuff on the trolley in the corner of the Hut. Could it possibly be ...? I lifted the weight off the trolley and yanked out the papers trapped underneath. 

Yes! Here it is!

The date on the papers was 2009. 

I had written, or perhaps dreamed, the best part of a novel set in the last years of the western Roman Empire, that period known to those who know as the Late Antique, peopled by Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, the usurper Magnus Maximus and the emperors Theodosius, Valentinian and Honorius and Ellen of the Armies, Justinia, Marcellena, Paula, to name just a few. 

It was the year AD 385. It was all happening. 

A young man, rejected at home, joins an expeditionary force, absconds and travels the Mediterranean world in the company of those we now call great. His journey takes him via London to Trier, Milan, Rome, Jerusalem and, finally, Bethlehem.

It is the year AD 415 and he wants to go home.

Paulinus Aurelius Sendico; it is his story I want to finish next. 

This will be novel #4.

These printouts from 2009 are the starting point. There is more somewhere. I am sure there is more. I will go on looking in old notebooks and old computer files, always assuming that MS Word now will read the files from MS Word then ... I will look and I will find what I can and I will summon up my dreams from all those years ago. 

And I will write Sendico, novel #4.

It will take a while, a year maybe, maybe less. I have novels #2 and #3 waiting to be published. 

There is work to be done