It's lovely to be back, and to celebrate I'm doing this one in imperial purple.

The nice folks at blogco have given us a new editor, with colours and fonts and stuff. They've even given us animated emoticons - .

Not that I'll ever be using one again, obviously. Or the colours. Somehow, I don't think Marcus Aurelius would have approved.

Anyway, I wanted to tell you about this. Apparently, when Hadrian's Wall was a frontier post, the defenders included a unit of "bargemen from the Tigris". Or as we'd call them, Iraqis. Probably from somewhere near Basra.

You couldn't make it up.