Don't worry about it. Every year, during a summer's walling activity - build maybe a hundred yards of wall, shift a hundred + tonnes of stone - I'd wear out fifteen to twenty pairs of heavy duty gardening gloves. One year I kept the remnannts and photographed them all for an early style web diary. One of the pairs were blue - hence the Username BlueGloves.

Rob Ixer was one of the four (?) active members of the Early Metals Research Group (EMRG). I wrote to him at a northern university (I think) saying "I've found a copper mine very probably exploited during the EBA, do you want a sample of its slag for isotope analysis?" He didn't write back so I moved him to the twonk category!

You have to sex it up to get the public to give a damn, you know that Mr Grumpy.

Latest word this morning is that the value of the Staffordshire Hoard may run into "tens of millions" so they're queing round the block to see it and putting money in a bucket to "keep it in Brum". Meanwhile, they're also agitating to keep it in Tamworth and Lichfield and elsewhere, like they'll go and look if they succeed. Not.

And it looks like the vacuous hapless git that kept digging it for five days and destroyed one third of the contextual information (despite eleven years of outreach to explain what to do) is nevertheless likely to be handed a bit more than the ten million it cost to repair Silbury. The whole world's gone to shit.