Do you want a FREE signed book?

I'll be giving them away LIVE!!! at 4pm GMT tomorrow...

Hello,

This is not a newsletter. It has very little to do with history. It’s mainly a shaggy dog story.

When I was a student the college I attended had porters who manned the main gate and front office. Yeah. Posh.

The porters had lots of jobs, one of which was patrolling the grounds of the college at night, keeping an eye out for intruders, nightwalkers and idiot undergraduates up past their bedtime.

They were good people. And the porter I remember most clearly was called Jim. Or, as he was universally known, though never to his face: ‘Jim the Dentist’.

It was said Jim the Dentist earned his nickname when he knocked someone’s teeth out - alleged to be just punishment for an infraction that had been lost to history by the time I first heard the story told.

Was it true? I never dared ask, obviously.

Be that as it may: whenever I now go to an actual dentist, whether to have my teeth examined, prodded, adjusted, X-rayed, cleaned or merely counted, I think about Jim the Dentist.

And that, in a roundabout way, brings us to Friday LIVE.

Last week: a dismal failure

Last Friday I went to the real dentist.

That bit was fine. A bit of tartar, a little age-related recession. Nothing disastrous.

But I miscalculated. I Jim the Dentisted my damn self.

I thought I would get back home from the appointment well in time to do Friday LIVE!!!: the semi-traditional 4pm GMT weekly check-in with my Facebook followers, where we discuss historical topics (sometimes) non-historical topics (more often) and I distribute FREE signed books as I see fit.

Reader, I was very late. So instead of an hour of quality(-ish) entertainment, all I could muster was 4 minutes of apology delivered from my iPhone in a supermarket carpark.

It was a low point in a bum year. And I want to apologise to everyone who was loitering on Facebook waiting for me to turn up.

So this week I am going to make up for it. I will be giving away TWICE the usual quota of signed books, as well as doing all my usual performing-seal tricks.

If you don’t know what that involves, the archive is here:

If you do know what it means, I’ll see you there. If you have any questions for the Q&A section, please send them to me via email, or on my Facebook page.

Newsletter issue #3 is coming at the end of the month. If you haven’t signed up to it, please consider it. Just click here to find out more:

Otherwise, have a good evening. I’ll catch you tomorrow.

Dan x