**1. What was your first job?**
Joining the Territorial Army as a member of Cambridge UOTC. Regrettably, I cannot claim to have advanced the interests of Her Majesty very significantly, and thus feel very keenly the observation of Dr Johnson to the effect that every man feels a little more meanly of himself for not having been a soldier.
**2. What was the best advice you were ever given?**
From my father: “Do unto others as they would do unto you, for else you will surely be done.”
**3. What was the last book you read?**
Edward Gibbon, _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, but do not understand me to mean that I was reading the thing through from beginning to end, a task that eluded me even as a schoolboy. Specifically, I was re-reading Chapter XXVIII, “The Destruction of Paganism”, a piece of writing to which I often resort in periods of gloomy _fin de siècle_ contemplation.
**4. What would be the first item on your bucket list?**
Finishing my part-time doctorate on the first piece of statute law ever enacted in English, the Laws of King Aethelberht of Kent, dating from c. AD 600.
**5. Who inspires you?**
Michael Ventris, who deciphered the Linear B script used by Bronze Age Minoans whilst holding down a day job as an architect, before dying aged 34 in a motor accident. Many academics in a lifetime of full-time scholarship have not achieved nearly so much.
**6. What does your ideal weekend involve?**
Leisured contemplation and gastronomic self-indulgence in Bath, which happily is indeed my lot for some forty weekends of the year, albeit also the principal reason why item 4 remains on the bucket list rather than having been long since knocked on the head, as it should have been.
**7. How long can you go without your mobile?**
It would be more accurate to frame my response in terms of how long I can bear to be with my mobile, which is not an instant longer than it takes me to complete the call in hand. I detest the things intensely.
**8. What advice would you give the young you?**
As a young professional specialising in tax, I rather grandly decided that VAT was not a worthy subject on which to expend any intellectual effort, and declined to make it any part of my competence. I doubt that the development of my professional career has suffered too greatly in consequence, but I would not now put the matter in quite such stark terms.
**9. What would be your luxury item on Desert Island Discs?**
A Parker 61 Consort fountain pen with a broad nib, ink and paper.
**10. Who would you most like to meet, and why?**
H.R. Trevor-Roper, whose writings I have read invariably with very great pleasure, and whom by way of recompense I would have liked to have been able to counsel to take a bit more care over those wretched diaries before making quite such an arse of himself over them.
