I try, and too often fail, to work according to the Pomodoro technique. In the breaks between my work today I decided to have a crack at a book lying on a shelf as I entered the library: Roman Britain: A Very Short Introduction. I have a whole box of books on Roman Britain and read one or two many years ago, but I never have the time to invest in the others. I myself am as fascinated as the Victorians were with the ambiguous relationship between Britain and Rome. On the one hand, there is the claim to be the last of the Romans, true heirs of law, architecture, civilization, etc. manifest, for example, in their adoption of Constantine as a Romano-Brit (see Evelyn Waugh's Helena ); on the other hand, there is the pride in the unconquered Pict or Boudica (one thinks of Caesar, primeval forests, and chariots or Cymbeline). There are those attempts to resolve the paradoxical identity of the British in Sutcliff's The Eagle of the Ninth.

Alas, I must read things like this,

The once-popular belief that Britain was largely covered with forest until cleared by the Anglo-Saxons is now discredited. By the Roman Conquest, although there was still a great deal of natural forest, the population had already grown to something of the order it reached under the Romans, two or three times greater than during the reign of William the Conqueror... (p.5)

that bring all those feelings of guilt that I prefer in some way the sparsely inhabited and thick forests I imagined when first reading Caesar and Tacitus than scientific truth.

Apparently, the Romano-British also liked their share of black magic,

 ...excavation of a temple at Uley in Gloucestershire has approximately doubled the total of curse-bearing tablets known form the entire Roman world. (p.35)