Greetings, Net-Age Travellers,

Happy New Year!
The countdown to ecstasy has finally truly begun!
And wasn’t it weird writing ‘1999’ for the first time?
As soon as I awoke, I put on Prince’s ‘1999’, followed by Black Sabbath’s ‘Snowblind’. I danced and stretched the New Year in with equal amounts of paranoia and inevitability.

But first, Drudion, I must step back and shriek, bark, blather, let loose, yip, yelp and foam at you all with delight for the reaction shown to The Modern Antiquarian. Everyone has responded to it with such extraordinary verve that even my most spirited pre-publication conjectural sales flights-of-fancy were ker-booshed in two months. The first edition was sold so much more quickly than anyone had anticipated that a further pressing had to be created for X‑Mass!

Virgin has matched the Head Heritage deal price so that even shallow people are buying it just for the packaging (!), and Joanne Wilder has already been offered £40 for the promo-CD alone! (though I’m sure she’d find copies for people at a fraction of that price). The November talks at various Waterstones and Virgin Megastores throughout the country were all sold out and I enjoyed the whole trip.

But it wasn’t enough. Britain in 1999CE is opening up and a great deal of new things, tangible things, may now be told. I am writing a follow-up to The Modern Antiquarian, a cultural sequel entitled Let Me Speak to the Driver. The two books will be usable in conjunction, creating a whole that is even greater than the sum of the two (fairly considerable) parts.

In March, I begin a Modern Antiquarian tour – the dates are shown below. I shall talk for around 75 minutes about the relationship between Ancient and Modern Humanity, and the importance of navigating history and prehistory in a way that can free us of our prejudices.

Unhood the Hoodwinked and they see as though for the first time.

On the March tour, I shall bring to the surface legendary British things which always appear so Esoteric and hidden. And once they are Exoteric and lying about upon the surface, they shall once more irrigate our lives as they formerly did for thousands of years. In The Modern Antiquarian, I endeavoured to show the extent of prehistoric Mother worship in Ancient Britain. On the March tour, I shall show how Ma was so entrenched in our culture that, as late as the 9th century, she could still be carved unself-consciously squatting over a doorway at Kilpeck church, in Hereforshire, her legs wide open, her face demonic, her hands pulling open her labial lips quite wide enough for her to deliver a rugby ball! Clearly, the world needs more investigation.

Love Onya,

JULIAN,

Sool, The Marlborough Downs.