Books on my shelves are about papers, leaflets and cards too. Here is a set of 50 delightful little cards from a series of “wonders” put into their cigarette packets by Wills in the 1920s.

I sorted out my books over Christmas. It had been a job looming for years, as I moved from one house to another watching them get steadily more disorganised, spending more and more time looking for titles I knew I had somewhere, and never knowing quite where in the muddle to shelve new acquisitions. But the point came when my study was a room big enough for most of my work books, and there wasn’t much else left that needed sorting.

I knew it would be bad. But I hadn’t anticipated quite how long it would take. Each shelf was a major operation. Which books should go together, how should I arrange the groups around the room, what should I dispose of and what keep? And for those that didn’t fit in the room but I wanted to keep, where in the house should they go – and which would those be? Those seemed obvious questions, if answering them was harder than I’d imagined.

But there was so much more. These days we research online, but it wasn’t so long ago that being a journalist (even a part-time one) meant it was helpful to keep press cuttings – that’s bits of paper, for younger readers. I found bits of paper everywhere, slotted into books and magazines, in folders, in old press packages or just stuffed in amongst the shelved books. And not just press cuttings, but letters, notes and scraps of essays. As part of my mission was to reduce the library to a size where it could all be shelved (I was fed up with tripping over piles of books in the dark), getting rid of these cuttings was an imperative. But I couldn’t just bin them. Maybe there was something important there. I had at least to glance at them. And anything I read brought back memories I’d forgotten to remember – or equally left me wondering why on earth I’d kept the cutting, or why I wrote something?

Other worlds came pouring off the shelves. So much stuff I’d acquired as a student, even as a child. There were papers and notebooks I’d filled at a rainforest conference in Washington. Fat files of notes and photocopies accumulated when I’d written books. Diaries from the south Pacific. Leaflets from exhibitions I’d gone to in London 40 years ago. It soon became clear that I wasn’t just sorting books: I was working out my personal intellectual journey. In several cases, I found more than one copy of the same title bought years apart and in different places. Remembering, checking, discarding, cleaning (all that dust), shelving, re-ordering… it wasn’t just a physical task, but an emotional one too.

So how wonderful to complete it! Immediately it seemed to clear my head, and facilitate new writing (though I’m still learning the details of my new arrangement). I’ve come to value something I would have thought very odd before, that you can see in the top photo: space on the shelves (though I confess the spaces are really smaller than that one, which I created for the effect).

I found so many things I love, I’m going to post a selection here over the next few weeks. Here’s a start, a little arrangement that came together on its own, that’s not in the study. Note the small book by archaeologist Louis Leakey on the right: a thought-provoking study of the Mau Mau problem in Kenya written when he was there, which I found in a shop in Cheltenham.

Jonathan Jones thinks the Hajj “one of the most brilliant exhibitions the British Museum has put on”. I often agree with what he writes, and I’m looking forward to seeing the show, though as I’d suspected that will have to be next week. Meanwhile, here’s a story about an English man who went to Mecca. He’s called Joseph Pitts (a likely relative, but unproven – hence “great uncle”). He is the first known English citizen to have made that journey, in around 1685, having, by his account, converted to Islam under torture.

He wrote one of those wonderful travel books when he was back in England, typically done by people we would never otherwise have heard of who ended up in some corner of the world in ways they had never planned. Another such is William Mariner, who wrote about Tonga in 1817, as I mentioned elsewhere on this blog. My friends Mike Parker Pearson and Karen Godden wrote a book about Robert Drury, who was shipwrecked in Madagascar and wrote about it in 1729.

Joseph called his story A True & Faithful Account of the Religion & Manners of the Mohametans, published in 1704. Little is known about the man, and until now the best report was a short 1920 paper by Cecily Radford (image above). Soon we will have Paul Auchterlonie’s Encountering Islam: Joseph Pitts: An English Slave in 17th-Century Algiers & Mecca, the first modern critical study of Joseph’s book.

And what a book! It begins with his capture. He was about 16 when a fishing ship he was working on, approaching Spain on her way back from Newfoundland, knew she was entering waters plagued by pirates. Yet the crew could do almost nothing about it. One morning the mate watching out from the top masthead spotted a sail in the distance. They must have known what it was as it slowly caught up. Around midday the ship was nearly upon them, and they decided they had no option but to surrender. So they hauled up their sails and waited.

The pirates took what they wanted (mostly just the men), and sunk the English ship. But that wasn’t the end of it. Over the next 10 days or so, a further three English ships and one Dutch one were captured and treated in the same way. So when they finally made land in Algeria, there were some 30 would-be slaves to take to market.

You can imagine why people who survived such experiences, with the right education and contacts back home, were persuaded to write about them.

I’m mentioning this here partly because so little is known about Joseph Pitts, and maybe we’ll be able to unearth some new information. His father John was a nonconformist, and Joseph was one of several children born in Exeter around 1662. He’s said to have been baptised at James’s Meeting (but the records are lost) and buried in Free Cemetery at Friernhay (where there are also no relevant records). If an undated will has been correctly identified, he married a woman called Hannah, they had at least two children, including Elizabeth who married a Mr Skutt, and he died around 1739. I’ve known about Joseph for some time, but only now have I started to look into his history – and excitingly with the help of an old friend may already have tracked down Elizabeth Skutt. We shall see.

Dropped into the British Museum on my way back from another Stonehenge meeting yesterday in London (of which more anon), and took these fuzzy photos with my phone. There must have been some interesting discussions in the early days of organising the Hajj: journey to the heart of Islam exhibition, not least about the sponsor HSBC and exactly what to stock in the shop. These black cubes on the floor are gorgeous, and make a lovely contrast with the great Grayson Perry pot in the hanging behind. The exhibition must be quite unlike Perry’s, yet his too is a spiritual thing, and it would be interesting to see the one after the other (possible until February 19 when The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman closes). Much looking forward to the press view of Hajj next week, if I can make it (dangerously close to the magazine’s going to press day).

The John Lewis Christmas TV ad came in for some stick as well as praise. I loved it so much I was tempted to rush to the keyboard the hour it was first aired. Today’s announcement of JL’s record-breaking Christmas sales (they got it right, then), gives me the excuse to write a quick note now.

This was an advert hoping to make us spend money at someone’s shop. Any criticism that forgot that entirely missed the point. You might as well complain that a polar bear kills seals or a traffic warden gives out parking tickets: that’s what they’re designed to do, and the way to judge them is to ask how well they do those tasks.

So we had a clever story told well, filmed beautifully and set to almost Schubertian piano playing with Amelia Warner/Slow Moving Millie’s version of a Smiths’ song. What was there not to like? If you were a Smiths’ fan, you should have been celebrating. I was introduced to Bach – entertainingly mangled by Jacques Lousier – by Collett Dickenson Pearce’s Hamlet cigar adverts when I was 12 (if you don’t know them, watch the lot here). Bach has been with me ever since, almost every day.

To pick out just one thing I haven’t seen commented on, I liked the cut from the clock pendulum to the swing, reminiscent of the flying bone cut in 2001, one of my favourite films. But what I most liked about the ad was simply that it understood its customers – you only get ads this good when client and creatives work together well. So let’s celebrate the people who made it, among them Craig Inglis (marketing director, John Lewis), Lloyd Page (head of marketing/brand) and creative agency Adam and Eve.

It didn’t hit you over the head with its products or prices, but soothed you into a world that was made entirely of John Lewis, artefacts barely on screen whose presence really came to life only when you visited a store. It was an ad that could have been designed by Danny Miller, an embodiment of his thesis in The Comfort of Things: we are shaped by the stuff around us, and we use artefacts to create who we are.

I found this nice little drawing in an antique market in Hungerford yesterday. It’s by Henry Hunt, Canadian First Nations artist who lived on Vancouver Island (1923–85). I’m largely guessing here, but it looks like a decorative greetings card or souvenir that he might have produced as a cheap purchase for his art shop in Victoria in the 70s. It shows an eagle with a toothy salmon in its claws (a common spring sight in many parts of British Columbia), in the traditional style that Bill Holm described in his Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form (1965).

Henry Hunt was among a line of artists who did much to record and revive Kwakwaka’wakw art and culture in BC. His grandfather was George Hunt (1854–1933), a key figure in this field who provided the anthropologist Franz Boas with important material, collecting and recording huge quantities of artefacts and stories. His sons Richard Hunt, Stanley Hunt and Tony Hunt are also notable carvers and artists, and his daughter Shirley Ford is a button blanket maker; his grandsons Jason Hunt, Tony Hunt Jnr and Trevor Hunt, among others in the family, are continuing the tradition with carvings and paintings.

Henry became a principal carver at the BC Provincial Museum in Victoria, after apprenticeship with Arthur Shaunnesy and his father-in-law, Mungo Martin. Some prominent memorial poles are among his work, including one in Hertfordshire! This was apparently commissioned in the 1960s by a grateful lumberman from Berkhamstead, whose brother had been saved from starvation by the Kwakwaka’wakw community in Tahsis. It was erected at the timber mill in England in 1968, and now stands in a housing estate. There are around a dozen of these poles in Britain, striking pieces of art that often have fascinating stories attached as to how and why they were carved, and ended up here.

Here’s another of Henry Hunt’s drawings, an eagle and wildwoman (1973) from the Coghlan Art website.

All that from a card bought for a couple of quid!

The booklet that accompanied the launch of Henry Moore’s Stonehenge Suite, consisting of 15 lithographs and, in an extended edition, 16 lithographs and two etchings, all with this etching on the title page, in 1974. Altogether 100 sets were printed, before the lithographic images were removed from the stones and the etching plates cancelled. This book also features a preliminary drawing, and an introduction by Stephen Spender. Happy new year everyone!

A further Stonehenge inquiry took place this year, looking at the possible closure of some roads and paths. This morning Wiltshire Council announced that it has accepted the inspector’s recommendations, so another stage towards improving visitor facilities and the landscape around Stonehenge has been passed. I found some of the proceedings difficult to follow, so I had a word with someone at English Heritage, who was very helpful. Here is what happened as I see it.

The key thing is that road changes have been approved, including grassing over the road closest to the stones (part of the A344), allowing construction of the new visitor centre and facilities to go ahead, with a projected opening late in 2013. However, not everything the proponents asked for was granted, and some issues that are unlikely to go away will need to be resolved later down the line.

English Heritage had asked for the A344 closure, which was something the Department for Transport had to respond to. It also wanted to straighten the road north of Airman’s Corner as part of improving the safety of that dangerous junction, which will incorporate access to the new centre when it is done. This is known as a “stopping up order”, and the government agreed to it on October 31 (see map).

The other part of this vision had been proposed by Wiltshire Council, which by a quirk of law is the authority with powers to make such a suggestion, and is also empowered to take the decision. This proposal (a “road traffic order”, or RTO) created so much public concern, the council decided to distance itself and extend the public inquiry. The aim was to cut down general road traffic within the world heritage site, especially on routes that remain unmetalled – including Byway 12, a track that passes close to Stonehenge, crossing nearby archaeological sites at the Cursus to the north and barrows on Overton Down to the south (see map). It sounds straightforward, but it generated the sort of debate we’ve seen at previous Stonehenge inquiries: a mix of elegant thought, chaos, irrelevance and incomprehension, and sometimes just sheer boredom. In other words, it’s as fascinating as all the others.

The inspector, Alan Boyland (who had also reported on the stopping up order), decided that it would be a good thing to close the A344 between Stonehenge and Airman’s Corner to everyday traffic, but a bad thing to do the same to byways (“byways open to all traffic”, or BOATs). The latter was not what Wiltshire Council or English Heritage, or indeed some of the respondents to the inquiry, had hoped for. But it will have pleased many, including some Druids and Pagans, and off-road driving campaigners.

But the celebrations may be short lived (in Stonehenge terms, anyway). Some of the objections came from people who want to drive off-road vehicles through the world heritage site (and some, it might seem, from those who want to uphold the principle that anyone can drive wherever they like). Others, including many of the Pagans, came from people who want to park close to Stonehenge. These are quite different things, and both are problematic.

Firstly, the inspector upheld the right of people to drive along the byways. It might be “convenient and practical” for the likes of Wiltshire Council and English Heritage, who seek to improve the environment, to stop the driving, he said. But it would not be “suitable and appropriate”. He was not persuaded that “the gain to the overall amenity of the WHS would outweigh the loss of amenity of motorised users”.

That’s fair enough, but it is a conclusion that brings problems. The RTO was being sought because the principles are enshrined in the world heritage site management plan. This was created in 2000, after huge public consultation and debate, was revised and updated after more consultation in 2009, and is endorsed by national government (the Department for Culture, Media & Sport) – it is “a material consideration in planning decisions”. It cannot just be ignored. Policy 5c (there are over 40 policies of this type, listed under the headline Action Plan) reads:

“Vehicular access to Byways within the World Heritage Site should be restricted apart from access for emergency, operational and farm vehicles.”

Casual short-term parking close to Stonehenge on Byway 12

Secondly, the inspector did not say that people had a right to park their vehicles on byways. He noted that near Stonehenge, Byway 12 “is frequently used for casual short-term parking” (there were 15–20 vehicles there yesterday, several looking rather long-term). But, he asked, “Is there a right to park on a BOAT?” No, he said. “The public right… is a right of passage”. While “a number of incidental uses may not be unlawful… [such as] temporary parking… this would not be a right in itself.”

So in both cases – driving and parking – there are going to be problems in future. This is partly because the continuing use of Byway 12 in these ways after the other changes have occurred, would be likely to become more intensive (as was seen briefly earlier this year when the A344 was temporarily closed at Stonehenge); partly it will be more disruptive to the majority of Stonehenge visitors, who would then otherwise be seeing the stones in a landscape devoid of car parks and normal road traffic (apart from that on the A303); and partly it will be much more dangerous, with access to the byway only from the fast moving and very busy A303.

And that’s very briefly summarising a huge mass of evidence, argument and review.

Just back from a cold and grey Stonehenge, talking to an ITV crew about the bluestone story I wrote about in my last blog: there should be something on ITV news bulletins tonight.

As I was driving down thinking about it, it struck me that one of the really interesting aspect of this research is the fact that all the samples of rock matched to Pont Saeson come from chips and flakes (debitage), and not from megaliths. What does this mean?

One of the distinctive features of the rhyolitic rocks is that they are flinty – they have a good conchoidal fracture. That makes them relatively easy to break up, if they are standing as monoliths at Stonehenge. But it also makes them pretty good for making tools, or portable artefacts of some kind. There are plenty of flaked bluestone “tools” in museum collections from Stonehenge (some of them from my own dig, as illustrated above, from my PPS report). Which of these are made from debris created when stones were dressed on site? Which are made from broken up megaliths? And which were made in Wales and brought to Stonehenge by people visiting, perhaps on a pilgrimage of some kind? Clearly the distinction has important implications for how we understand Stonehenge.

These are questions that future research can answer, through excavation in Wales and at Stonehenge and study of the debris – that we can do this is a reflection of the quality and utility of the new research. Ixer and Bevins identified five groups of rock amongst the rhyolitic pieces they studied, of which three (by far the bulk of all they saw) they have matched to the Pont Saeson outcrops. There is one buried stump at Stonehenge (stone 32e) that they say could well be from Pont Saeson (to be confirmed), but the four standing rhyolitic stones are different. One of the latter (stone 48) belongs to one of the two very rare classes that Ixer and Bevins identified, which have yet to be matched to a source. One way excavation at Stonehenge would help us, is in allowing modern identification of the stumps and other bits of megaliths at the site.

Just before I set out to Stonehenge, I emailed Ixer to ask how to pronounce “Pont Saeson”. Was it Sayson or Season? He replied that Bevins always calls it Sigh-son. So now we know. (I got his message after the interview, so I used the more specific Craig Rhos-y-felin!)

One of a few things I said that probably won’t make it on air, but interesting nonetheless, are these figures, which I worked out long ago. If we imagine a complete Stonehenge (itself debatable, especially for the sarsen circle), the total weight of rock at the site would have been around 2,000 tonnes. Most of this (some 85%) was sarsen. But if you calculate tonnes/kilometre, based on assumptions about where the sources were, these two rock categories work out about the same, at 50–60,00 tonne/km. All sorts of factors complicate the issue (the sheer bulk of the big sarsens brings exceptional logistical problems, while the shorter distance would have been far less problematic than having to come from Pembrokeshire; most sarsens are likely to have been brought to the site in one go, while bluestone may – or may not – have arrived in different episodes; etc). But it’s this sort of thinking that we need more of, we need to understand the practical Stonehenge as well as the things that are impossible to know, such as why it’s there.