I have just spent the past four days in Antwerp, to which my parents have retired after many peripatetic years in the foreign service. I was there to open boxes containing the excess paraphernalia from various stages of my youth, sealed and placed in storage every time we moved house. Some of these boxes I had not seen for a full two decades, so triage proved to be quite the nostalgic exercise — fantasy and science fiction novels by the pound from my first stint in New York, shockingly atrocious poetry I’d written in my late teens in Australia, strong circumstantial evidence of an early infatuation with existentialism and Nietzsche, and far more spelling mistakes than I remember making in essays that nevertheless betray a strong disposition towards style over content.

My sister and my brother-in-law were there too, with Amélie. On my brother-in-law’s laptop, the entire bit-torrented season of Rome, the acclaimed BBC drama that purports to show the era with an unflinching dose of gritty realism. I copied these anon. I wasn’t sure what to expect — I, Claudius meets Gladiator, perhaps? — but decided to check out the first episode on my Ryanair flight back to Skavsta last night.

Ten minutes in, past the opening credits and some good fight scenes, we suddenly learn that Romans were not averse to, how shall I put this, flagrante delicto fucking in front of their household slaves, but also in front of me and my two fellow passengers, upstanding citizen Swedes both, who fastidiously pretended not to notice the raunchiest scenes this side of Caligula on my suddenly massive laptop screen. It took interminable seconds before I could recover my computer’s composure. In a repentant mood, I ended up watching most of Casablanca for the remainder of the flight. I learn something new every time I see that film — for example, it turns out I am now just four months shy of Rick’s age.

But unlike Rick, I went to Stockholm for the waters, and I wasn’t misinformed.