BEFORE hitting 50 next year, former SNJ news editor Sandra Ashenford has compiled a bucket list of 50 goals to achieve before her birthday.

The aim is to do one every week.

HAVING failed to tick off anything from the list last week, I was fretting to daughter number four that we weren’t going to be able to do anything this week either.

“Don’t worry mum,” she said, “we can walk part of Hadrian’s Wall.”

I pointed out that travelling all that way this close to Christmas just wasn’t going to happen.

But she shook her head and opened her laptop.

She is a big fan of Google maps, so we took a virtual tour of a short section of the wall.

This was a novel experience for me, and not quite what I had envisaged when I wrote the list.

It will have to do for now, though, and we will head up north in the spring when the weather improves, and we can enjoy the gorgeous landscape.

As my birthday is at the beginning of March our visit probably won’t be strictly within the time limit but we will definitely do it anyway.

I studied Latin for seven years, and even though I can’t remember that much of it any more, I’ve always been fascinated by the Romans.

And life in Roman Britain is one of the history workshops I offer to schools.

We have great fun handling 2,000-year- old pottery and trying to work out how to put on a toga.

It involves attempting to wrap a huge amount of fabric.

Some of the Romans who ended up posted to Hadrian’s Wall weren’t too keen on the British weather, though.

There are letters which exist from soldiers writing home and asking for some woolly socks to be sent to them.

I guess leather sandals and bare legs are probably not the best thing in our chilly climate.

Where the Ancient Greeks are known for their poetry and philosophy, the Romans were a very practical race.

Quick to spot a good idea and adopt it into their own way of doing things.

It’s true that they had some rather nasty habits.

They were known to eat some strange food from time to time.

Dormouse rolled in nuts, anyone?

But on the whole I think I would have fitted in quite well.