 Well, strange times. Six months ago, back in March, I was beginning to think about this address when, in the space of a week, everything changed. I went from a jolly weekend in Norfolk through a jittery site meeting in Kent Midweek to lockdown in Strawberry Hill by the end of it, with the anniversary meeting unavoidably postponed. The society's staff coped magnificently, giving the appearance to me and especially to the outside world of a seamless transition to home working, which continues to the extent that their work cannot reasonably be done from home. We lost the remainder of the spring events programme to the pestilence, but the experience has not been entirely negative. Indeed, it is shown us how to accelerate our capacity for outreach going forward, as you will hear. This afternoon, I will, as is customary, summarise our activities in 2019-20. I will also address matters of consequence for the society, which have emerged over the past six months, and I look forward to some of the issues that we must address going forward in 2021 and beyond. Turning first to the national picture, last year I reflected on the retrenchment in the organisations and institutions that are responsible for the conservation and study of England's material heritage. The desirability of rethinking the organisation of development-led archaeology to make best use of resources and focus beyond data gathering to the public benefit of increasing knowledge of the past. During the year, with much assistance from my past president, Jill Andrews, who is here, we developed a draft paper, The Future of Archaeology in England, which was circulated widely through the Archaeology Forum and has been intended as a contribution to ongoing reflection on these issues. It would be fair to say that it was not universally well received across a sector understandably concerned with survival and inclined to support, therefore, the status quo, with the consequences of the pestilence emerging as an additional and major concern. On 12 March, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government published a white paper, Planning for the Future, the title page on the screen, which sets out, albeit at a very general level, radical proposals for the reinvention and simplification of spatial planning in England, rather than further tinkering with a system that originated in 1947 and has become ever more complex since. Coupled with central government encouragement, that's the right word, towards fewer larger single-tier local authorities, this makes change to the present structure for managing the historic environment in general and the archaeological resource in particular inevitable. Beware of what you wish for, goes the saying, especially since the word archaeology appears nowhere in the paper. But our emerging view, based on the thinking we did last year, is that this reform actually presents an opportunity to improve the structural provision for archaeology in the planning system. Our response to the white paper consultation is being formulated on those lines, while our own paper, as refined, will be put formally into wider circulation shortly. Turning perhaps next to our own activities. During the year, we offered just over £150,000 in research and travel grants, including that generous donation from Edward Harris. This represents a considerable increase, as you can see, over our preceding five-year average. The range of disciplines is, as ever, wide, but with archaeology almost inevitably predominant. A significant proportion of our grants for projects are for those outside the United Kingdom, particularly in Oman, where the Ducati plants are now being fully taken up. And all periods are represented from the Paleolithic to the Victorian. We're a very broad church. Morris grants for the conservation of decorative or non-structural elements of churches continue to be oversubscribed and were applied to a wide range of items. In summary, our grants awarded last year totaled over £180,000. We all wish that it could be more, but the low return climate for investments is getting worse rather than better. In terms of dissemination, the meetings in 2019 all seem a long time ago now in a different world. We held a record number of public and participatory events through the year, doubling attendance of public lectures and events to over 4,000. Thanks, Danielle. No time to cover all of it, but a few highlights. Our annual research programme was showcased, as usual, grant recipients setting out their stall in this room and engaging directly with fellows and the public. People were enticed in from the courtyard, fascinated by our curious ways, and indeed our furniture, my chair proving quite popular with some. This event, again, coincided with the Burlington House courtyard leats, where we all get together, the six-learned societies including the academy around the courtyard. This year, the theme was exploring the elements, being the anniversary of the periodic table. We had an engrossing evening in the Academy Lecture Theatre. One particularly archaeological paper was on lipids in pots and what one can learn from them. Put over in a way that he engaged people who might otherwise have thought it was an obscure subject. Our postgraduate open day is now a key event in the calendar, or was before the pestilence. Here our director, Chris Skull, introduces the potential of some of our collections. In June 2019, we hosted jointly with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, a lecture by Chris Skidmore, MP FSA, on the value of the humanities to universities and contemporary society. At the time, he was Minister of State for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation, but last year ministers came and went with disconcerting speed. Closer to home, perhaps, the Staffordshire Horde colloquium, organised by Leslie Webster, Tanya Dickinson and Sam Lucy, was the culmination of a decade-long research project. Coincided with the publication, The Staffordshire Horde and Anglo-Saxon Treasure, which is already in reprint, a rare thing for an archaeological monograph. That was our aethioth research report, and we've already followed it by two more this year on Vale of York landscapes and Roman Albra. We now have 37 titles available online open access through Open and the ADS, and we're continuing the programme of making our backlist accessible in this way. In March of this year, we held a seminar to mark International Women's Day and to celebrate the anniversary of the Society admitting female fellows. The centenary, I should have said, perhaps. The day, 100 years of female antiquaries, with speakers highlighting the role of women within the society past and present, was indeed our last before lockdown. This is the first meeting to be held in this room since. And where we are embracing the virtual world. Over the past few months, as a matter of necessity, we've learnt much about how to operate in this new virtual world. Heather Sabir gave our first live-streamed public lecture on the 19th of June, Stonehenge AD 2020 Summer Solstice. And we had about 180 participants, almost twice the normal capacity of this room. All able to put questions via the chat function, which many of them did. And nothing can ever really take the place of being in the room with the speaker. But not everyone can be now, or indeed in normal conditions. So in future, we will be live-streaming all our lectures, both fellows' lectures and public lectures, with, I hope, rather better production values than our historic kit allowed. And giving real opportunity for virtual participation, extending our reach beyond the room, and indeed beyond this country. Our next public lecture by Michael Wood already has 230 bookings, so it wasn't the Stonehenge effect entirely. There is a mark is out there, the potential to expand our reach. Turning to our collections, painful there it has been for many of us deprived of the library, despite the postal loan service. Sysatio of normal work did enable our staff, led by Dunia, to achieve a rapid transition of data to the new library collections platform. And search engine. Now this has been close to my heart since I became president, and I hope will be welcomed and is being used already by all fellows. We are now able to offer limited personal access to the library. And thanks to the fortitude of our staff, we will maintain this unless instructed by government to close for business. But it's vital now, and I've said this before, that we follow through with updating catalogs to modern standards, including more and better images online. As the nature of running a library changes following this investment, we're considering ways to expand and improve the way we manage and catalogue our records, our archives, particularly our own archives. We're rightly proud of our collections as a resource, and these are major steps towards making them better known and above all better accessible to researchers. Which brings me to the fellowships. Sorry, I'm checking the slides. Yes, right. I'm grateful for the overwhelming support for the statute changes reflected in the vote today. This will bring the society into line with current good practice, appropriate and practical for an organisation that now numbers some 3,000 fellows worldwide. But numbers are not everything. We lack diversity. As an ancient white male, I'm conscious that I represent the very antithesis of it. So a sample from our updated fellows database generates this graph or chart of our age profile and illustrates one of our problems all too clearly. In case you can't read the numbers at the bottom, the tallest column says 60 to 70 and the next tallest 70 to 80. And I'm in the first of those. No, I'm in the second of those. So it seems to reflect a situation or the inheritance from a time around the turn of the present century. When election tended not to follow, for example, the publication of a helpful excavation report or post thesis book, as it did when I was election. It was expected in the 1980s, but rather towards the honorific equivalent of a gold watch. Recent elections and admissions now do better reflect society, particularly in the agenda of violence. But change is slow as fellows we naturally tend to propose people very like ourselves. Recent events, and I won't go into detail, have prompted a wider reflection on the sources and human cost of the wealth of our predecessors and have brought into focus the desirability within, of course, our charter remit of excellence in our respective fields. Greater diversity and inclusivity among our membership as there is among our staff. We should, I believe, astew superficial transient or token gestures, but the long term health of the society depends on our diversity, at least reflecting that of the academic and professional sectors which we represent. And not just in the British Isles, but around the world, admittedly, mostly the Anglo foam world where our fellowship is represented. And where in Australia, Australasia and the Americans, we've long had established regional groups. I recently had the pleasure of participating in a Zoom meeting, if Zoom meetings are ever pleasurable, with our Australasian fellows where we discussed how to grow the group and its influence. We recently set up a diversity and inclusivity working group, chaired by Natalie Cohen, to consider the issue of the lack of diversity among our fellowship and what we can do about it. They have a maximum of three years to produce final recommendations and hopefully interim ones along the way. But, of course, this is just one aspect of the need to grow the fellowship if we are to address a structural deficit of 150,000 per annum and rising. So I urge, as I have before, all fellows to put forward suitable candidates for election, not least because we have had precious few candidates put forward since the onset of the pestilence. Please be reassured by the vote that we can now hold ballots despite the restrictions on physical meetings. Turning to Kelmscott, I spoke last year of the work, the proposals there in celebratory tone, I think, with the fundraising for the major investment all but complete, the consent for the project in place, and our staff and the architect rearing to go. We let the contract for the work in November. It was always going well, apart from some low-level winter flooding of the site, until the pestilence struck. After lockdown, work resumed on the 11th of May by our excellent contractor, Ken Biggs, but using fewer socially distanced workers, about two-thirds of their previous capacity. You can see in these slides the new education building on the site of and inspired by a cattle shelter along the side of the yard nearest the road. The south barn in the background taking shape with a quite beautiful thatched roof. Another example, the south barn itself, the roof repaired, and those nice new doors in place of the rather utilitarian old ones, and defunct old ones. So the quality of work remains high, and delay of itself has not added to contract costs. But it has added a year to the programme, limiting the opening of the house without contents, and the exhibition of treasures from Kelmscott here at Burlington House, both supposed to take place during this year, both now pushed back to 2021. And in pessimistic mode, I must add that neither may happen if this gross retestly misnamed new normal, or worse, still prevails through next summer. The first full year of opening will now be 2022, but the sector view seems to be that visitor levels generally will not return to pre-COVID levels until around 2024. So the reopening bounce in visitor numbers that we had anticipated will be missing. The main financial consequence of all this is a year's loss of income. We're reworking the business plan. We've already secured some assistance towards the extra costs involved, and further applications are pending. But meanwhile, two opportunities have arisen. It will be possible within the extended contract to undertake full rather than temporary repairs to this wonderful little building, the field barn and the paddock behind the house, providing we can raise the extra funding. And we really do need to, because the barn has been shown to be in a rather poorer structural state than was envisaged a couple of years ago. So we're hoping to do that within the extended contract period, and Dominic is currently raising funds for the extra cost. Another opportunity has arisen to purchase from the church commissioners the whole 10 acre field in which our car park stands for £150,000. They are selling the entire farm to the north, the home farm, which they bought in 1905 from the farmer, one of whose account books we were quite coincidentally given earlier this year and which I mentioned. This will give us long term security. It will save annual rent and provide future opportunities to add to our offer. It also protects the setting of Kelmscott Church. Since the National Trust already owned the field behind it to the north, we now own the field to the east of that, to the right on the map, which is very helpful. And over lunch we actually sealed the contract, literally with a long fashion seal. Less good perhaps is the state of the society's finances. I mentioned the loss of income at Kelmscott, but organisations in the sector, heavily dependent on visitor income, have mostly been much worse hit with major staff redundancies, including professional and curatorial. The National Trust has been in the news in that regard, but others like historic royal panaces are in a much worse position. We're relatively fortunate. The most serious consequence of the pestilence for us is the loss of the almost over £100,000 a year income, which comes from the letting of rooms in these apartments. And mainly, of course, to kindred organisations. Yola manages this very well. It's very disappointing this year that Forsbydger has intervened. The value of our investments and income from them, as I've noticed, has fallen, though both should recover over time. But one black cloud that has drifted over us is that society is faced with unprecedented potential financial liabilities arising from the university's superannuation scheme, which provides pensions for most of our staff. Some of you have probably noticed this in the paper, but not necessarily connected it to us. Market and interest rate movements have dramatically worsened the deficit in the scheme. To keep it afloat, the scheme's trustees are proposing further increases in the employer contributions that are quite simply unaffordable, as well as a lock that will prevent participating organisations from buying themselves out of the scheme. Even if we could afford to do so, which our treasurer assures me, we can't. We continue to take professional advice on this, but the options to mitigate these risks are very limited. We're a tiny organisation among the many who participate in the scheme, and therefore bluntly have very little say in decisions by the trustees. I'm going to end on Burlington House. This is the existential threat that has faced us for years and can no longer be ignored. Last year I explained the background to the problem of our tenure, and particularly the rapidly escalating rent under the terms of our lease from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government as our landlord. The consequence, uncertainty since 2012, which had prevented us from investing in Burlington House or making strategic plans about the society's future in so far as they were and are dependent on our remaining there. The graph shows that our blue line, the rent increases. The last two years of the current year and the previous year, current year is based on the previous year carrying forward, and it may well be rather more. Now, confidential, constructive discussions with governments were in progress when I spoke to you last, which we hoped would secure our future and that of the other courtyard societies at Burlington House. They did not, and I now feel free to summarise the sequence of events. The societies approached the then minister with the proposition that we wished to negotiate a long lease at a nominal, a peppercorn rent on a best value basis, which recognised the public value of the societies in their historic central London home. The then minister proposed instead that we be given such a lease as a grant if we demonstrated our public value through a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers following treasury guidelines for such things. We did so, but eventually it became clear that the minister had been overruled by his officials. Our rent last year was reduced partly to reflect the consultancy costs, hence the, hang on, what have I done? Right, hence the slight dip. And a new minister offered, with official backing this time, to peg our rental increases to 8% compound for five years. The potential impact of rises at 8% compound is shown in the little inset graph going on upwards. And I think, John, you worked out it would double in eight, was it eight years? Eight to ten, yeah. Clearly not much helped to us. The society is then countered with an offer to purchase such a lease for the current fair value of the property in the ministry's books. Ie, a value that assumed that our right to an 80 year tenure would run its course. Our share of the cost of that would be five and a half million. We further suggested that part of that sum might be met by the transfer of ownership of a very few objects to the national collections in which they have been on loan and display for decades. Though that aspect was not critical to the proposal. The offer was, as we originally intended, grounded in the concept of best value, taking into account our public value to the nation. It was rejected on the basis, essentially, or in terms, as the lawyers would say, that it was artificially low. And that because of the escalating rent, the ministry could soon foresee having vacant possession, which would allow them to realise an open market value of 110 to 120 million, whether by sale or proportionate rent. That sum refers to the new Burlington House courtyard as a whole. The suggestion regarding the objects was dismissed on the grounds of not wanting to set a precedent, despite transfer of objects being a common way to settle inheritance tax liabilities, and was indeed suggested by our fellow Patrick Cormac, Lord Cormac. So, council has decided that we should make one final attempt to persuade government that they should take into account our 5.4 million per annum in public value, this time through a public campaign. We have engaged April 6, especially this communication and campaigns agency, to help us in this, and we will be finalising the details in the next couple of weeks. We know that the society has a strong case and evidence to present through the economic analysis of our public contribution. For good reasons, the government built these apartments for the society 150 years ago to replace those that it had previously provided at Somerset House, and those reasons have not fundamentally changed. The cost of an affordable Easter government is nominal compared to the value of the activities, programmes, events and research which take place here. The government's desire to force what they say is market rent is based on a flawed assessment, which would raise an only nominal sum of money while sacrificing a unique arrangement which has shown demonstrable benefit to the nation. In coming weeks, we will ask and explain how you, the fellowship, can help the campaign to exert pressure on current ministers, with the belief that an arrangement acceptable to both the society and government can be found. We are not looking here for something for nothing, but an equitable and publicly defensible arrangement. I hope you will step up to protect our magnificent collections and make this building accessible not just to us, but to all in the coming decades. We could have done a great deal more over the past few years, but of course it would not have been wise to invest in upgrading the building or devise, for example, the membership scheme I mentioned last year based on being in Burlington House, when we could obviously not guarantee that would go forward. If we do not succeed, the society will have to face leaving Burlington House and seeking a congenial birth elsewhere, which in the market sense is most unlikely to be in central London, possibly not in London at all. We are rich in assets, both scholarly and market terms, but we are cash poor. There lies the dilemma we must face, but I for one would be saddened not to see our flag flying over these apartments, which have borne our name over the door for such a very long time. Thank you. Not quite finished. I must finally end by thanking our officers, Stephen Dunmore, Chris Skull, Heather Sabir, who's just run for a train, members of council, committee members, General Secretary John Lewis, and above all our staff and volunteers, both here and at Kilmscott. Their unfailing hard work, especially in the exceptional circumstances of the past six months, has been impeccable. So, I really have finished that. Questions, I'm happy to take and answer as far as I can.