About me

A picture of Nathan. He's a fiftysomething white guy with a shaved head and a white beard. He's wearing a mauve T-shirt

I’m Nathan Bottomley, and the website Guns and Frocks hosts pretty much everything that I write for the web. It started life as a travel blog back in 2008, but now it also contains some things that I’ve written either for publication or for my own amusement, and soon it should contain some technical articles about using the static site generator Eleventy to create websites, particularly podcast websites.

I’m a Latin teacher, and I’m in my thirty-first year of teaching Latin, Classical Greek and Studies of Religion at Sydney Grammar School, a private, academically selective boys’ school in Sydney, Australia.

I’m also a podcaster, currently running or appearing regularly on a number of podcasts mostly about science fiction and fantasy television. These include

Flight Through Entirety, which started in May 2014 and has been working its way through televised Doctor Who story by story, starting with the very first season in 1963. We’ve just finished the Peter Capaldi’s second series as the Doctor in 2015.

Untitled Star Trek Project, which started late in 2021. In it, my friend Joe Ford and I choose a random Star Trek episode and record a commentary on it. We’re both lifelong Star Trek fans who love every iteration of the franchise, no matter how silly it gets.

Bondfinger was an occasional James Bond commentary podcast which started by covering all of the James Bond films and which finished up mostly watching classic spy-fi television from the 1960s.

Jodie into Terror was a flashcast where we recorded our intial reactions to the Doctor Who episodes of the Jodie Whittaker era.

Maximum Power is a Blake’s 7 podcast in the style of Flight Through Entirety, featuring contributors from Australia and the UK.

Startling Barbara Bain is the spiritual successor to Bondfinger, in which we get together and watch an episode of Space: 1999.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire is the spiritual successor to Jodie into Terror — a place where the FTE hosts get together and record their reactions to each new episode of Doctor Who, starting with the 60th anniversary specials and continuing into the Ncuti Gatwa era.

I created and maintain the websites for all of these podcasts, which has given me the opportunity to learn how to create and present content for the web. And I created this site as well, to be a place of my own on the web.

If you want to find out what I’m up to at the moment, take a look at the Now page. If you want to find out what I use to do it all, take a look at the /uses page

I live in an inner-city suburb of Sydney with my husband Calvin and three adorably fluffy dogs.