About me

A picture of Nathan. He's a fiftysomething white guy with a shaved head and a white beard. He's standing in a garden in front of a red wooden fence.

I’m Nathan Bottomley, and the website Guns and Frocks hosts or links to 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. It was originally a self-hosted WordPress site, but in 2022 I reimplemented it with the static site generator Eleventy. More of which later.

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 finished the Peter Capaldi era at the end of 2024, and now we’re taking a couple of years’ break.

500 Year Diary has taken over from Flight Through Entirety as my main current Doctor Who podcast. The style and format is similar to late Flight Through Entirety, but we cover stories across the whole history of the show and its spinoffs, organised thematically rather than chronologically.

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. Like Guns and Frocks, the podcast websites are all created with Eleventy. They also use an Eleventy plugin I wrote called eleventy-plugin-podcaster (or Podcaster for short).

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.