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@missy  @ichabod

I, too, remember the rag-and-bone man who came round with his horse and cart collecting scrap metal, old clothes and other items for what we would now term recycling. I don’t remember if he collected meat bones as well, but he may well have done, presumably for glue making, or grinding for fertilizer.  We used to have a knife grinder come round also, on a bicycle with a grinding wheel attachment on the front.  The coal man too, with his lorry piled with coal sacks, but in our case he just had to carry the sacks to the coal hole by the back door.

At that time most of our food was delivered, as well.  We moved to Norfolk at the beginning of February 1947 when I was four and a half years old,* and for the following eight years we lived in one of an isolated row of small semi-detached houses situated in a hamlet a little over a mile from the village and four miles from Norwich.  I can still remember the butcher who came round with his van once a week, and the ingratiating way he talked: ‘ I’ve a nice bit of lamb for you this week, Mrs — ‘.  Since this was during the period of stringent post-war food rationing we didn’t have a say in the matter; we had to take whatever he had in stock and chose to sell to us, and the ‘nice bit of lamb’ was as like as not to be scrag-end.  Fortunately my mother was a good and resourceful cook, so she could make something appetising from even the most meagre and unpromising ingredients.  Then there was the fishmonger, also once a week, the greengrocer ditto, and the baker twice a week.  For everything else we were registered with a grocer in the city and phoned in our order once a week which they also delivered (luxury of luxuries there was a phone in the house!). When I got to the age of eight or so I was sometimes asked to phone in the order, though it was pretty straightforward: ‘the rations’ – our fairly meagre allowance of butter, cheese, bacon or ham, eggs, sugar and tea – plus any other items we could afford which were not ‘on the ration’ or were ‘on points’. The points system controlled the distribution of many items such as canned goods.  Every household was allocated a certain number of ‘points’ to spend as they chose, and the number of points required for particular items fluctuated according to whether that commodity was currently relatively plentiful or in short supply.  Tins of salmon, for example, were a rare indulgence because generally they ‘cost’ a lot of points.

@missrori

I have been thinking about your question concerning indoor flowering plants and will contact you soon with some suggestions.  Here, though, there is now less than an hour to go before the broadcast of the first episode of season 10, and Who takes precedence for the moment.

 

* The tale of our removal from Yorkshire to Norfolk is a saga in itself, since in Britain the winter of 1946/47 was one of the coldest and snowiest of the 20th century

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@mersey

The Movie Which We Do Not Name is no way to have been introduced to any manifestation of the Doctor, so your original reaction to the seventh Doctor is entirely understandable.  I have to admit that I, too, underestimated McCoy in the role until fairly recently.  I had stopped watching entirely not long after Colin Baker took over, because I had begun to think that the show was going in the wrong direction and so lost interest.  When McCoy took over I did watch again, briefly, to see if things had improved, but his first season did nothing to alter my opinion – not entirely his fault, of course.  I can’t speak for the Big Finish productions because I have heard very few of them – which is odd because, having grown up until the age of fourteen without television, and after that with only limited viewing for several years and sometimes no access to television at all for periods of months at a time, I have always maintained that the pictures [in ones imagination] are better on radio.   It is only relatively recently that I have had the opportunity to watch some of the later McCoy episodes, and they give a better idea of his potential as the face of the Doctor. – Remembrance of the Daleks, for example, or The Curse of Fenric.

I cannot say that there is any manifestation of the Doctor who is *my* Doctor, unless it is Capaldi  whose interpretation seems to me to embody so many aspects of previous incarnations whilst yet bringing something new to the role.  Among the others I have my preferences, of course, chiefly Patrick Troughton, Tom Baker (most of the time) and Matt Smith, but I wouldn’t discount any of them entirely.  That is the strength of the character and the brilliance of the concept of regeneration: provided that the core values persist the permutations are almost infinite. All that is needed then are writers who understand the concept and have the imagination and skill to create stories round it, and actors who are sympathetic to the ideas and can give them life.

 

 

 

 

 

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@pedant

There can’t be that many people who would have got the Joan D Vinge reference…

Imagine an irritatingly smug grin  🙂

@thane15

puro, you have builders disturbing the peace, I have the merry men from Anglian Water digging up the road outside to replace the supply pipes.  No music, though, shitty or otherwise – they wouldn’t be able to hear it above the noise of the pneumatic drills and other machinery.  I’m off to the city centre to give my ear drums a rest and for a little retail therapy

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@pedant

just noticed that I referred to The Snow Queen

I was baffled by that, I confess, since I couldn’t discern any link with Hans Andersen and Danish fairy tales, still less with a science fiction novel under the same title, and I wasn’t at the time in lateral thinking mode. The Snow Goose, on the other hand, is a reference I do recognise; so now it makes perfect sense 😉

Reverting to the subject of Roman iron working; the Romans may not have developed the blast furnace, but I have just been reading up on the shaft furnaces they were using just a few miles up the road from the focus of my interest.   I am playing catch-up in this regard, because Roman Britain never held much appeal for me as a student. At that time all anyone seemed interested in were the military sites, plus villas which seemed to be studied as a phenomenon without context.  The approach is different now.

 

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Brief footnote on the small bottle I found yesterday.  I have now cleaned off all the encrusted gunk to reveal the legend Booth’s Distillery Ltd.  embossed in the glass along one of the facets. So it is a 60 ml miniature gin bottle, 1930s vintage judging by the images of comparative examples I found via Google.

 

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@mersey

I agree that the current format of Gardener’s world tends to seem cramped and am glad that in this 50th anniversary year we have been promised more one-hour episodes.  The Chelsea Flower show is next month and the BBC generally devote at least an hour and a half a day to that during the week it is on. I don’t know whether you get any access to that. It is pure gardening fantasy, but very watchable.

As regards your pot plant, it all depends on what kind of plant it is.  Some like direct sunlight, others prefer to be slightly shaded, some like a humid atmosphere, others dry, and the amount of water they need also varies according to species.  The commonest fault is overwatering; the compost becomes waterlogged and the roots get no air and so rot, so the general rule is to water only when the surface of the compost in the pot starts to feel dry, and not to leave the pot standing in water.

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@whisht

You have just reminded me that I have a copy of The City and the City which I bought ages ago and put aside to read later.  It got buried under a pile of other books, but I have just checked and relocated it, so I have put it back on top of the pile.  I must have read most of Ray Bradbury’s output back in the day and it is, as you say, heady stuff and highly evocative of times and seasons and places which probably never quite were but should have been.  @ichabod , in mentioning a novel by Alfred Bester, has started me on a kick of re-reading some of my old science fiction paperbacks from the late 1950s and 1960s, which has been an interesting experience.

@winston

Your account of excavating the old dump brings to mind a similar experience.  In the village where we lived from the mid 1950s through the 1960s, just up the lane from us, there was an old cottage built in the local tradition of ‘clay lump’ which is pretty much what it sounds like – unfired blocks of clay mixed with chopped straw and perfectly serviceable as long as it is on waterproof foundations and the roof is secure.  At that time much of the village was not connected to the mains water supply, and many households including ours had their own artesian bores or else relied on surface wells.  The old couple who lived in the cottage did not even have piped water indoors, and we used to see the old lady crossing the lane with her bucket to get water from the well in the field opposite.

When they left the cottage was left vacant and my mother and I, being inveterately nosey, went poking round.  The cottage itself was like a time capsule from c. 1850. There wasn’t even a cooking range, just an open grate with a hob to the side and a bar across the chimney with a pot hook from which to hang a cauldron.  Beside the cottage was a half-collapsed open shed containing the remains of a pony trap and an old style horse-drawn farm waggon, and to the rear, in an overgrown orchard, there was a mound which we set about excavating. A lot of the stuff we found dated back at least to the turn of the century and some of it well before.  Among the finds I remember a horn spoon  and an enamel mug commemorating Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, earthenware jam jars, bottles of the kind with glass marble stoppers, and an almost complete washstand set of washbasin and ewer.  I still have a large stone ware jar or urn which graces my garden as a kind of ornament, and an enamelled go-to-bed candlestick of the kind with a saucer and little handle.

When I moved here in 1988 the garden was a long neglected and overgrown jungle which I set about clearing. At the bottom was a mound which, when I got around to levelling it, proved to be another rubbish dump.  Mysteriously, the objects and the pottery I found in it all seemed to predate the building, which is on a housing estate erected in the mid 1930s. There was even a piece of medieval painted window glass, and I cannot imagine where that came from. As far as I can discover the whole area before it was built over was occupied by market gardens.  I have a  collection of small bottles from this dump – drug bottles, scent bottles and the like, including a wonky-looking Bovril jar which my mother, when I showed it to her, declared to be ‘before my time’, and she was born 1915.  The latest in the collection came up this afternoon.  The corner where the rubbish dump was is where my compost bins now stand, and today I was emptying the bin with last years compost.  At the bottom, partially exposed as a result of the activity of worms which  are attracted to the rotting compost, there was another small hexagonal bottle, completely intact – by the look of it probably a container for some kind of culinary ingredient.

@janetteb  @arbutus

Thanks for your appreciative comments, but you shouldn’t encourage me. I am well aware that I am one of the worst offenders when it comes to straying off topic and at length.  From the fund of stories of the cats I have known I could write a book, but with less than four days to endure before the end of the Who-less drought, now is not the time or place 🙂

 

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@janetteb

(re-emerging briefly from my corner)

Yes, we in the ‘old world’ are lucky in that respect.  The archaeology of hunter-gatherers is interesting but frustrating because of the relative scarcity of material evidence.  There is a reason I veered away from Palaeolithic archaeology and eventually began to find even Neolithic and Bronze Age studies – my original field of specialisation – limiting.

The archaeology of relatively recent periods can be interesting too, though.  In the years immediately before I retired I was required to survey and assess World War II coastal defence installations, and on one occasion even to study a 1950s nuclear bomb storage facility.  I thought I would hate it, but it was in its own way fascinating, though it was disconcerting to reflect that I was recording the archaeology of events within my own life span.

The point is, that the material record of everyday life and of industrial sites, even from relatively recent periods, is valuable because so much of it is taken for granted at the time and not a matter of documentary record.  I can think of domestic utensils and practices common in my parents’ childhood, or in mine for that matter, which would baffle younger persons now.  A few months ago I was talking to one of my nephews and he was staggered to learn that house where we lived until I was two and a half years old had no electricity or telephone, and that we relied on oil lamps for lighting and a coal fired range for cooking and water heating.  He said that he had no idea that people lived in those conditions so relatively recently and could scarcely imagine how we managed.  He was equally staggered to realise that I had many vivid memories of it – and yes, they are genuine memories, rather like brief video or film clips, and relate to nothing that anyone ever described to me or to the few photographs which were taken (it was wartime, after all, and photographic film was hard to get hold of) . Much later in life, when talking to my mother, I found that I could remember details of that house and the rooms within it that she had forgotten.

And now I really will retire to my corner and shut up 🙂

 

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@pedant

Take all that it is not hard to let the mind drift to a scenario where the Romans were one blast furnace away from an industrial revolution.

No blast furnaces, but in the area I am looking at there is plenty of evidence for late Iron Age and Roman iron working from the first century onward.  They were exploiting the local carstone (ferruginous sandstone for the uninitiated), from which you may deduce that we are talking about North West Norfolk. In the township which is the focus of my research at least three sites have been identified from surface scatters of iron working residue, though it all seems to have been on a fairly small scale.   There was a villa immediately to the north, so chances are this was, or became part of the economy of the associated estate.

@pedant @thane15 @bluesqueakpip

Yes, it is all a lot more complicated than the version taught in schools – when it is taught at all, that is.

Most of lowland England was already enclosed via a combination of piecemeal illegal the Enclosure Act and assarting, with started in the twelfth century

Well, up to a point that is true, and in some regions of lowland England the open field system was never typical to begin with, but in parts of Norfolk large areas of open field survived until late.  In the particular township I have been studying manorial documents show that even in the mid 18th century there were still extensive tracts of open field with strips held in severalty.  In the 1490s there had been almost no enclosure apart from some closes of pasture adjoining the homesteads and crofts of the village itself and one or two small enclosed pieces on the margins of a couple of the fields. A subsequent manorial survey suggests that nothing much had changed a century later, and it is only in the mid 17th century, when ownership or tenancy of the land began to be concentrated in just a few hands that things started to change slowly. What seems to have happened is that towards the end of the 18th century the landowners, having bought out the freeholders and taken in the small copyholds, came to an agreement among themselves to rationalise the system in the arable fields and to enclose the uncultivated sheep courses. Certainly no Act of Parliament was required.

The other thing to note is that in Norfolk the open field system operated rather differently from the Midland pattern, in that the operative units in the system of rotation were not the fields but the furlongs – the subdivisions of the fields into which the strips, here known as pecia or pieces – were organised. There could be any number of fields of varying size within a single township, and they seem to have been little more than convenient units of reference, usually bounded by roads or natural topographical features. Another complicating factor was that most townships here contained land belonging to several different manors.  It must have made management of the rotations extremely complicated.

The township I have been studying is a few miles south west of Townshend’s Raynham Estate but beyond the edge of the boulder clay and extending beyond the limit of the lower chalk, so the soils are somewhat different.  As in most of North Norfolk, it was farmed in the medieval and early post-medieval periods according to the foldcourse, or sheep/corn system which integrated arable cultivation and pastoralism. Large flocks of sheep were grazed on extensive unenclosed and uncultivated sheep courses, and at night were folded on the fallow furlongs or pieces, and on the fields ‘in time of shack’ – i.e. between harvest and ploughing for the next years crop.  Not as productive as the four course rotation, but it served to make Norfolk one of the wealthiest counties in England for several centuries.

At which point I have probably bored the pants of everyone who has had the stamina to read so far, so I will switch out of archaeological mode and retire to my corner.

 

 

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@pedant

Yeah; I was of course joking, as were you. I may not be a geographer or geologist or a climatologist or a meteorologist, but I am familiar with the basics, which are useful to an archaeologist. As it happens I have just been examining the more intricate details of the cretaceous and quaternary geology particular to the area of my current investigation, as well as the soil map, because they are relevant to prehistoric, Romano-British and medieval activity in the area, and particularly to the pattern of agriculture and husbandry practiced there – the layout of medieval arable fields, pastures, common and sheep courses matches the mapping of the bedrock, superficial deposits and resulting soils beautifully. I also have to consider the vagaries of the weather during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in relation to the Black Death and the impact on the population of the village, because the tally of vacant messuages in the late medieval survey of the township, which like most such surveys retains information from a much earlier periods, provides a fairly exact measure of the fall in population which matches the rather more generalised documentary evidence.

As for the Cromer Ridge, there is no need to tell me about it, I must have tramped over almost every inch of it in the course of my field work over the years 🙂

So if you go into full geographer mode I am prepared to retaliate.  You have been warned 😈

 

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@pedant

I stand corrected 😳

I first read the ‘semi-arid’ claim some years ago and was surprised, as my understanding of that classification was as you define it, but the source seemed authoritative so I did not question it.  You identify the problem though: Wales – and the Lake District do steal the rain, and most of what they do not snaffle gets deposited on the Midlands, so more often than not when rain is forecast, we end up with nothing, or at best a light sprinkling which is barely enough to lay the dust.  Very frustrating for a gardener.

The writing of short stories – or memoirs for that matter – will have to wait; I have a monograph to finish, and a fair amount of additional research before I can do so.

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@thane15

If you are judging by the examples above, puro, I think that your praise of my writing is somewhat overstated.  When I wrote yesterday evening, glass of wine to hand, I did check for typos, and even so missed a superfluous ‘a’, but re-reading in the morning light I can see several glaring stylistic infelicities. But hey, this is an internet forum, and if I were to spend time polishing my prose I would never get round to hitting ‘submit’.

One thing we didn’t need to do, incidentally, was peel the dough from the cats. They proved able to manage that without assistance, licking it off themselves and each other. Those two would eat anything if it was left unguarded in a kitchen, as my mother’s neighbours soon learned.  Even as tiny kittens they were adept at opening any door with a lever handle, and they regarded any house in the vicinity as part of their territory. Fortunately the little imps were so endearing that few of the neighbours seemed to mind their burglarious habits.

Shadow, sadly, did not live very long, although what life he had was adventurous and crammed with incident.  Unfortunately, his lack of caution was his undoing, because he was hit by a car one dark night on a narrow lane nearby which led to a golf course.  There was a 5 MPH speed limit on the lane which was little more than a track, but many of those heading to or from the club house ignored it.

Sundance lived to a good age, though, and in his later years used sometimes to come home at night smelling of expensive cigarettes and perfume.  My mother never did discover where he had been, but it led to some fantastical speculation.

Your gardening problems, having to contend with heat and drought, evoke my sympathy.  East Anglia is the driest region in Britain, officially classed as ‘semi-arid’, and it is a couple of weeks at least since we had any significant rainfall here, but my rain water barrels are still full, and this early in the season the soil beneath the surface retains some moisture, even if it is dry on top.   Today we are getting a foretaste of summer, with temperatures predicted to hit 22 C or above, so it’s carpe diem and off into the garden for me. There is no time to waste if planting is to be done.<b></b><i></i><u></u>

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@mersey

Beth Chatto’s garden is wonderful and I just wish that they could have devoted more time in the programme to it and the interview with her.  The garden is only about 60 miles from where I live, but it is a long time since I last visited it and I really must do so again soon. At one time the format of Gardener’s World was such that they would alternate between one week’s programme devoted to discussion and practical demonstrations of gardening techniques and planting, and the next devoted entirely to an exploration of one garden and its gardener and/or designer – sometimes one nationally famous and open to the public, sometimes a just a particularly interesting private one which had been brought to their notice.  In some respects I preferred that approach, although I still enjoy watching.

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@janetteb

I used to make hot cross buns, though nowadays I buy them from Marks & Spencer.  They were generally successful to the extent that, although they did not look entirely professional, they tasted better than the bought variety. I did learn very early, though, that they should be made with ‘strong’ (high gluten) bread flour. If made with ordinary, all purpose flour, the texture is all wrong.

The most memorable occasion on which I made them was Easter 1980.  I was living in Northampton at the time but had come over to Norwich to spend the holiday weekend with my mother. Arriving on the Thursday afternoon I offered to make the buns and, early in the evening, set to work mixing and kneading the dough.  The previous summer my mother had acquired two Burmese kittens, one brown, one red, respectively named Shadow and Sundance. They were a mischievous and highly resourceful pair, and for the first ten or fifteen minutes they were underfoot making a nuisance of themselves; then apparently they lost interest and went out to terrorise the neighbourhood. Having kneaded the dough I set the bowl in a conveniently warm place to prove, returning an hour later to knock it back and shape the buns, placing them on two baking trays which I returned to the warm place.

I then went back to the living room and told my mother that the buns were now rising in their trays on top of the boiler.  ‘Oh’ she said, ‘I don’t think that’s a very good … ‘ but before she could finish there was a loud crash from the kitchen.

We ran through to witness a scene of devastation. One of the trays was on the floor and in the middle of it was Shadow, wolfing down the raw dough which trailed in strings from his lower jaw, whiskers and paws.  The other tray was still on top of the boiler, but Sundance was sitting beside it, patting the buns with one of his forepaws

Having evicted the miscreants we binned the contents of the tray on the floor, but having inspected the buns in the other tray for contaminants such as cat hair, decided that they were salvageable, and in due course they went into the oven.  That year, though, they were referred to as ‘hot paw buns’.

As for jammy dodgers, not even for the Doctor would I buy or eat them. I just wish that he could have expressed a preference for one of the few varieties of sweet biscuit that I actually liked. But such is life, and chacun a son gout and so forth.

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@pedant

No research needed 🙂  The source of your quotation adorns my bookshelves, along with most of the associated body of work.

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@joshamus  @blenkinsopthebrave

I have mixed feelings about this.  It promises to be a pyrotechnical spectacle 😮 but, whereas Michele Gomez’s Missy is magnificently nuts but nuanced, John Simm’s version of the Master was a little OTT for my taste. Maybe with a different writer we will see something a little more subtle.

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@miapatrick

The difference between ‘garden’ and ‘yard’ is another one of those linguistic divergences to ponder.  With me, as for you, a garden is an enclosed space where people grow things for pleasure or domestic use, whether flowers and shrubs or fruit and vegetables.  A yard is a utilitarian area at the rear of a house or farmstead, sometimes paved, where you might  – and certainly within the lifetimes of my parents and grandparents  – have found the wash-house, coal hole and privy.  Grander houses might have had courtyards and forecourts, which were more formal spaces.

At my maternal grandparents’ terrace house in Stockton Heath, within my own memory, the scullery containing the only water tap and sink in the establishment, as well as a copper with a grate beneath it which was used for heating water for baths and for laundry, opened onto a yard containing the coal house and the WC –  a step up from the house my mother grew up in, where the privy was an earth closet at the end of the garden.  The tin bath was hung on a hook on the scullery wall. My maternal grandmother, born in 1882, was the second to youngest in a large family, and the yard of the cottage in which she grew up also contained the baking oven.  The boys in the family would be responsible for heating the brick oven by lighting a fire of brushwood within it. When the oven was hot enough they would rake out the ashes, and then the girls would run across the yard from the kitchen with the bread loaves and pies under their pinafores (to protect the dough from the elements) and put them in the oven.  It is an image which has always appealed to me.

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@missy @thane15 @miapatrick

The topic of language, the evolution of language and linguistic usage has arisen, so how could I resist 🙂

Miapatrick is correct, that the English language is a hugely flexible mongrel tongue which has, on a Germanic base with its own varying and regional dialects, evolved and, in the process of evolution, borrowed from multiple sources including aboriginal British (Welsh), Norse, Norman French,Latin and Greek. Over the past four hundred years or so it has then been exported to many parts of the world and developed numerous variants; so who is to judge what is or is not ‘correct’. One of my sisters in law and her family speak an expressive form of English which has developed in the Indian subcontinent and is perfectly valid and comprehensible, even if it does not conform exactly to the English spoken in England.  Sometimes  elements of these variant dialects – as, for example, those spoken on many Caribbean islands, not to mention the version disseminated by US cultural imperialism  –  have returned to the mother island to enrich it or, as some cultural dinosaurs seem to think, contaminate it.   Language, and even pronunciation evolves, as anyone who has watched British or American films of the 1930’s and 1940’s can attest. On one occasion I made an American acquaintance collapse in laughter. She, vaguely aware of the differences in vocabulary and usage, was trying to explain something to me, and I loftily intervened to assure her that there was no need to explain because I was bi-lingual.

What I do find saddening is the gradual erosion of the dialects spoken within Britain itself.  From my family I learned  words and expressions specific to Cheshire, Lancashire and West Yorkshire and, growing up in Norfolk, I acquired another and very different dialect vocabulary, some of which I now know to derives from Flemish and Dutch immigrants to the region, but I suspect that there are many younger people in both regions who now would recognise few of them.  Even the regional accent in East Anglia seems to be flattening out into a kind of South Eastern ‘estuarine’.

Despite my awareness of the natural evolution of language I do find some things dispiriting- the conflation of ‘uninterested’ with ‘disinterested’, for example, which eliminates a subtle distinction in meaning, or the confusion between ‘flout’ and ‘flaunt’, which is a malapropism and not excusable. I am often also both irritated and amused by the increasingly common misspellings of words which have a Greek or Latin derivation, although it isn’t particularly surprising.  After all, how could anyone who has never studied Latin be expected to know that the word ‘desperate’ derives from Latin spero, to hope, and that desparate could imply  something different. Another one which amuses me is the spelling of hypocrisy as ‘hippocracy’ – literally ‘government by horses’ which always brings to mind Jonathan Swift and ‘Gulliver’s Travel’.  The meaning is normally apparent from the context, however, so there is no reason to obsess about the niceties – and, to digress, ‘nice’ is an example of how the meaning of words evolves.  In Jane Austen’s ‘Northanger Abbey’, Henry Tilney teases Catherine and her friend about their use of ‘nice’ in the way that we would now generally use it, meaning ‘pleasant’ or ‘agreeable’, rather than ‘subtle, or ‘delicate’, so the preoccupation with linguistic change is nothing new.

 

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@mersey

You didn’t enrage me, and I am very sorry if I upset you by giving you the impression that I was ‘enraged’.  I was simply a little concerned that you seemed to have allowed the opinions and criticisms of others to sway your judgement.

I’m glad that you do in fact enjoy Gardeners’ World and like Monty Don as presenter and hope that you continue to do so.  I have watched the programme for over forty years, in which time there have been at least seven different presenters with different talents and approaches to the subject of gardening, and all have contributed in their different ways to developing it into what it is now; much in the way that many different people have contributed to the evolution of Doctor Who, in fact.  For every viewer individually some stages in the development may appeal more than others, but you stick with it throughout, because you know that it is worth it in the long run.

Incidentally, if your interest in gardening programmes extends further, Monty Don has presented several short TV series on gardens and garden design across the world and throughout the past five hundred years, and if you haven’t come across any of these already, I would recommend that you look out for them.

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Steven Moffat’s response to the fuss about Bill’s sexuality, with applause from me.

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@mersey

after reading those critical comments I started to think that maybe Don really is wrongheaded, has no professional knowledge or is just rude

This is straying somewhat off topic but, as a keen gardener myself,  I think that you are being a little unfair here.  Alan Titchmarsh’s training as a practical gardener began with an apprenticeship after he left school. Monty Don came to it by a different route, but that does not mean that he is any less knowledgeable or worthy of respect and it is, after all, the way in which he now principally earns his living, so he is no longer really an amateur.  Some of the most influential English gardeners of the last century, such as Gertrude Jekyll, Vita Sackville-West and Christopher Lloyd, were in any case ‘amateurs’ in that sense, as well as in the sense that it was not their primary source of income.

Like most gardeners, Monty Don has his preferences and prejudices when it comes to techniques and plants, as I do myself – which does not mean that I condemn those who hold different opinions; and when it comes to subjects like ‘organic’ horticulture and the use of chemical pesticides Monty’s views hold some weight.  Pesticides kill beneficial insects as well as pests, including those which prey on the pests, and so can cause as many problems as they solve, and some have proved over time to have a cumulative and long-term deleterious effect on the wider ecosphere.  There are in any case many other, if sometimes more labour-intensive ways of combatting the little blighters. Having seen both, you may prefer Alan Titchmarsh’s ideas on garden design to those of Monty Don, but that is also a matter of opinion and not a reason to dismiss the latter out of hand.

All I mean to say is, that there is no need to change your initial views of someone or something solely in response to criticism by others, any more than you would necessarily change your views of Stephen Moffat as a writer and show-runner just because he has been at the receiving end of vociferous criticism.  Trust your own judgement – while of course remaining open to arguments and insights which expand your understanding and appreciation 🙂

 

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@mersey

after reading those critical comments I started to think that maybe Don really is wrongheaded, has no professional knowledge or is just rude

This is straying a bit off topic but, as a keen gardener myself I feel that you are being a little unfair here.  Alan Titchmarsh’s training as a practical gardener began with an apprenticeship after he left school. Monty Don came to it by a different route, but that does not necessarily mean that he is any less knowledgeable or deserving of respect and it is, after all, the principal means by which he earns a living. For that matter, many of the most influential English gardeners and garden designers of the 20th century were ‘amateurs’, in the sense that they were not professionally trained and it was not their main source of income – people such as Gertrude Jekyll, Vita Sackville-West, or Christopher Lloyd.

Having watched both you may find that you prefer Alan Tichmarsh’s ideas about garden design to those of Monty Don, but that is a matter of personal preference, and both have useful information to impart.  Like all gardeners, Monty Don has his preferences and prejudices when it comes to plants – I do myself, which does not mean that I condemn others who like the ones I prefer not to use. Likewise he favours certain techniques, which is also a matter of personal preference and even practical ethics. When it comes to ‘organic’ horticulture, for example, he has a valid point, because chemical pesticides in particular tend to cause as many problems as they prevent, killing off beneficial insects, including the predators which naturally control the pests as well as the pests themselves, and thereby compounding the problem, and many widely used chemical pesticides have turned out eventually to cause even more long-term, endemic ecological damage. There are, in any case, many other less drastic – if occasionally more labour intensive – ways  of dealing with the little blighters.

All I mean to say is that, just because you find that someone is criticised in some quarters, that is no reason to suddenly alter your opinion of them and dismiss them out of hand, any more than you should alter your opinion of Stephen Moffat as a show-runner just because he has been so often attacked by vociferous critics in some quarters.

In other words, trust your own judgement and ignore what others say unless it contributes to your depth of understanding 🙂

 

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@rorysmith

Welcome back.

I don’t think many people thought of this

See my post #55029 above 🙂

 

 

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@thane15

Delighted and relieved to know that you all survived with nothing worse than a little rising/falling  damp, though I feel for all those who were flooded out, or lost their roofs or more.

I don’t know whether you followed up the link I included, but if not, and you weren’t already aware of the site, it is quite entertaining and informative and I used it to track the course of Debbie.  You can zoom in on any place on the planet and get information on the current weather and forecast, with a side bar which you can use to summon up a general view of temperature, cloud cover, precipitation, wind speed or barometric pressure.  Hours of innocent fun if you have nothing better to do 🙂

The blood test was just routine.  The vampires (phlebotomists) have taken untold litres of my blood over the years without any ill effect. My only concern was that I usually book an appointment ahead of time, and I wasn’t sure if the could fit me in at short notice.  If they hadn’t, I could have gone to the NHS walk-in centre in the city – about 25 mins walk from here even at my now relatively sedate pace, but that might have entailed my waiting there for an hour or two .

As for the NHS in general; in this region – at least in my recent experience -it is still providing a remarkably good and efficient service despite being under considerable strain, but how long this can continue is uncertain.  In relation to GDP Britain spends less on its health service than any other  country in Europe, and the present government seems intent on making further cuts while promoting policies which fragment the service and make it less efficient and cost effective.  The man put in charge is on record as favouring a privatised system, which tells you all you need to know about the ideology driving their policy.  I spent half an hour this evening filling in a questionnaire for a group campaigning for the NHS against the government and I have been signing petitions and writing letters, though with vanishing hope that it will have any effect.  As for Brexit, I can hardly bring myself to watch the news or read the headlines now, or I become terminally depressed 🙁

@arbutus @janetteb

I agree that weeds do not, in themselves, hold much allure, and I can become more than a little obsessive once I am absorbed in research, but yesterday and today the sun was shining and the temperatures were almost summery so, for the afternoons at least, the lawn and the weeds won, and even lawn-mowing and weeding can be quite soothing to the spirit.   In normal years the weeds and pests have been controlled by a brief, gentle amble round the garden two or three times a weeks, but because I was incapacitated for much of last summer they flourished, flowered and seeded – so it’s back to square one.  As my maternal grandmother observed in her wisdom, ‘One year’s seeding, seven years weeding’.  The slugs and snails have yet to make an appearance, but I am armed and ready to do battle – and where they are concerned, I take no prisoners.

 

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@thane15

Stay safe all of you.  I just checked your weather here which indicates that you are currently (10.30 am our time) still at the epicentre of a deluge.  I hope that does not mean that the water creep in your house has turned into a full scale flood.  Having experienced a flooded house once, way back in 1968 when the piddling little river that bordered the garden rose 7ft overnight and decided to re-route itself down our driveway, I know how devastating that can be.

@winston

The crocuses here have done their stuff and are now over, but they made quite a show.  I planted a single handful of corms (species crocuses from my mother’s garden) 22 years ago and they have gradually proliferated into a carpet, covering large areas of the borders and invading the lawn.

Minor panic first thing this morning, when I suddenly remembered that I had a haematology appointment looming and should have had a blood sample taken two days ago 😳  Cue desperate call to my GP surgery:

Me – in my best wheedling tones: I need a blood sample taken today for a teleclinic appointment next Tuesday; is there any chance … ?

Receptionist: Do you have the appropriate form with you?

Me: Yes.

Receptionist: No problem then. What time would suit you best? 9.30 or 10.05?

Who says the NHS is inefficient!

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@thane15  (puro)

Flattery will get you a long way, 🙂 but I think that you over-praise my garden.   The word ‘professional’ would not occur to anyone seeing it at the moment, at any rate, although it has a certain degree of dishevelled charm, with the narcissi, primroses, violets, camellia and Japanese quince in full flower   It is still suffering the after effects of last year’s neglect, when I was convalescing from the hip op and couldn’t do much; and now that I am fit but once again fully engaged in my research project, it is still not getting the attention it needs. Yesterday I had fully intended to make use of the spring weather – sunny, 17 C – by cutting the lawn and doing some much needed weeding at least, but ended up spending the whole day trying to sort out some anomalies in my mapping of the medieval field system.  I think that I now have it sorted, but after ten hours trying to get it to fit exactly the 15th century written description I was ready to hit the bottle.

@arbutus  I think I know what you mean about alternate realities, although in my case my head, or at least my nose, was for most of the season tucked firmly under my furry tail, emerging from time to time only to observe that the world seemed, indeed, to be yielding to insanity.  In the present circumstances, alternate realities look very seductive 😈

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@thane15

If they think “strip farming and changes in agriculture is not needed” the class gets nothing.

I suppose it comes down to whether or not you think that how we got to where we are now is important; I happen to think that it is, and that the more people learn about how things really worked in the past – as opposed to the myths that all countries have about themselves – and the more they know and understand of how people in other countries and regions of the world – now and in the past – think and organise their societies, the better equipped they are likely to be to deal with life as it is. Parochialism, nationalism and a lack of understanding of the past is, I think, at the root of quite a few of the problems we are currently facing.  But it is an uphill struggle  – sisyphus again 🙂

As for the teaching of medieval social history and economy in schools, I seen to remember a very simplistic version of  feudal society and associated agricultural systems being presented in our second year in upper school (age 13) – i.e. social structure = King > barons >knights > villeins, and agriculture = the two or three open field rotation system . In fact the feudal hierarchy and system of tenure was never as simple as that, even in the early days following the Norman conquest, and it soon got very complicated indeed, and the simple two/three field system with one whole field left fallow each year, and with manors generally coterminous with the townships, was typical only in the Midland region of England.  In fact the distribution and functioning of manors, the organisation of fields and land tenure and the system of farming all varied considerably from region to region – which is why I think and hope that my study will provide some genuine new insights, if I ever succeed in finishing it and getting it published .

Hot chocolate;  I’m not sure that I would have known what to do if presented with a glass of hot milk and a brown stick-like thing.  I find the drinking chocolate powder too sweet for my taste, so I make it with plain cocoa powder, mixed to a paste with about half a teaspoon of sugar, and add the hot milk from the pan, as you would.

@winston  It has happened to me once or twice that code appeared in my text for no apparent reason, even when I hadn’t copied and and pasted, but as @pedant says, if you click promptly on ‘edit’ (top right, next to the post # ) it can be edited out.   Mind you, having recently had a fairly lengthy post vanish when I attempted to edit it, I am starting to feel a bit cautious about using the edit function 😕

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Well, I’m back and all seems to have gone well with the op; the cataract is gone, although  that eye not much use at the moment – it will be quite sore for the next day or two, and at the moment the pupil is still dilated to maximum because of all the atropine they dripped into it, so I can’t focus on that side.

@winston  Yes, it has been fascinating to study.  One crucial element which I mentioned in the original post which disappeared but which I failed to mention in the second and rather shorter version above, is that the original field work was concerned with the visible earthworks which still mark the sites of abandoned medieval homesteads and the associated gardens and crofts. What alerted me to the potential of the 15th century written survey was that the earthworks on the ground could be matched exactly to descriptions in the survey, down to being able to identify many of the earthwork enclosures by the name of the homestead and the occupier. The modern landscape of the arable fields bears very little relationship to the medieval system of open fields, furlongs and strips, of course, but I discovered that several of the field names which survived into the 19th century, and even into the present, are recognisably  descended from names in the medieval survey. Much of the old road system is also still traceable in lanes and bridle paths, and there were other topographical clues, so with that as a starting point I have been able to reconstruct the medieval map, though it was a bit like doing an extremely large and complicated jigsaw puzzle.

@thane15  Oh, the wonders of modern technology. Back in my Neolithic schooldays the nearest equivalent concern was likely to be keeping the teachers from spotting the book I was reading under cover of my desk 🙂

You asked about aerial reconnaissance.  The County Archaeological Service maintains an extensive library of aerial photos, including several of the area in question, ranging from 1946 RAF surveys to the present day, and I made good use of that, but I also did a good deal of work on the ground, and I must have walked every inch of the surviving earthworks – humps and bumps marking building platforms and the banks and ditches of the croft boundaries.

Once I had reconstructed the map – which took quite a while before I arrived at something which corresponded exactly to the description, I set out to try to analyse the society of the village, the structure and how the communal farming system functioned.  There was quite a lot of detail in the early survey, and in later, less comprehensive surveys and manorial records, about the individual tenants, how much land they farmed,  how much of that was held according to feudal custom and how much was freehold – most tenants had some of both, and most farmed land from more than one of the four manors in the township, so it was quite complicated. I began to feel as if I knew some of them – families with intriguing surnames such as Platfoote (very hobbity) and Paunch, and a Johane (Joan) Cattell and her descendants – there were quite a few women named at various times as having lands in the Township, probably widows who had inherited the right to their husbands farms.  There is still work to be done in that area, and on the earlier evidence for prehistoric, Roman and Saxon activity in the area, so it may be difficult to know when and where to stop. There is always more to be learned.

Time now to stop squinting at the computer screen, as it probably isn’t very good for a newly operated eye, so I’m off to get myself a drink of hot chocolate, and then to my bed.  I probably won’t be able to work on the project for a few days, or to read, so maybe a chance to catch up on some TV viewing, or perhaps re-watch some Dr Who.

 

 

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@thane15 and puro  I’m not sure what happened there 😕  I posted a fairly lengthy screed which you evidently saw but which, at least from my point view, disappeared into the ether when I tried to edit a couple of typos. So I wrote another which hasn’t disappeared, but which doesn’t include the reference to gargleblasters or the forthcoming cataract op.

The gargle blasters are most acceptable, and will fortify me for tomorrow 🙂

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@winston @blenkinsopthebrave @thane15 @ichabod

Thank you for those words of encouragement; it feels good to be back in the groove 🙂 The only problem is that I’m not very good at multi-tasking and once I am immersed in a project of this kind it tends to occupy most of my waking hours. Yesterday I even grudged the time I spent on some necessary and urgent work in the garden. As for housework, forget it!

ichabod  It isn’t in fact a new project. It stems from some field work I did years ago on the site of a ‘shrunken’ medieval village when I was employed by a national organisation. While doing the necessary background research I came across a wealth of documentation in the County Record Office, including an 18th century copy of a late 15th century written survey which provided a systematic and very detailed description of the township with its homesteads, fields, manors and tenants .  The information in the survey and in various slightly later documents, in conjunction with 18th and early 19th century maps and surviving field names, have been enough to enable me to reconstruct the map of the medieval township down to the details of the individual strips in the open fields, and I have also been analysing the pattern of feudal tenure and the beginnings of enclosure in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century.  I got as far as a draft report, but then came up against the problem of reproducing the map(s) for publication, given that the smallest scale at which the details of individual tenants strips in the fields could be shown was 1:10,ooo.  So things went off the boil a bit, and then there were various distractions and a spell of health problems.

What I am hoping is that the Oxford College which held the original of the copy I have been using will still have it in their archive, perhaps with some earlier documents which the 15th survey was using as a reference. It could mean more work or at least a good deal of revision, but no matter!

@thane15 @pedant  Yes, the role of serendipity, intuition, trial and error and sheer dumb luck in the process of scientific discovery should not be underestimated. What matters is the ability to recognise what is significant, whether it presents itself in a dream, in a passing thought, or as a stumbling block on the way to somewhere else. It highlights the stupidity of funding policies which prioritise research which is solely focussed on a practical,  commercially oriented end.

 

 

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@winston @blenkinsopthebrave @Thane15 @ichabod

Thank you for those words of encouragement; it feels good to be back in the groove 🙂  The only problem now is that I am not very good at multi-tasking, and once I am immersed in this kind of project it tends to occupy almost all my waking hours. Yesterday I even grudged the time I spent on some necessary and fairly urgent work in the garden. As for housework, forget it!

ichi – It isn’t by any means a new project. It originated many years ago when I was working for a national organisation and was doing field work on a ‘shrunken’ medieval village – i.e. a tiny village which was once much larger, where the remains of medieval homesteads and crofts are still visible as earthworks. As a matter of course while researching the background I checked in the County Record Office to see if there was any useful documentation and discovered a treasure trove, including an 18th century copy of a late 15th century written survey which described the township, with its homesteads, fields, manors and tenants in such systematic detail and with such a wealth of topographical references that I realised it might be possible, using this and some slightly later post-medieval documents together with the archaeological evidence, later maps  and surviving field names, to reconstruct a detailed map of the medieval village with all the details of its field system down to the individual strips.

Once I retired I was able to pursue this more or less full time. I have succeeded in reconstructing a map which fits the description in all details, have done quite a bit of work on analysis of the pattern of feudal tenure and the process of enclosure in the sixteenth and early 17th century and got as far as writing a draft report.  Then things went off the boil a bit. The smallest scale at which all the details of the map(s) can be shown is 1:10,000, which presents a problem for publication, and then there were various distractions and a spell of health problems.

What I am hoping is that the Oxford College which held the original of the copy I worked from will still have it in their archive plus, with any luck, one or more of the earlier documents. If so, it could mean a lot more work and revision, but it would be worthwhile,

Thane/puro  Do I qualify for the gargleblaster on offer? even if this isn’t really a new project?

@thane15  @pedant  Yes, the role of serendipity, intuition, trial and error and sheer dumb luck in scientific discovery should never be underestimated.  What is essential is the ability to recognise what is significant, even if in a dream or a passing thought or image. It does highlight the stupidity of funding policies which prioritise research focussed on narrow, practical objectives over research whose aim is simply the extension of scientific knowledge wherever it may lead.

Tomorrow is the day when I get my other eye fixed, after which – all being well – I will have perfect or near perfect distance vision, though I fear I will still need reading glasses.

 

• This reply was modified 9 years, 8 months ago by  Mudlark.

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@winston @blenkinsopthebrave @thane15 @ichabod

Thank you for those words of encouragement;  it feels good to be back in the groove. The only problem is that I am not very good at multi-tasking, and when I’m immersed in a research project it tends to become a full-time affair consuming most of my waking hours. Yesterday I even grudged the time I took off to attend to some necessary and fairly urgent work in the garden.  As for housework etc. – forget it!

ichabod – it isn’t by any means a new project, although it has been on the back burner for the last three years and more.  It stems originally from some field work I did years ago when I was working for a national organisation and had to research and evaluate the site of a ‘shrunken’ medieval village – i.e. a tiny village which was once much larger, with visible earthworks marking the remains of medieval homesteads and crofts.  As a matter of course I checked in the County Record Office to see if there was any relevant documentation and found a treasure trove, including an eighteenth century copy of a late fifteenth century written survey which, very unusually for the period, described the township in minute and systematic detail with its homesteads, field systems, manors and tenants – most medieval surveys are much less detailed and tend in any case to be restricted to individual manors, which is of limited use in a township comprising several manors.  It contained such a wealth of topographical references that it occurred to me I might be able to use it, together with the visible archaeological evidence and surviving field names, roads and bridle paths to reconstruct a complete map of the medieval township, right down to the furlongs and individual strips in the fields.  As was usual at that period, the survey was based on an examination and comparison of earlier documents, so it also contains a good deal of information relating to earlier periods.

Since then I have succeeded in producing a map which matches the description in all details, have done a lot of work analysing the pattern of feudal tenure during the later medieval and of enclosure in the early post-medieval period, and produced a draft report, but then things stalled a bit. I had to think of how I could possibly reproduce the map or maps for publication, given that the smallest scale at which all the details of individual strips in the fields could be shown was 1:10,000. Things then rather went off the boil, what with various distractions and a spell of health problems.

What I am hoping is that the Oxford College which held the original of the copy I have been using still has it in its archive and that, just possibly, it has some of the earlier documents as well, although if there are earlier documents it may involve a good deal more work.

@thane15 – puro  Do I merit a gargleblaster? Even if it isn’t exactly a new project, just one that has been re-vitalised?

@thane @pedant  Yes, the role of trial and error, serendipity, intuition or sheer dumb luck in the advancement of scientific knowledge should never be underestimated.  What counts is the ability to recognise what is significant when it presents itself, even if it is in a dream or a random thought.  It does rather highlight the stupidity of policies which prioritise the funding of research focussed on narrowly defined practical ends over research aimed at the general advancement of knowledge.

Tomorrow I have the cataract operation on my other eye, after which – all being well – I should have perfect distance vision, though I will need stronger reading glasses 🙂

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Teaser for season 10, not that it is a particularly informative

Nevertheless, a little light relief, considering that I am now re-immersed in a serious piece of historical/archaeological research which I had, to my shame, been neglecting for some time.  I ran into an old acquaintance last week who has offered to facilitate my access to the archives of an Oxford College, and my enthusiasm has been re-ignited

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What happened? I posted something here a few minutes ago and now it has disappeared.  Ah well, try again.

@whisht

I saw the first four episodes of Taboo before deciding that watching Tom Hardy grunting his way round a fantastical version of Regency London was not all that enthralling, and that any interest I had in finding out what it was all about and how it was going to end was not sufficient to sustain my interest of a plot which seemed to be going round in circles at a somewhat stodgy pace.

Your observation that The Coat – aka James Delaney – is ‘hardly a sympathetic character’ is a remarkably restrained understatement on your part, given his penchant for incest, murder, the odd spot of cannibalism and occasional forays into what appears to be the practice of black magic 😉

 

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@whisht

I watched the first four episodes of Taboo before realising that watching Tom Hardy grunting his way round a fantastical version of early 19th century London was beginning to get tedious, that my interest in finding out what on earth was going on and how it would all end was not sufficient to overcome my impatience with a plot that seemed to be going round in circles at a somewhat stodgy pace, and that there were probably more productive ways of spending a Saturday evening.

To say that The Coat, aka James Delaney, is a ‘hardly a sympathetic character’ is a very restrained understatement on your part, given his penchant for incest, murder, the odd spot of cannibalism and an occasional recourse to what appears to be some form of black magic 😉

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@ichabod

Your mention of Alfred Bester’s ‘Tiger Tiger’ has led me to reread it after an interval of nearly fifty years, and I think your memory may have done some disservice to the novel, not least in conflating two different female characters.

The central character, Gully Foyle, is not portrayed as a hero in any usual sense, although his growth in self awareness and ultimately to a kind of redemption is charted in the course of the narrative. At the outset he is an unthinking brute, bred in the gutter, uneducated, speaking only the inarticulate argot of the gutter and driven by unreasoning rage and the desire for vengeance on the ship (note, at this stage not even people) which had ignored his distress signal and left him to die in the wreckage of the Nomad.   The rape of the psychiatrist to whom he had been assigned for rehabilitation is portrayed clearly as a symptom of who he is at the time. When, much later, he encounters her again, the devastating effect that the rape has had on her life is stated explicitly. She certainly does not fall in love with him, but in her desperate state she is persuaded, by the offer of large sums of money, to instruct and guide him on how to conduct himself in upper class society.

Between these two events, the second woman in his life is encountered in the prison/hospital in which he is confined, and it is she who stimulates his latent intelligence, teaches him to think, gives him the language and vocabulary to express his thoughts and provides him with the beginnings of an education.  But he is still an angry, driven man, dominated by his lust for revenge, and after their escape together, when he is faced with the choice of saving himself or risking all by waiting for her, he abandons her to what he assumes is her death.  When they meet again, her attitude towards him is, to say the least, ambivalent, and she is a force to be reckoned with.

The third w0man in his life is the blind woman, a member of a powerful clan, who ‘sees’ things in an electro-magnetic  spectrum, and it is she who falls in love with him and who he, in turn, both loves and loathes. She is, in her own way, as monstrous as he if not more so, conscienceless in her responsibility for countless deaths, and when he confronts her he sees a mirror of himself, becomes fully aware of what he has done and become and, in doing so, is freed from the compulsion which has driven him to this point. He acquires a conscience and feels the need for atonement.

All this is set in an imagined future in which women have been consigned to a kind of purdah ‘for their own protection’, but all three women have agency in their different ways, and all three have a crucial part to play in the release of the protagonist from his prison of ignorance and anger. At the end it is in part their understanding and forbearance which redeems him.

On the whole not bad, I think, for a science fiction novel of the 1950s

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@thane15

No trouble at all.  As long as there is anybody here who finds my occasional off-topic outpourings interesting, it is a pleasure.  If it becomes tedious, I hope that people will tell me so 🙂

@pedant  As thane says, LOL, but these days there are so many Hallmark festivals in the calendar; how do we distinguish them one from t’other?

@ichabod   The tradition of well dressing/well blessing is – nowadays at least – largely confined to villages in the Peak District – the upland areas  of central England which are on limestone with many natural springs – and takes place during the summer months.  I suspect that the original tradition survived in a few places and has more recently spread to others whose inhabitants did not want to be outdone.  At times the Church has disapproved of the practice, but nowadays the presentation of the ‘dressed’ well is generally accompanied by a short religious service (if you can’t beat them, join them) and a local  brass band is often engaged for the occasion.  I gather there are sometimes Morris dancers as well 🙄

 

 

 

 

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@thane15

An afterthought:   It occurs to me that I was talking about reading chiefly in relation to books, because for me and all  other readers of my generation books were our principal resource. But now, for better and worse, there is the internet, which offers an infinitely more accessible, world-spanning library for anyone who can learn to use it with discretion.

That said, and speaking strictly for myself, words on the page are still much easier to read and digest than words on the computer screen .

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@thane15

You dangled the bait in front of my nose, so I’ll bite 🙂

I don’t know what or how much your teacher told you about Valentine’s day and I may not be able to add much – if anything, since I’m not particularly knowledgeable on the subject of hagiography.

St Valentine (Valentinus?) is one of those saints of the early church about whom little or nothing is known. There are at least three possible candidates and a number of legends which accumulated around the name, all of them probably apocryphal.  In one version he was a Roman soldier who was martyred; in another, a bishop of the early church in Italy. Or he may never have existed; some saints, particularly in the Greek Orthodox church, appear to be no more than thinly disguised pre-Christian deities or demi-gods.

The feast of St Valentine coincides, near enough, with the date of a pre-Christian Roman festival, the Lupercalia, which was celebrated on February 15th.  The Lupercalia long predated the rise of Rome as an imperial power and seems to have originated as a shepherds’ pastoral ritual relating to the protection of the flocks. The coincidence of dates could indicate that the early Christian church co-opted this pagan festival for their own purpose, a practice which seems to have been fairly common. The date chosen for the celebration of Christmas, for example, was the same as or close to various European mid-winter festivals, including the Roman Saturnalia, and a letter from Pope Gregory to St Augustine, who was sent to England to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons, suggests a deliberate policy of founding churches on the site of pre-existing sacred shrines. Even now, in Britain, there are many wells and springs associated with saints names which were believed in medieval times to have curative properties, and the veneration of many if not most of these sites is likely to long predate the introduction of Christianity, to a time when they were associated with particular local deities and spirits. In a few places in Britain there are still annual ‘well dressings’  when the local holy wells  are decorated with an elaborate display of flowers and greenery. Many of these wells are associated with St Helen, and I doubt very much whether the Helen in question had anything to do with Helena, the mother of Constantine, discoverer of what was believed to be the True Cross.

But I digress.  The association of St Valentine’s day with romantic love seems to go back no further than the 14th century, when it was believed to be the day on which birds began their courtship, but the tradition may also owe something to the medieval ideal of courtly love – the pure (?) love of the chivalrous knight or squire for a lady, having nothing to do with marriage, which remained a pragmatic and business-like arrangement between families.

In my curmudgeonly opinion none of this justifies the modern commercial hoo-ha.  A discreet card to the object of one’s affection or admiration has a certain appeal, but I draw the line at hugely expensive bouquets of red roses which are unlikely to last more than a couple of days before they wilt, or equally expensive, heart-shaped boxes of chocolates 😈

Changing the subject:

Good for you, choosing reading; but I hope that you don’t come to think of it as a chore, because that rather defeats the object of the exercise.  From my own point of view, books and reading were what broke down the walls and opened the whole world to me – the world of facts and science, of fiction and imagination, of speculation and possibility. But then I have been addicted to reading since the age of six, and I know from long experience that many others, including some of my close friends, see and experience things differently, so I make no judgements.

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@janetteb

Despite the fact that I knew even at the time that they were being broadcast in colour, I still tend to think of the Pertwee episodes as being in B&W, because when they were originally broadcast I did not have a colour TV set.

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@thane15   Not so much ‘deep’ as perceptive 🙂

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@ichabod

Thanks for the tip about ‘Beloved Poison; it sounds just my kind of book and I will look out for it.  I haven’t come across Alan Bradley or the Flavia de Luce series, but having looked them up I think the books sound interesting. My only reservation is that, although the author is Canadians and he had never visited this country when he started writing, he set the books in England. Not necessarily a reason to reject the work, but it brings to mind some other books set in Britain by North American authors.

One such is Connie Willis.  In many ways I like her writing and  I enjoyed ‘Domesday’, even though some of the historical details and perceptions were a bit iffy if not outright wrong, but my appreciation of the two part novel ‘Blackout’ and ‘All Clear’  was diminished by the numerous and ubiquitous factual errors and cultural false notes, and I think that was the case with many British readers .  I know that she did a great deal of research into the blitz in London but, despite the vast resources of the Mass Observation archive, she seems to have gained little insight into the nuances of social hierarchy and social history of that period as it pertained to the blitz, and her knowledge of the geography, flora and fauna of the British Isles* and such matters as coastal defences appears somewhat sketchy, to say the least.  One of the most convincing sections is that which is clearly based on the information she gained from a chance encounter in the Imperial War Museum with a group of women who were having a reunion there.

Picky, picky, picky, I know; but if a novel is set in the past or a foreign country, and the reader knows a great deal about the period or the country in question, such errors are an obstacle to immersion in the story.

Digression and mini rant over.

Have you come across The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, by Natasha Pulley?  If not, I recommend it. It is her first novel, set set chiefly in late 19th century London, and I’m not sure whether it should be classed as fantasy or magical realism or something in between; but it is beautifully written and I found it spell binding.

 

* Many British species were introduced deliberately into North America but, with the exception of the grey squirrel, the same is not true in reverse.  Do you recall a song briefly popular in the 1960s –  ‘Country Gardens’ set to the tune of that name by Percy Granger? The lyrics consisted largely of a list of birds and flowers supposedly to be found in an English garden, and the one thing remarkable about that list was that hardly anything in it would in fact be found in any garden in England 🙂

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@davidzdep   Welcome to the Forum.

As @missy suggests, your description exactly fits the third Doctor, played by Jon Pertwee from 1970 to 1974.  He affected a dandified style of dress, with frilled shirt fronts, velvet jackets etc. and, during the earlier part of his run at least, he often wore a silk lined cape.  The vintage yellow car was named Bessie, and beneath her antique exterior were some surprising modifications.

The Pertwee episodes were the first to be broadcast in colour.  All episodes survive, I think, although a few required restoration, and DVDs are available.

 

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@ichabod

I wasn’t ever, really, what people thought of back then as a regular girl

Nor I, though I could look the part if I tried – small, blonde, etc. etc.  As a kid, if I could be persuaded to take my nose out of whatever book I was reading, I was much more likely to be found tearing round the countryside with the boys, exploring abandoned chalk quarries, climbing trees, building dens in the woods and sliding off haystacks, than I was to be playing with dolls; and I *loathed* the colour pink – a prejudice which it took me decades to overcome. As a teenager I wasn’t typical, either, although becoming a bit more conscious of the fact that I marched to a slightly different drum; and from the age of 16 I was in any case starting to focus on my ambition to be an archaeologist. The fact that I went to an all-girls school was probably an advantage, in that I was at most regarded as being slightly eccentric, gained a small amount of status from my academic ability, and there was no pressure for me to be other than myself.

Like you, I was a reader of science fiction from an early age – around ten or eleven in my case, but what mattered to me were the ideas, the speculative dreams of future utopias or dystopias and the extrapolation from scientific theories.   The characters in the novels and short stories written by the  authors of the ‘golden age’ were rarely more than two dimensional puppets anyway and of lesser importance, though I did discriminate and there were certain authors I learned very rapidly to avoid.  I was always sensitive to how girls and women were portrayed, and recoiled from any evidence of misogyny  Your mention of ‘Tiger Tiger’ reminded me that I have a copy in my fairly extensive library – Penguin edition, 1967, and what you say of it may explain why have never re-read it since and have only the haziest recollection of the plot.  Equally,  I latched on to any depiction of a strong and clear minded female character, as in John Wyndham’s  ‘Trouble with Lichen’.  As for the more militaristic end of the genre, warfare in space held little appeal unless there was a more interesting wider context.

What you say about women’s greater ability in general to inhabit male characters in fiction, whether is as writer or reader, is true in my experience, also, but things have improved, and I have noticed recently that there are now a few more male novelists who can portray rounded female characters, or even write a convincing female first person narrative..

Reading choices are another matter, though all the anecdotal evidence is as you say. I have only my own immediate family to go by, and most of them are or were fairly eclectic readers and perhaps not typical. One of the dominant figures of my childhood was a great uncle-by-marriage who was a journalist, American correspondent for a London newspaper in the 1920s and, when I knew him in the 1940s and early 50s, the editor of a middle-brow weekly literary magazine. Their house was my heaven, where I was free to roam his library and read anything which caught my fancy.  He was a blunt spoken Yorkshireman from Keighley, and as far as I could tell he did not discriminate between the writings of male and female authors.  He was certainly nuts about the novels of the Bronte sisters, wrote about them and was a leading member of the Bronte Society. My father did not have a great deal of time to devote to reading, but he encouraged it in us and he was, among other things, highly appreciative of the novels of Georgette Heyer, as being well written, witty, and highly entertaining.  My mother, who was the eldest of three sisters, was a voracious reader from an early age, although her family owned very few books because they could not afford them and her main resource was the public library. But her taste in novels was narrower than mine and perhaps more ‘literary’, and her preferred authors were almost exclusively female.  My younger brother seems fairly conventionally masculine in his reading tastes and his favourite novelist is John Berger, but my youngest brother’s and my tastes overlap to a considerable extent (it was I who introduced him to the works of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett) and when he visits almost the first thing he does is to prowl my bookshelves for reading matter – sometimes books magically transport themselves across the English Channel. When I think about it, though,  most of those books we have in common are by male authors.

Reading habits are clearly partly a matter of personal inclination and partly of social conditioning, but sexuality and gender lie along a spectrum with no hard and fast boundaries, and writers who can command that spectrum have a clear advantage, as do readers who are not constrained by a gender or age determined strait jacket.  There are men who are fans of the novels of Jane Austin – I seem to remember that Rudyard Kipling wrote about such in his short story ‘The Janeites’ – and there have always been men like my great uncle who appreciated the works of the Bronte sisters; and then there was my father who could not understand my fascination with science fiction and fantasy, but enjoyed reading what are normally regarded as quintessentially ‘feminine romances’.

What is ‘normal’, anyway?  As you say, this is the Doctor Who Forum.

 

 

 

 

 

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@ichabod

I wasn’t thinking of principle, though, but in terms of sheer *volume* to sort through, check, and counter-check.

Assuming there is a future, there will almost certainly be an algorithm for that 🙂  The multiplicity of data to be sifted is not the greatest problem, so long as the primary sources are available. After that, as @pedant says, it is just a question of who is the source, who is telling the story and – cui bono?

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@thane15

it was sad to hear about them saying: “well all this bad stuff, kinda glad i’m leaving the planet soon.”

There have been time recently when, considering my age and projected life span,  I too have caught myself thinking that, though I try to shake myself out of it. We seem to have so little time to secure the future of humanity and the planet, and those in power and those they have seduced into enabling them seem hell bent on a course of destruction, because they cannot see beyond their own scientifically illiterate, tunnel visioned and short sighted, self interested noses.

It is tough on your generation, and all those who will have to live with and find a way to cope with what is coming, but the human race is resilient and resourceful. I’m just sorry that those of my generation who care probably won’t be around long enough to help much.  During my lifetime the majority of us in the developed world have been privileged. Regardless of individual circumstances, we lived in an optimistic world in which the material and social circumstances for most were gradually improving and even the most disadvantaged could hope for better, provided some nutter did not press the nuclear button.  Now everything is in the air again, and things appear to be going backwards, but that is no reason to despair and give up. I forget who said that history does not repeat itself but sometimes it rhymes, and in either case we can learn from it and be alert to that rhyming; and once people see, they can organise and resist.

.

 

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@ichabod

Moving the discussion here, so as not to stray too far off topic.  When I first read TLoTR at the age of fourteen I did so at a gallop, concentrating primarily on Frodo’s quest.  I had read The Hobbit when I was younger, and so seized on the first two volumes when I came across them in the school library.  It was immensely frustrating to find that neither the school nor the public library had the third volume.  What drew me in, I think, was the obvious resonance with the myths ands sagas of northern Europe, which had always held a particular fascination for me.

On the second reading four years later and in subsequent re-readings  I found a lot more in to appreciate and digest.  The pace never bothered me – in fact, provided that they are well written, disciplined and without redundancy, I prefer slower narratives which allow space to explore and consider the scenery and hinterland of the imagined world, whether that world be fantastical, futuristic or prosaic.

It never occurred to me to feel bothered that the protagonists in TLoTR were predominantly male, no more than it would have done if the principal characters had been female. What mattered, and still matters, is that the characters are believable and three dimensional in the context, and written with insight and depth.  In TLoTR they are to some extent archetypes, of course, but to me at least, they live and I can understand them.

I wonder sometimes if this outlook is in some way androgynous, in that I seem to be able to think myself at least partially into the skins of both male and female characters. Perhaps this is innate, or perhaps it stems from the fact that I was born and reared as the only daughter in a family where it was taken for granted that my education was no more nor less important than that of my brothers, that potentially I was equal to anybody, and that any career was possible if I had the ability and was prepared to work for it, and this was also the ethos of the girls’ high school which I attended. Maybe I applied a kind of mental filter to my reading, but I grew up thinking that this was the normal state of things and, until I was adult and my sense of self to a large extent established, I remained pretty much oblivious to the assumptions and social pressures which bore on so many other girls of my generation. I thought then that it had all been consigned to a Dickensian past.

Thinking back, I remember at the age of eleven being introduced in English classes at school to extracts from the opening chapters of Mill on the Floss and David Copperfield, which led me immediately to tackle the novels as a whole; and I identified equally with David Copperfield and with Maggie Tulliver. Make of that what you will 🙂

 

 

 

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@ichabod  @missy

I like you; you make me feel young 🙂

In reality I don’t feel old most of the time. Arthritis and other recent health problems are just a trick that time has played on me; inside, and very close to the surface, there’s a 25 year old who insists on being heard.

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@ichabod

in S8-S9 we do see the Doctor yanked back from what seems to be a default TL setting of no positive emotional involvement by Clara.  So, do all TLs have that capacity but learn to stifle it? Or is it something the Doctor has learned (since the caveman incident) from his human companions?

Presumably many of them do have the latent capacity, though clearly they have their equivalent of sociopaths and psychopaths, but the general sense conveyed is that for much of their existence their policy of non-interference was underpinned by a deliberately cultivated sense of detachment from other species – possibly their training includes conditioning to that end  –  and their power and great knowledge has fostered an arrogance which tends to be reinforced and hardened to callousness by their longevity.

The Doctor is not and clearly never has been entirely typical of his kind but, as you note above, in his earliest appearance on this planet he certainly displayed some of that arrogance and callousness, and he can still at times revert to detachment. His travels through the universe and his interest in all that it contains have helped develop in him a concern for and sympathy with many of the beings who inhabit it, but I think it is indeed his companions, whether human or of other species, who bring out his latent capacity for empathy.

In his case empathy means the capacity to feel what humans are feeling though clearly it does not entail the ability always to understand their thinking or to parse their behaviour.  To some extent that is true of all of us, I suppose, but in the Doctor as alien it stems from fundamental difference and is therefore more obvious – and in Moffat’s hands it is a source of comedy as often as pathos..

In DW, the great corruptor is power over others, power to bully, destroy, abandon, imprison, exploit, and enslave.  He is tempted by that, sometimes, the way that good people are tempted to accept the corruptor and use it to wipe out corruption

Which is the central theme of TLOTR*, of course, where absolute power is embodied in the Ring.  Speaking of which, (and yes, I digress) one of the principal failings of the film, or so it seemed to me, was that Jackson and the writers of the screenplay hadn’t fully grasped the more subtle implications of this. If they had, they wouldn’t have monkeyed about with the characters of Faramir and Denethor in the way that they did.

 

* a formative text, for me. I first read it in late 1956 or very early 1957, before the county library had acquired a copy of the very recently published third volume, so that I had to beg them to order it for me.  The Head of my school was a Tolkien fan, and four years later, at the end of my final year there, I was presented with a copy which I still have, the binding of each volume stamped with the school crest.

 

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@missy  @nerys

Julius Caesar had himself appointed Dictator for life after decades of social unrest and what amounted to intermittent civil war among those of the ruling class, and he was a self-publicist – as those of my generation who had to read and translate his Gallic Wars can testify; he also had a reputation as a womaniser and he was sensitive about his receding hairline, but on the other hand he was literate and a highly successful, if ruthless military strategist and tactician as well as an astute politician, so the resemblance to Trump isn’t all that close.  Brutus was one of Caesar’s proteges, rumoured in some quarters to be his son, so if Trump has a Brutus it would probably be his son in law or one of his sons, or even Ivanka.

There are rumours of disarray and squabbling within T’s entourage, but I wouldn’t hold out too much hope of a political assassination in the immediate future, alas.

@pedant   Heartening video, but why so restrained?

@thane15    Your mother’s feelings match mine pretty much exactly, though I try to avoid reading BTL comments.  I have done a lot of swearing recently, aloud and under my breath, and have started drinking more than I should.  But the barricades await, and I’m not ready yet to give up the fight.

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