At the going down of the sun

World War One has been jogged back into the UK’s collective consciousness once more with the Third Battle of Ypres,aka Passchendaele getting its own Royal Command Performance on British TV. Two thoughts; one pretty much universal and the other pretty much local. The local first. There is a tiny village in Suffolk named Bildeston. A… Continue reading At the going down of the sun

Have our Romans already departed?

Ah, the Dark Ages. That period in British history after the Romans went away where everything just stopped, or seemingly so. It didn’t of course. The record petered out. The accepted wisdom is that because people built in wood, drank from horn and worked in leather our archaeological tools to discover their civilisation become useless.… Continue reading Have our Romans already departed?

The piratical eyes of the magnetic healer

Leamington is a quiet little spa town in Warwickshire near Stratford upon Avon. In the late 1880s it is not difficult to envisage how very Jane Austen it still must have been, with its Pump Room and all, though visitor numbers “taking the waters” had declined drastically. Nearby big city newspaper the Birmingham Post really… Continue reading The piratical eyes of the magnetic healer

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled

Here’s a note of despair from, of all places, the Grauniad, that is to say an English Liberal newspaper, The Guardian, (once famed for its consistently poor proof reading hence the epithet). It ran a story yesterday that proves Western civilization is indeed collapsing. For the Romans it was lead in the water; for the fall… Continue reading I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled