Monthly Archives: January 2019

Yesterday I blogged about the use of nitrous oxide as a dental anaesthetic. As is often the way with such things I was speed reading a local history this morning looking for relevant background information for the documentation project I’m … Continue reading →

This time in Dunedin in 1886 … You might remember that last year I wrote about a rather splendid ‘before and after’ advert from the Merthyr Tydfil Telegraph of 1861 – I’ve just come across an equally splendid image from … Continue reading →

I’ve long been fascinated by the history and sociology of bicycles – the invention of the safety bicycle in the 1880’s took the world by storm – suddenly there was an affordable means of transport which allowed clerical workers in … Continue reading →

We were visiting a hospital in Melbourne, nothing serious, just J’s periodic checkup with her rheumatologist, and as in the way of hospitals we skipped breakfast to make an early morning appointment, rushed there on the tram, only to discover … Continue reading →

Louisa M Alcott aged 25 or thereabouts (wikipedia commons) We’ve been watching the recent miniseries of Little Women on the ABC, as always showing years later than everywhere else. Being male, I, of course, had never read Little Women, and … Continue reading →

I’ve written before about Kath Bode’s work resurrecting lost fiction from colonial period Australian newspapers. At the time, I did say that in one sense it wasn’t a surprise, newspaper fiction had been a major event in the mid to … Continue reading →

I recently bought a book. Not an unknown event, but unusually I bought it for the title alone – The Queen, Her Lover and the Most Notorious Spy in History. The book can be summarised like this: After the end … Continue reading →

Totally unscientific I know, but my little Christmas recreation of investigating my family history has brought home to me just how many people died of what would now be preventable diseases, and in Dundee at least how many these were … Continue reading →