Author Archives: dgm

Our trip to Malaysia went pretty smoothly. Sure, there was the time in Penang Airport when we discovered that the booking company we had used had failed to add our bags to our Air Asia booking, even though we had … Continue reading →

   Northam Road cemetery is the oldest European cemetery in Georgetown in Penang, opening shortly after the East India Company founded Georgetown in 1794, and closing roughly a hundred years later. As a consequence there’s a lot of pre Victorian … Continue reading →

We’re back from a three week trip in Malaysia, during which we visited cat obsessed Kuching, saw wild orang utans in the Danum valley conservation area, river dolphins, proboscis monkeys in Bako national park, chilled on beaches and swam in … Continue reading →

Sometimes, we tend to think of the Victorians as quite like us, except a little more buttoned up, and wearing funny clothes. Yet, in many ways their lives were quite different from ours, one aspect being the absence of reliable … Continue reading →

What seems a long time ago, but it was only in the middle of 2013, we visited Trincomalee in Sri Lanka. It was only on our way back from Sri Lanka that I discovered that Jane Austen’s brother was buried … Continue reading →

While rooting around the bowels of Welsh papers online in search of examples of Hayman’s Balsam of Horehound adverts I came across this rather splendid advertisement for replacement teeth from 1861: Merthyr Tydfil Telegraph 8 February 1861 What I find … Continue reading →

I was documenting some nineteenth century medicine bottles the other day and came across this rather nice example in bluish glass: and it was embossed Hayman’s Balsam of Horehound suggesting that it had held a cough medicine of some sort. … Continue reading →

In the dispensary of Dow’s pharmacy there’s a rather impressive safe made by Thomas Perry and Son of Bilston near Wolverhampton in England. The safe is pretty substantial, and painted with a rather nice wood grain effect We can guess … Continue reading →

Recently, now the hot weather is over, I’ve been doing some work in the garden, planting and laying out garden beds, and in the process using the UK Royal Horticultural Society plant data sheets to help plan my planting. Not … Continue reading →

This morning, while working on the project, I came across a bottle of Stephens blue endorsing ink. Actually, I found a second bottle of violet endorsing ink later in the day, but by then I’d solved the mystery of what … Continue reading →