Author Archives: dgm

I went to get my hair cut yesterday. I normally go to a moderately upscale place that has staff who have mustered the art of cutting my slightly unruly hair short enough to look neat but not so short that … Continue reading →

Last weekend was a public holiday in Canberra, officially Family and Community day but informally Fish and Chip day. We could have been like everyone else and dashed frenetically to the coast, only to find that the water was still … Continue reading →

There’s a minor spat going on over at Slate about the validity (or otherwise) of a couple in Washington state in the US who have chosen to live a late nineteenth century life eschewing modern conveniences like electricity and all … Continue reading →

There’s a long green versatile vegetable that the English call a courgette and almost everyone else calls a zucchini. If you do search for the two terms using google’s ngram viwer you can see that no one talked about them … Continue reading →

History can be deadly dull. Names, places, dates, events. What of course makes history interesting is the ‘story’ aspect of it, the interplay between people and events, and also how people got on with everyday life. And of course, there … Continue reading →

If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll be aware that we recently spent a few weeks in the old Habsburg lands. We arrived in Vienna on the last day of April, meaning of course that the next day was the … Continue reading →

Last weekend (yes I’m still catching up) brought news of Roman artefacts being found in 2000 year old graves in Aksum, in Ethiopia, suggesting a healthy trade between Aksum and Roman Egypt, if not directly evidence for the presence of … Continue reading →

When we recently spent five week overseas in Vienna, Budapest, Slovenia and Croatia, we did a lot of our long distance travelling by train – we’d originally planned to do all of it by train but events conspired against us. … Continue reading →

We’re back from a trip to Vienna, Budapest, Slovenia and Croatia. We were on a holiday and mostly did tourist things, but for quite a lot of the time we stayed in rented holiday apartments which mostly meant that if … Continue reading →

News this morning that the statue of Cecil Rhodes has been removed from UCT in Cape Town. Rhodes was of course an utter racist. By today’s standards much of his behaviour was reprehensible in the extreme. But of course the … Continue reading →