Category Archives: Uncategorized

One of the artifacts in the old dispensary where I’m currently working on the Pharmacy documentation project is an old Remington portable typewriter that was used in the 1930’s to type labels to be stuck on bottles of prescription medicine … Continue reading →

Queen Victoria reigned for over sixty years. At the start of her reign, in 1837, passenger railways were still a novelty, the British Empire was half the size it would eventually become, and Australia was a gaggle of small squabbling … Continue reading →

Since I came back from overseas I’ve been back working on the Dow’s Pharmacy documentation project. And one thing that has struck me is just how many late nineteenth and early twentieth century pickle jars have been reused to store … Continue reading →

So, Singapore. I’ve always had a soft spot for Singapore. Both my father and his brother lived there during colonial times, and even when he was too old to travel, my father always wanted to see our photos of Singapore … Continue reading →

For some reason our car’s GPS decided to ignore tollways and took us an interesting way to Evora through wooded countryside and then on to the old main road north before branching west across wheat growing country that increasingly looked … Continue reading →

So there we were, heading down the tollway in our rental car. The tolls weren’t a problem, we’d filled in the paperwork for electronic tolling and agreed to settle the bill with the rental company when we brought the car … Continue reading →

So, on to Porto. We skipped breakfast, checked out and caught the Gatwick Express, as irritatingly that’s where TAP flights to Porto go from. Actually the whole business was pretty slick and seamless leaving us plenty of time for a … Continue reading →

This is a somewhat belated post, really to explain the lack of blogging over the last few weeks We spent the best part of six weeks in Europe, leaving in early September, so early that the day we left there … Continue reading →

Earlier this week I was on a plane, and given that flying is a fundamentally boring experience I whiled away the time watching a movie. The art house movie on offer was the wonderful, spare elegaic Lady Macbeth, beautifully photographed … Continue reading →

One of the aspects of the Madeleine Smith case that so titillated the mid Victorian audience was that not only did she have sex with her lover, but that she wrote gushingly about the experience. Probably neither the first, or … Continue reading →