Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 →

Easter Monday was damp and rainy. Too rainy to get anything done in the garden so we went to the National Portrait Galley to look at this years Photographic Portraiture prize winners. And I didn’t like any of them. All … Continue reading →

I’d been quite enthusiastic over this weekend’s lunar eclipse. It had been quite some time since I’d seen a good one, and this one promised to be interesting, and happened to occur on a weekend, and even better, at a … Continue reading →

Sunday was a nice day, so we went for a walk. Nothing strenuous, just up Orroral Valley to the abandoned settlement site, and to have lunch sitting on the rocks by the river. Our walking lunches tend to the basic … Continue reading →

What did it mean to be literate in antiquity, or indeed in the eighteenth century, or in any other age where schooling was variable and there was a great range of standards and capabilities. Clearly in both the eighteenth century … Continue reading →

From those of you who don’t know, Eden is a fishing and former whaling town way down the south east coast of New South Wales and the last settlement of any size before you ‘turn the corner’ at Green Cape … Continue reading →

Living pictures in the Albanian style. Now that’s a phrase if ever there was one. It’s from the journal of one of the Rothschild daughters describing a holiday in Scarborough in 1858 and refers to the spectacle of swimmers, presumably … Continue reading →