Category Archives: Uncategorized

When I first lived in York, I lived in Milner Street, in a brick terrace house built in the early 1860’s by the railway company to lease to its clerks. The name ‘ Milner’ always puzzled me – the adjoining … Continue reading →

Around a week ago, some people were getting quite excited about finds of high status Roman pottery from Carlisle, and how it suggested that it was more than a rude frontier settlement on the edge of empire – one commentator … Continue reading →

New Year’s Eve and what to do? We had our prawns, a bottle of champagne in the fridge, and our evening planned, but we had a dead space in the afternoon. So rather than mooch and read we went to … Continue reading →

Like everyone used to in the dark pre-internet ages I used to have a diary for appointments. Full of scribbles and crossings out but a bound hardback diary. It also served as a record of what I’d done over the … Continue reading →

About a year ago I posted about the unusual provenance of the the Beechworth gun. At the time I didn’t think to take a picture of the crest, but I was in Beechworth last weekend, and this time I did: … Continue reading →

Yesterday, I tweeted a link to an article from the Hindu, a major Indian newspaper, about conservation work to be undertaken on an Egyptian mummy in the Hyderabad museum. This of course begs the question of quite how an Egyptian … Continue reading →

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 →