Like a lot of people I became interested in the whole retro photography thing during the pandemic, but I’ve got to admit that while I’ve had a couple of false starts, I really havn’t done much with it.
I’ve some working cameras, a box full of 35mm film, and a couple of experimental days out, but that’s about it.
However, more recently, I became interested in the idea of half frame cameras, and, yes, I ended up buying one online from a used camera dealer in Adelaide.
Doing this was actually tremendously useful as it helped crystallise my thoughts around the elephant in the room – film processing.
I’d already decided that I wouldn’t bother with the whole enlarging and printing thing, and simply have my films processed and scanned.
One of the results of the retro photography boom is that there are a number of companies that will, for a fee, process and scan films. The only problem is that as half frame photography was always a minority sport, which means that a lot of labs – who of course simply feed the exposed films through an automatic developing machine, and then a custom scanner are not set up for handling half frame media.
Given that you can buy plastic half frame cameras from Amazon and others for something between fifty and a hundred bucks, you might have thought they were more geared up for handling half frame media, but no.
Now, as I’ve written before, I used to do my own film processing as a geeky teenager, and I used to have a basic lab setup with a blackout tent, but I realised that I don’t need a lab, all I need is a change bag – basically a light proof bag in which you put the exposed film cassettes and the developing tank, and then by touch you unwind the film from the cassette into the tank spool, and then close up the tank
Simple, no need for a tent or a lab, even though I’m sure that a certain amount of swearing will be involved the first few times.
Then it’s simply a matter of adding the chemicals, stirring and agitating, and you have a set of negatives.
It turns out it’s possible to buy a tank and all the required flasks and stirrers, not to mention special squeegees for drying the film as a package, and again to buy the chemicals as a package.
As with all these things, the startup cost is not exactly cheap, but the more one does it, the cheaper it gets.
The going rate for having a film processed and scanned is something between twenty and twenty five dollars and the startup cost for home processing is something like $250, so do it often enough it’s cheaper to do it at home and also possibly more fun.
You will notice however that I havn’t mentioned scanning, and that’s for a reason.
Commercial labs will scan every image, which of course includes all the duds.
You can buy a home film scanner, in fact I already have a basic one, bought to rescue some family pictures where we still had the negatives but not the original prints, but again they are designed for full frame film.
The alternative is to use a light box and a digital camera (or even your phone) to take a picture of the negative and then process it using Gimp – this gives you more control over the image, and by using a mask – basically a bit of card with a rectangular hole the correct size blank out the rest of the backlighting – and yes, capitalism being a wonderful thing, you can even buy light boxes with mounting brackets for doing this very thing
So, I think I can make this thing work, and more importantly, have fun along the way
Following on from my post about why Roman ghosts were not a nineteenth century thing I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what was mentioned in English language newspapers in Wales about a single Roman site during the nineteenth century.
I chose Luentinum, nowadays identified with Pumsaint in Carmarthenshire for no other reason that it was mentioned in one of Alis Hawkins’ Teifi Coroner novels set in the mid nineteenth century.
While nowadays it is usually referred to as Luentinum, in the nineteenth century it was more commonly referred to as Loventium, and is close to the Roman gold mines in Wales and sat at the junction of the Sarn Helen, Hen Fford and Fford Fleming roads. It is also mentioned in the seventh century Ravenna Cosmography so was known to antiquarians and classicists – it’s worth remembering that for much of the nineteenth century our knowledge of the Roman world came via the study of the classics and not from archaeology.
Edward Lhwd first identified the likely location of the site in the 1690‘s when tracing the Roman roads in the area.
As the site was well known it’s not surprising it was mentioned several times in newspapers in the nineteenth century, in 1806, 1857, and 1861, but the site remained comparatively remote and inaccessible until the coming of the railway in the mid 1860‘s after which the site became more visited.
As far as I can tell the first excavations at the site were not until 1887 after which time you start to see Field club and local antiquarian society excursions to view the remains and perhaps walk stretches of the Roman roads in the area.
While the site was known, it is only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that it attracts any substantial interest, perhaps (a) because of its increased accessibility, (b) an increase in leisure time and wealth allowing local historical and archaeological societies to sponsor excavations and organise excursions to the site.
Of course there needs to be little bit of care in interpreting these results – in the early nineteenth century English language newspapers in rural Wales would only be read by the English speaking gentry, who would have been a comparatively small part of the population.
The local Welsh speaking peasantry wold have been more concerned with surviving than with Roman remains and it’s noticeable that apart from a single mention of Loventium in 1875, there is no mention of the site in the Welsh language press until the 1890‘s.
So really, it is only with the development of an anglophone middle class with sufficient leisure and wealth to indulge their interests that one gets a critical mass of individuals interested in archaeology and archaeological remains.
Given the late nineteenth interest in self improvement, this is not terribly surprising.
Ideally I’d like to also investigate mentions of Loventium in the guidebooks of the time, but as yet I have not been able to track down any digitised sources …
This morning I came across an article on the CBC on the theme of how despite the pervasiveness of e-readers, sales of printed books are booming, and how while older readers preferred e-readers the prime readership for printed books was the younger cohorts, both gen Z and millennials.
Slightly less than ten years ago there was an argument that we had reached peak e-reader, but that was probably a result of market saturation and the longevity of the original e-reader devices – for example I’m on only my second kindle (and my third e-reader – my first being the long discontinued Interead Cool-er).
Equally, as my experiments with the dogfood tablet show, a very cheap basic android tablet makes a competent e-reader, and with the increasing size of phone screens, it’s almost possible to have an enjoyable experience reading a book on the phone.
Paper books, especially second hand paper books are cheap, you don’t have the upfront cost of an ereader, you can give them to your friends, and lets face it, the better bookshops can be fun places to while away an hour or two just browsing.
Ereaders offer convenience – you get your book online from Stuff Central, it’s often cheaper than the sticker price of the paper edition, and the device is light and easy to carry round – ideal for a train journey or these boring times stuck in an airport waiting for a delayed connecting flight. In comparison books can be bulky to carry round, which given all the other stuff one has to carry about, giving ereaders a definite advantage when travelling.
And of course, if you are on an extended trip of a week or three you can preload your ereader with reading material.
In the old days, before the millennium, car trips used always find you having to somehow fit in a box with a two or three paperbacks each.
Longer plane or train journeys would often see you dropping off a book at a second hand shop and trying to find something else to read – for example, in Chiang Mai there used to be an English language book exchange shop where you sold your book to the shop and could use the money, plus a few extra baht, to buy a replacement book to read – basically a circulating library of sorts.
And of course, public libraries have got funkier, lending e-books and other media as well as paper books.
So, where does this leave us?
E-readers and ebooks have not been the great disruptor they were hyped to be.
However, they have changed the landscape immeasurably – some booksellers have gone to the wall, and those that have survived have done so by being funkier and offering extra facilities and space to browse.
People now know that they can get a book easily online either as an electronic item or a paper one via the mail, meaning that bookshops have had to provide value add to survive.
Physical books have a sensuousness about them that e-books will never have. Personally I find curling up with a paper book and a cup of tea on a cold wet winter’s dey a more enjoyable experience than sitting with an e-book.
That’s not to say I don’t value my e-reader, I do, it most definitely has its role – and that I think is the key – the e-reader was not truly a disruptive change, but now, ten or twelve years on, we can say that it is now part of a new reading ecology where paper and electronic books both have a role, not to mention libraries and the big second hand online book sellers.
There’s no need to agonise about this, change happens and change has happened …
I’ve been a bit lethargic the past week or so, it’s been hot and sticky in the afternoons, with intermittent showers that bring little or no relief from the heat, meaning that I really havn’t done any work outside in the garden other than mow the lawn and the nature strip.
I did get as far as driving over to the big hardware store in Myrtleford to buy the bits to put together a zucchini cage to allow me to finally plant them out and protect them from the pouched demons, otherwise known as possums, which this year have destroyed most of my summer vegetables, but I’ve yet to summon the enthusiasm to spend a sweat soaked hour or two putting it together.
What I have spent time on, as part of retro photography, is investigating half frame 35mm cameras.
Put simply, a half frame camera takes a smaller size image than the standard image on 35mm film allowing you to squeeze 72 images onto a standard 36 exposure 35mm cassette, the idea being to lower you costs as you only use half as much film and your developing costs are the same.
Of course, you don’t get something for nothing – half frame camera images are taller than they are wide, as opposed to normal 35mm negatives which are wider than they are tall, and this use of portrait mode met some resistance when they were first introduced.
To the Instagram generation, used to mobile phone images which use portrait as the default, this is probably less of an issue.
Given that getting hold of film, and more, getting it processed, can be a bit of an adventure in itself, with shortages of film and developing chemicals, there’s an attraction in economizing on film usage.
You can buy all-plastic basic half frame cameras from Kodak and Agfa through Amazon, as well as some of the big online camera retailers.
These all plastic cameras are basically slightly more sophisticated versions of the cheap disposable cameras that used to be widely available, with the crucial difference that they can be reloaded with film, and used multiple times.
(Before digital totally displaced film I would sometimes use a waterproof disposable camera when sailing or kayaking – a former partner managed to totally write off a moderately expensive camera on a rain soaked horse ride, and after that I was always a little more cautious than I had been. I even sometimes took a disposable camera bike riding for the same reason)
Reviews of these all plastic cameras seem to be positive, but when reading the reviews you need a little caution – a lot of them seem to be written by people who got into the pandemic era retro photography boom, and where the plastic camera might be their first, and only film camera.
That said, more critical reviews by more experienced photographers, also seem to suggest that the cameras work well and produce decent images within their limitations.
They are all fixed focus fixed exposure cameras with an optional flash for lowlight photography, but obviously you are going to be limited in what you can take. In Australia, where the sunlight is brighter and more intense than in Europe, you might find some pictures to be a bit washed out.
The one thing that everyone does comment on is how small and light they are compared heavier more retro cameras, meaning they can be dropped in the bottom of a back pack and carried round just in case opportunity or inspiration strikes.
However, a little digging around on ebay shows that there are a reasonable number of half frame cameras for sale at an affordable price, mostly Olympus Pen models – in fact I’ve seen some for sale in working order for not a lot more than the plastic cameras.
Fully reconditioned ones are also available for a price, but as with all reconditioned cameras they tend to be pricy.
If I was in the market for a half frame camera – which I’m not – I’d probably take the risk and buy a non reconditioned one from Japan without any serious defects.
However, given I have fridge tray full of unused film and some working 35mm cameras, I’m not.
But, if I get seriously into the retro photography thing it’s a consideration given both the cost of film and processing…
Normally, when you start with family history you begin by building a family tree stepping back via your parents, your parents siblings, your parents’ parents etc, and along the way you might find some interesting tidbits, like the time your great-great aunt Mildred was arrested at a Suffragette demonstration in London in the 1900s, or that her cousin Wilfred made the serving maid pregnant while his wife was expecting, etc, etc.
Actually, what you rapidly find is that tracing everyone becomes massively unwieldy, so most people end up concentrating on their direct line of descent.
And if you have a relatively common surname, that’s probably the best you can do.
If you have an uncommon name and have access to digitised records you can do something a little bit different.
Now, I have a relatively uncommon surname, and the Scottish Government has funded the digitisation of church registers going back to the 1550’s, meaning you can search for births, marriages or deaths for a particular surname in a particular year or set of years.
Usually you get the father’s name, the child’s name, and sometimes, but not always the mother’s name, the date of birth, and the parish it was registered in
It’s not perfect, there’s no easy way of dealing with transcription error, or spelling eccentricities by the original clerk, and of course some of the registers are missing, lost, burned, or eaten by rats, but it’s pretty good.
So, I decided to try the following – use the Scotland’s people site to search for occurrences in the name ‘Moncur’ in a set of 25 year periods (ie a generation) forward from 1585 to 1750 and record the parish name associated with the name.
If my theory that some of our forebears took the name of the now vanished Moncur estate in Inchture, where they lived and worked, as a surname we should see them gradually spread out from Inchture to neighbouring parishes. If I’m wrong, or if there’s another group with the same surname we should get several clusters in different locations.
1585 is the date when the reformed Calvinist church started requiring people to have surnames.
In fact when you run the search, its only after 1605 that you start to see records of the surname ‘Moncur’, so we start from 1605.
I’d originally planned to run the searches through to sometime around 1800, but decided to stop at 1750 because agricultural reforms and the early industrial revolution were beginning to cause a migration from the land to the larger towns and cities.
I compiled this into a spreadsheet recording the number of occurrences of the name ‘Moncur’ for each parish’s baptismal record in a 25 year period.
Parishes of course change boundaries, are renamed, and the rest, so using Google Maps I worked out the distances by road from each parish church to Inchture. While changes in field boundaries etc might change the distances a little, I reckoned that that was good enough for my purposes.
I then used this information to split parishes into two groups, those more than 50km from Inchture, and those less than 50km from Inchture.
I have no justification for picking a 50km limit other than it was more than a day’s walk and might help show how many people remained close to Inchture.
As Inchture sits on the north bank of the Tay estuary, which was and remains a substantial barrier to travel the 50km circle turned out to be more a 50km semi circle.
And it worked better than I thought – the data quite clearly shows that majority of occurrences of the name Moncur in baptismal registers is within 50km of Inchture, and fit the hypothesis that the name spread outward from Inchture.
Except, the data also shows a small number of births with the name Moncur being registered in parishes around Kineff and Catterline, on the east coast of Scotland close to Dunottar castle.
This is quite interesting for two reasons – it’s only around 16km from St Cyrus (where my family had a farm in the nineteenth century, after moving from Glamis) and may be the source of the confusion as to how long we had been in the area as my family accidentally had the same surname as other people living in the area.
Secondly, it might also explain why I’ve totally failed to find a connection to Captain John Moncur – it would make perfect sense, given his sea going career, for him to be one of the unrelated Kinneff Moncurs as Inverbervie, the nearest harbour town of any consquence (and incidentally the birthplace of the magnificently named Hercules Linton, the designer of the Cutty Sark) is no distance at all from Dunottar, and for him to have been apprenticed to ship’s captain there, so I’m guessing he’s the John Moncur whose baptism was registered in Dunottar parish.
We can also guess that he had another job before being commissioned into the Royal Navy during the AngloFrench war of 1778-83 as he was old at 36 to become a Lieutenant, but which would make sense if he was al ready an experienced merchant seaman.
The spreadsheet can be downloaded if you want to play with the data. It was created with Libre Office and is in the open source ods format but should be readily openable by both Excel and Google Sheets.
Now when anyone mentions vibrators, one does tend to think of sex and sexual stimulation, but this wasn’t necessarily the case for nineteenth century vibrators.
Some were used by doctors to massage torn or damaged muscles, and some were for home use, again usually to relieve aches and pains.
And whatever the official purpose of the device, it might be that some may have been used as aids to masturbation, even if the idea of using a glorified eggbeater seems ever so slightly ridiculous.
(Francis Kilvert in his diary from some time around 1870 does mention going to London to buy photographs of the Holy Land, and that in the case of one of the shops he visited, the owner had been fined for selling obscene material.)
So, whatever the public virtues on display, there were certainly private vices as well.
Equally, in the nineteenth century there was a complaint known as ‘female hysteria’, which was really a catch all diagnosis for women who appeared to be overly emotional, moody, highly strung, or just plain ‘difficult’.
Some doctors at the time tended to ascribe it to sexual frustration, and there is an urban myth about doctors masturbating their patients to bring relief, with the suggestion that these eggbeater devices may have been used for such purposes.
This is almost certainly not true.
Of course, there may have been isolated cases where this happened, but that’s probably all they are, isolated cases.
There is a more serious side to this – some doctors used a diagnosis of female hysteria as an excuse to have difficult women incarcerated in private lunatic asylums.
Sigmund Freud, despite sometimes having some silly ideas, did have the rather more sensible idea of ascribing female hysteria to emotional disturbance and in trying to find the psychological cause of the disturbance.
It’s also worth noting that female hysteria was a disease that affected the wealthy classes – those who could afford expensive doctors. The poor managed their stresses and psychological problems as best they could, self medicating with alcohol and patent medicines.
These stresses may also explain some of the truly horrible instances of domestic violence reported in nineteenth century newspapers.
And while some of the early devices were machanical, there was a move towards the use of electrical devices to relieve nervous complaints. Some of the early electrical devices were therapeutic, rather than sexual, and best thought of as early version of a TENS machine.
(while considerably later than the period I’m writing about George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, describes receiving electrical stimulation treatment to restore the use of his injured arm after he had been shot.)
So, bottom line, just because a device is a vibrator, it doesn’t mean that it’s a Vibrator …
When we first visited Bologna back in 2003 the airport was a small regional airport, and you got there by bus from the city centre.
From memory the driver put your bags in the storage area for you and the bus was something like a standard long distance coach.
Since then the airport has expanded and they have built a monorail that allegedly gets you from the airport to the main railway station in seven minutes.
It’s also expensive at €11 each – by comparison a single ticket from Bologna to Ravenna costs €8.
That is when it runs.
It has continually been plagued by technical problems and often does not run and is replaced by a bus.
And that was the case on the day we tried to use it. After lugging our bags through the station and paying eleven euros each for the monorail they told us it was not running and to use the replacement bus.
The replacement bus was not one of the long distance coaches waiting outside of the station but and ordinary Bologna city bus with no space for luggage. Everyone crammed on somehow but the whole experience was slow and unpleasant.
And then we discovered that a cab from the airport to the railway station costs between twenty and twenty five euros. This is the cost for a standard Bologna city licensed cab – Uber and the rest may be cheaper.
And when we dropped our rental car off we got a cab into the city centre to our overnight hotel it cost us €20, including a tip. The next morning, in the middle of rush hour to get our morning flight to London it cost us €25, again including a tip for the driver.
Sure a cab takes longer – between twenty and thirty minutes depending on traffic, but it will take you straight to your city centre hotel, and the cost is not that different to the monorail.
So, while the monorail is a really cool idea, I’d take a cab if there’s two of you – it might even be cheaper!
Like everyone, our travel plans over the last few years were disrupted by the pandemic.
We had planned to go to South Africa in March 2020.
For obvious reasons that didn’t happen, and while we got most of the money we’d paid out back, that left us with a flight credit with Qantas – it had to be a flight credit as I’d paid for the original tickets with a mixture of points and cash.
If you’ve been following the news in Australia at all in the last year, you’ll be aware that Qantas have kept on changing the redemption rules on flight credits making the redemption process a bit like a bizarre poker game, do we twist or fold?
Well, earlier this year, we decided to fold.
We had family reasons to go to the UK, so we cashed in our flight credit and tried not to grimace at the excess we had to tin up for two economy return tickets to the UK.
So, in late September, off we went.
Rather than fly directly, we deliberately had a night in a hotel in Singapore, as the flight to Britain from Singapore as a 14 hour overnight marathon, in the hope that we would not be complete zombies on arrival.
Staying in Singapore in a hotel next to La Pau Sat was one of our better ideas as we could eat in the food court, collapse into bed, and then have a swim the next morning.
We wanted to go to Manchester to see J’s family, including Ben and Jen who visited with us earlier this year, so we asked Qantas to book us on a morning flight to Manchester.
Qantas, with great optimism, and believing that their flight from Singapore would arrive on time, put us on an 0830 flight to Manchester.
Qantas were of course almost an hour late into London, meaning a frantic dash from terminal 3 to terminal 5, through security, back through security for the domestic flight to Manchester, something not helped by some of the most snarky, obstructive and downright rude security staff in terminal 5 we have encountered anywhere, but we made it just as the gate was about to close.
We then sat on the tarmac for forty minutes as the plane missed its take off slot as BA decided to wait for other Qantas customers who were still stuck in security.
However, we made it, and tired and frazzled, checked in to a hotel at the airport – we’d emailed them in advance asking for an early check in – and collapsed into bed for a few hours.
Dinner, in a Turkish fusion restaurant attached to the hotel, and a decent night’s sleep we were more or less dezombiefied and ready to face the world.
So after we picked up our rental car, we headed first for the Trafford Centre to buy some supplies, and then to our AirBnB in Hebden bridge.
We picked Hebden Bridge as a place to stay as
we like Hebden Bridge
it’s a few kilometres from where Judi’s cousin, Alison, lives
Alison’s husband had been quite ill, and when we booked the trip we weren’t sure how his health would be and whether or not we would have to ration our time with them to let him have a time out or two.
As it was, all was well, and we had dinner with them a couple of times, as well as a couple of canal side walks, plus lunch with Ben and Jen.
Egyptology will have to wait until another trip.
Our original plan had been to return the car, get the train to London, have a couple of days in London, and then go onto the South of France where we’d rented an apartment in Uzes for a week.
Didn’t happen, or at least not like we’d planned.
One of J’s other cousins had emailed her to say that an auntie that J had stayed with twenty five years ago when she came to London was going to turn ninety, and was there any chance we could make her birthday party.
Well, her birthday as a couple of weeks before our flight, but we decided we must pay a visit, however belated.
So we scrapped our train trips, kept the rental car for longer – insanely it worked out cheaper than taking the train to Hampshire – and decided to fly from Gatwick to Marseilles.
So, after checking out of Hebden Bridge we drove down to Lyme Regis in Dorset, where we had a day to ourselves to walk on the beach, and the plan was to drive from Lyme toHampshire for more family stuff before dropping the rental car back to Gatwick and a flight at stupid o’clock the next morning to Marseilles.
Along the way we stopped off in Southampton to buy a cake, flowers and some other things like that. To keep things simple we had lunch in John Lewis which has a Waitrose in the basement, and were amused and a little embarrassed by an elderly woman with a voice redolent of a vanished empire asking a hapless Turkish waiter for ‘Froot cake’.
He clearly didn’t know what ‘froot cake’ was and gestured helplessly at the rather nice cake selection. And no, there was no froot cake or even fruit cake. Tastes change.
After the family stuff, including a traditional and enjoyable pub lunch, it was off again that afternoon across the south of England to Gatwick to drop off the rental car, followed by a night in a hotel at the airport and an EasyJet checkin at a truly ungodly hour in the morning.
From Marseilles we picked up another rental car, and drove to Uzes, something that involved driving round the one way system in Avignon twice, where we had an apartment in a medieval building and within easy walking distance of the main square.
Uzes is a compact medieval city, and supremely walkable. Parking is a nightmare but our apartment had come with parking – admittedly about a kilometre from the apartment – medieval apartment buildings on the whole don’t have parking garages, and a lot of the town is semi pedestrianised, with entry to the medieval core guarded by fearsome automatic bollards during the day.
A typical tawny limestone Provencal town that had been there since the Romans, it was built around the castle and a large central square cum market place. The walls have gone, to be replaced by a one way loop round the city centre, and the railway station has also disappeared, though nowadays there is a bus to Avignon and the high speed TGV line.
Other than a medieval garden there’s nothing remarkable about Uzes. People work, live and love in the town, while there are tourists it is not, at least in autumn, overwhelmingly touristed. It is simply a working town with a lot of medieval buildings, and none the worse for that
Basically we just relaxed and walked around and enjoyed the town. We did, however have some days out, including a trip to the Pont du Gard, somewhere I’d always wanted to visit since I was a geeky Roman obsessed ten year old.
It more than met expectations, and by chance we hit the dead part of the day after the morning school groups had left and before the buses full of elderly polyester trousered Americans arrived, meaning we had the site, if not exactly to ourselves, near enough so.
After Uzes, we dropped the rental car back to Marseilles airport.
Dropping the car back took far longer than it should as the rental company was having IT problems – more exactly they were unable to print any of the documentation required, so rather than get the bus to the main train station in Marseilles, we ended up with a taxi that got us there in thirty minutes.
From there, it was on to a TGV to Nice.
J had wanted a day or two in Nice to go the the Chagall and Matisse museums. Unfortunately the Matisse museum was closed for refurbishment, so we made do with Chagall, which, though up a steep hill was in walking distance of the hotel
After the museum, plus lunch at the cafe, we walked down the hill to the Promenade de Anglais for a stroll by the sea and an ice cream.
This was about a week into the Israel/Hamas conflict and there was a heavy police presence in Nice with riot vans and patrol cars parked up in strategic location.
Nice was also showing its gritty side with homeless people sleeping under the railway viaduct, plus the usual array of derros and clochards, including one man who was quite obviously wearing nothing but a rather grimy shirt.
However, it didn’t feel unsafe with plenty of ‘normal’ people about, plus the obvious police presence.
Then, it was on to Bologna, where we planned a side trip to Ravenna to pay our respects to Gallia Placida, and pick up a rental car drive to a hill village in Tuscany where we’d rented an apartment for a week.
Once there were direct trains from Nice to Milan, but no more, we first of all had to get a local train to the border with Italy to meet with the express to Milan.
Despite dire warnings from the man in seat 61, the local train turned up on time and delivered us on time to our connecting service at Ventimiglia.
Accidentally we’d timed it just as the sun was coming up so were rewarded by set of quite stunning dawn views of the Riviera coast.
After changing trains we set off for Milan, via Genoa.
There’s no catering on Italian expresses any more, just a couple of self service machines that didn’t work so we had to make do with a couple of bananas and bottled water that we’d had the foresight to buy the night before.
Despite not being the newest, our Trenitalia express delivered us to Milan on time.
People tell you that Milan is a wonderful station and you should take time to admire the architecture.
That Sunday afternoon it was a chaotic but functioning anarchy of people wandering about looking for trains, trying to get something to eat, plus the odd lost and confused tourist.
Still, we managed to get a couple of coffees and focaccias, and the it was on to our final train, the Italo high speed train to Bologna and points south.
It was fast. It was impressive, but had no space to put our luggage – fortunately the seats behind us were empty, so we used them.
We’ve been to Bologna several times before, and the railway station has always been a maze of confusing passages. It’s now doubly so as they have now built what looks to be a new high speed train station, strangly reminiscent of Birmingham New Street in the eighties, under the existing station, plus a monorail link to the airport (of which more later)
Sign posting inside the station is confusing and at times contradictory (you are in a maze of twisty passages, all different) but eventually we emerged into the main square outside the station and into our hotel.
I like Bologna. It’s a proper city, not a tourist showpiece.
Yes, there are the Unesco listed colonades, the grand Renaissance buildings, a Duomo, the museums, but it remains a city in which people live and work.
And you have got to like a city that still has a TAFE named after Rosa Luxemburg – you can catch a bus to it – and just to add to the feel of being somewhere different, it still has trolleybuses.
However, it’s also an easy day trip from Bologna to Ravenna, and that’s exactly what we did the next day, catching the local train across the Emiligia Romana plain.
Up to then, the weather had been fine – in England it had been early Autumn – Hebden Bridge had been showery and tin he south of England the season was beginning to turn, but in Uzes it had still been late summer.
The day we spent on the train from Nice had been warm and summery, The next day it turned grey and drizzly.
However, off we went to Ravenna.
Perhaps because it was a grey Monday in mid-October, it was quieter than last time we visited, but the mosaics did not disappoint, and I got some better and clearer pictures of them than last time.
The other thing, and it’s a minor point, in the intervening decade or so there’s been a marked investment in railways in Italy, with new trains and station rebuilds, so instead of a thirty year old rattletrap, the train to Ravenna is now a sleek new commuter train
Then, on to our final destination – a traditional hill top borgo in Tuscany. It actually was on the rising slope of the foothills of the Apennines and actually half way up the slope with a view across the plain to Siena.
This wasn’t without drama, although pretty minor on a scale of one to ten. We picked up a rental car at the airport. And as always with rental cars and tight spaces there’s sometimes a bit of back and forth to get it out of the rental company’s yard. Forth wasn’t a problem but back was as I put the car into reverse and the gear knob came off in my hand.
The rental company had no problem giving me a replacement, but they only had an automatic spare, was that a problem?
Of course it wasn’t – in fact it was a bit of a plus so off we went in a slightly clunky Brazilian made VW – obviously the economy version as it didn’t have a reversing camera or a GPS or the various beepers one expects on a car these days.
Given the need to wiggle and jiggle through traffic in some small Italian towns, being beeper free might actually have been an advantage.
Anyway we got there.
A small sone built thirteenth century walled settlement clustered around an older church with stunning views and walking tracks. No mobile phone reception – not unless you walked up to the Etruscan tomb higher up the hill or drove down to the small town at the bottom of the hill – however there was wifi, and the two osteria in the village were happy to take bookings via Whatsapp – not that it was necessary – they were only a fifty metre walk from our apartment.
So, we walked following the trails and drove around the area enjoying autumn in Tuscany. Very low key and supremely pleasant.
And then it was over.
On the day we drove back it began to rain on the autostrada. Seriously rain. Some villages had bad flooding, but we got there. I did drop the tollway ticket in a puddle putting it into the machine and had to call for help, but fortunately there was someone English speaking at the end of the help button.
An afternoon in Bologna, with enough time to sit and have a drink in the main square, dinner and a night in a hotel.
Then a flight to London, an afternoon at the V&A before an overnight flight to Singapore, where we checked into a hotel for a night and another, crowded, cramped overnight flight to Melbourne before driving home.
Due to timezones our evening departure from London arrived on what was the early evening the next day Singapore time, allowing us time for a food court dinner before collapsing into bed and waking up more or less refreshed. That evening we flew to Melbourne on what should have been a relatively pleasant flight.
It wasn’t. The plane was crammed with extra passengers transferred from another cancelled flight, food service took forever and they ran out of options. However we got enough sleep to drive home safely. and driving out of Melbourne before the Sunday traffic started was pretty pleasant.
We stopped off in Euroa for morning tea at the bakery and a bit of fresh food shopping at the supermarket, before arriving home around midday to an overgrown garden.
I’ve been reading Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner as my evening reading – a change from outback noir crime novels – when I came across Steven’s Consumption cure.
Even though I’ve finished with Dows’ Pharmacy for the moment, I’ve acquired an interest in nineteenth century medicine along the way, something that dovetails into my interest in Victorian murders and the way that newspapers sensationalised the most graphic of them in order to sell papers.
So when I came across Steven’s Consumption cure I had to do some background reading about it. And it’s a curious tale.
Tuberculosis, or consumption was the scourge of the nineteenth century.
My grandfather’s first wife, Catherine Gracie, died of it, his mother died of it, and if you plough through the death certificates quite a few other family members died of it – and these were relatively middle class people who lived in relatively nice airy apartments, and living in Dundee had access to the Tay estuary and cleaner air despite the undoubted urban pollution from smoke and industry.
The urban poor, crammed in overcrowded tenements would have had it much, much worse than the middle classes.
Until the advent of antibiotics there was no real cure for tuberculosis. Most people died unpleasantly. If you could afford it, being able to live in the countryside and breathing clean air might let you live a little longer, but really, unless you were one of the roughly twenty percent of cases who recovered spontaneously, a diagnosis meant death sooner or later.
And of course, the figure of twenty percent is based on the middle and upper classes who could afford doctors and treatment. The poor simply suffered and died, and perhaps relied on patent medicines for some relief.
Most patent medicines didn’t do much – a pain killer like laudanum, some herbs to help clear the the chest and let you sleep, and that was about it. Some made outrageous claims as to their effectiveness, and of course there were always those that claimed to be derived from exotic cures from the mystic East.
Perhaps my favourite example of the latter was Bile Beans, claimed to be made from secret herbs used by Australian Aborigines, but in fact made principally from cascara and rhubarb in a factory in Leeds.
The situation regarding patent medicines was so bad that in the early twentieth century the British Medical Association analysed many patent medicines and published the results, invariably showing that they were cheaply made from standard ingredients. They also published an estimated cost of the ingredients showing that many were wildly overpriced for what they contained.
Instinctively, I would have put Steven’s Consumption cure among the quack medicines, selling hope when in reality there was none, but when I began to read about it in detail, I became less sure.
Colonel Stevens, and he liked to be called Colonel, claimed that as junior officer in South Africa he became ill with tuberculosis, and in desperation he went to see an indigenous healer who supplied him with a preparation made of a native pelargonium or geranium.
Given that at the time Europeans in South Africa probably didn’t know much about the therapeutic value of the native flora, it’s entirely possible that the plant used in the cure may have had some bactericidal properties. Or it could simply be that Colonel Stevens was one of the lucky twenty percent that went into remission.
In time Colonel Stevens returned to England and began to market his cure.
The BMA, who clearly to a man thought Stevens was a charlatan, analysed his patent medicine and claimed that his preparation contained Krameria, which is still used in herbal medicine today, but not Pelargonium as Stevens claimed.
However, this didn’t stop Stevens, who clearly believed in his medicine’s efficacy, from continuing to publicise his cure, so eventually the BMA took him to court, intending to prove he was just another charlatan exploiting poor and desperate people.
Stevens lost the court case. He appealed, and lost that case too. He was refused further leave to appeal, and you might think that would be that, but no, Stevens continued to prosper, serving in the Royal Flying Corps during the first world war, and to market his cure.
And this is where it gets interesting. After the first world war, a doctor in Switzerland started using the ‘English Cure’, ie Steven’s consumption cure, in treating his patients.
As a doctor practising in Geneva he was outside the control of the British Medical Association and free to prescribe what he liked, and he obviously thought that this preparation did some good. In fact, he made the interesting anecdotal observation that during the second world war, when supplies of Steven’s Consumption cure became unobtainable, some of his patients who had been in remission suddenly developed the full and fatal form of the disease.
With the arrival of streptomycin after the war, this all became moot, as tuberculosis ceased to be the scourge it once was.
Stevens clearly believed in his cure. He may have been deluded, but I think he was honest in his delusion. He may have profited from it, but I think he was sincere.
And, given the Swiss doctor’s observation, it may have been that it did some good.
The doctor in Switzerland strangely didn’t see it as cure but thought it might stimulate the immune system to better fight the disease.
No one today is interested in investigating Steven’s cure, but given the rise of drug resistant tuberculosis, perhaps it might be worthy of further investigation.
Strangely, you can still buy herbal preparations containing Steven’s pelargonium for chest and bronchial complaints from pharmacies in Germany …
Charles Collinson Rawson was a migrant from England who settled in Port Mackay, now simply Mackay, in Queensland in 1867.
As well as being a grazier, a Justice of the Peace, a minor artist Rawson was diarist who frequently illustrated his journal with doodles. I first came across him during the pandemic when his 1877 sketch of vaccination day in Port Mackay was widely reposted.
He also doodled about the 1877 election and appears to have been against blackbirding, the process of inducing Kanaka labourers to come and work in the canefields as indentured labourers and virtually enslaving them
His diaries are lodged in the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane, which is where most of these images come from.
All in all he seems to have been an engaging character, and unafraid to make fun of himself
stuff 'n other stuff 