Link salad
Joan Bakewell, appositely, considering my post yesterday, writes that The most ancient places in the land can tell us more about Englishness than any politician, in today's Guardian:
a lot has happened here a very long time ago and has left its mark. The landscape, a product of weather and man, yields at almost every turn a hill fort, an ancient dyke, a stretch of straight Roman road, a tumulus or barrow where undiscovered riches may still lie. Aerial photographs across the midlands reveal the pattern of medieval strip farming. Ours being a small-scale countryside, nowhere is the density of historical evidence so great.
'Albert Marshall, the last surviving soldier from the battle of the Somme... has died aged 108' (from Tuesday's obituary page).
in 1997, on the 80th anniversary of Passchendaele, he returned to the battlefields with a party of 16 other veterans, and, the following year, was one of those who received the Legion of Honour from the French government.
In 2000, to a standing ovation, Albert sang songs from the first world war at a concert in Rochester cathedral. Last year, he appeared in a Channel 4 documentary about boy soldiers.
Article on women and surfing. Has anyone else read the novel Gidget, by Frederick Kohner (1957)? - I think it was later made into a movie and sequels and ? a TV show, but the book has a wonderful ending, especially when you consider the period: with Gidget shooting the curl, and then a brief coda in which she wonders if that summer was about 'a woman in love with a surfboard' rather than any of the romantic interests: 'with the board and the sun and the waves it was for real'.