Friday Five
Reminders of the longer history, a little behindhand of Black History Month:
The story of a man who became one of Britain's first black gardeners is being marked with a rose named in his honour.
I’m a fourth-generation black British man. Yet still I’m made to feel I don’t belong. My great-grandparents came here in the 1800s. Too few people realise the UK’s black history began long before the Windrush.
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I was lately thinking that Did Those Feet in Ancient Time/Walk Upon England's Mountains Green, there are those in these present days would doubtless consider The Holy Lamb of God an unwanted immigrant... possibly a terrorist. William Blake cottage at risk of being lost, says Historic England. Home where he wrote Jerusalem, in Felpham, West Sussex, one of 130 places on 2021 at-risk register.
We do rather wonder if those who go WO WO about Our National Heritage are really there for those parts of it that are Mad Radical William (was it Felpham where he and his wife played Adam and Eve in the garden?) or early female horticulturalists who advocated 'wild gardening' and died penniless.
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Joy. A piece on historical romance novels by somebody who not only reads them, but reads what's currently being written: 'the genre has come quite far since the derogatory label “bodice ripper” was coined. Authors and the stories they tell are much more diverse'.
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I'm pretty sure I've mentioned before that whole 70s 2nd-wave feminism, let's all sit around and look at our cervixes thing, and the women's health movement, etc: this goes some way towards recovering it ‘I Looked at my vagina and it was beautiful’: Feminists reclaim the speculum though I have a notion more research is being done in this area.
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