Heritage things:

This year's English Heritage blue plaques to include the 1888 Matchgirls' Strike, the Ayahs' Home in Hackney, and a pioneer of humane psychiatric care, Dr John Conolly and the Hanwell Asylum.

Campaigners are celebrating a victory in the battle for public access to the countryside, after the government agreed to cancel a deadline to ( Read more... )

Over the years, my dearios, I have, it would seem, gained sufficient esteem over various fields with no particular association with one another that I have been asked to be on panels adjudicating awards. (Will concede that there was nothing there approximating e.g. the Nobel or the Booker.)

(I am still wondering what happened to the one that made, ( Read more... )

Paging the shade of Dr Marie Stopes, not for the usual reason, on account of she got a Royal Society grant to go to Japan to study cycads and chase up the Japanese professor she was keen on before she ever got into human reproduction, and wrote a really not at all bad travel book on the episode, A journal from Japan : a daily record of life as seen ( Read more... )

I was going to remark that that is not so remarkable these days but given the runaround I had connecting to LNER wifi, perhaps not.
There was actually bread made during the week: the Collister/Blake My Favourite Loaf, wholemeal & white spelt + einkorn flour, turned out v nice.
Yesterday afternoon while we were taking tea and and a short break in ( Read more... )

Further to yesterday's musings about the creepy mouse people, I daresay they just are people with a weird and spooky habit of speaking to each other and visitors in the persona of mouse figurines. Which is, I do depose, quite disturbing enough, especially when they expect other people to collude in this practice.
But then I remembered a novel I ( Read more... )

In yesterday's Observer Food Monthly: restaurateurs on their memorable customers: I have a maybe not-so-wonderful story, of a couple who dine with a puppet which the woman made, in the shape of a mole. They request a high chair and get really annoyed if one isn’t spare for the puppet. They come in for the mole’s birthday and always order an ice- ( Read more... )

Let big data unlock the secrets of our bodies: Technology will help to map female mysteries, from menstruation to menopause.
You know what: I am so not there for another iteration, even if it's a woman doing the iterating, of 'Wymmnnz! Mysterious!' because this depends on an entirely uninterrogated assumption that Men Are Straightforward and ( Read more... )

Because I'm more likely to put it down to male-gazey prurience. Do we need to know the identity of the woman who posed for Courbet's L'Origine du Monde?
Experts say they are 99% sure model who posed for L’Origine du monde was ballet dancer Constance Queniaux.
Jonathan Jones, who has a certain amount of form for ponceyness, higher codswallop and ( Read more... )

So that was one factor.
But another factor that kept me from posting #metoo was that, sure, I have experienced the common female lot of annoyance and pestering and creepy behaviour by men, but I can't really think of any instance in which there were also issues of power dynamics impacting upon my career or avocation. I put this down to good fortune ( Read more... )

A pregnant woman working at a Queenstown ski field found a colleague had left a condom filled with mayonnaise and a crude note on her desk during a staff morale boosting event.
And okay, perhaps this is me being Very British Problems, but I'm fairly creeped out by the concept of an event dubbed "woo week" where staff were encouraged to boost each ( Read more... )