During a Twitter thread springing off the legitimate contention that prior to mass vaccination programmes there are a lot of tombstones for babies in graveyards - or at least, records of very young children on the family memorials.
So somebody contends that In Ye Old Days children were not loved then because parents did not become attached to ( Read more... )

Mary Hockmore’s Lawyer: Marriage Breakdown and Women’s Rights in Seventeenth-Century England: For centuries the English common law rules concerning married women’s rights-known by the shorthand ‘coverture’-restricted a wife’s ability to control real estate, own movable property, enter into contracts or participate in litigation without the ( Read more... )

Pet cemeteries reprised: [O]wners of all kinds of domestic animals have become more likely to believe in a pet afterlife: A new analysis published in the journal Antiquity, examining the history of pet cemeteries in Newcastle and London over 100 years from 1881, found an increase in the proportion of graves that reference the animals’ immortal ( Read more... )

“Perhaps the most horrible spectacle in Britain”.
No, my dearios, this time it was not portly middle-aged to elderly men enjoying healthful outdoor exercise while wearing suitable garb for the endeavour, i.e. shorts and open-necked shirts (the horror! the unbearable horror! - I refer readers to the passage The Road to Wigan Pier in which two ( Read more... )

Happy 117th birthday, Barbara Hepworth - the video to go with today's celebratory Google Doodle.
***
I was initially cynical about an interview with a sexual psychophysiologist and neuroscientist but it's wonderfully It's All More Complicated about simplistic views about sexuality, sexual arousal, ideas of the gendered brain and patterns of arousal ( Read more... )

Museum of creepy curiosities opens in London. Hmmmmm. Has he ever been to the Horniman, which far from being a higgledy-piggedly Cabinet of Curiosities, always strikes me as being about Educating The Masses About the Glories of Scientific Understanding of the Natural World, with added benefit of the really manky stuffed walrus, taxidermied by ( Read more... )

Charles Dickens: newly discovered documents reveal truth about his death and burial: the name of John Forster was fresh in my mind from the less than glorious role that he played in the sad saga of L.E.L. (and yet another case of reputation management...)
Passionate pioneers - increasing access to botanical artwork by women artists and putting ( Read more... )

Today to the funeral/memorial service of a former colleague at the West London Crematorium at Kensal Green Cemetery, which, alas, I did not have time to explore - it was the first large commercial cemetery set up in London at a time of pressing need for burial reform. Numerous notables are interred therein but I only noticed the gravestone of the ( Read more... )

Spotted this the other day and then forgot to mention it:
Sex Festival in Tunbridge Wells.
Actually, not in Tunbridge Wells, which evokes images of orgiastic goings on in the Pantiles amidst a crowd of the local denizens being Disgusted.
In fact, in a wood nearby.
'People living in the area have expressed concern over noise, parking and decency': ( Read more... )

Having received the statement of the account that they had to post, because *security*, somewhat more expeditiously than I had anticipated, I took it, along with ID and details of how the money was to be divvied up, to the branch of [financial institution in question].
Where - having previously been led to suppose that did I front up with the docs ( Read more... )