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 ( Read more... )

Lost in the Archives: Ayahs in Scotland: British families travelling back and forth from India to Britain, often hired travelling ayahs or brought their family ayah on the long and occasionally treacherous sea voyage. Before the Suez Canal opened and the advent of steam powered liners, these journeys could take up to six months. The ayah on board ( Read more... )

Apparently - I think this may have been reported before? 'Albanian Sworn Virgins' are a dying breed: With More Freedom, Young Women in Albania Shun Tradition. One also rather hopes that it is not just that they can go to the big city and get jobs outside the pressures of a patriarchal family system, but that it no longer pertains that the area is ( 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... )

Crocuses bursting into bloom in the pocket park behind the house and it's not yet mid-February. The Houndz of Spring are confused puppiez.
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I have been striving, my dearios, to discover some common factor in the books on this list: Goodreads' 200 Most Difficult Novels: "Novels that made you work the hardest. Let's assume that you actually ( Read more... )

Today went with
( Read more... )

So, yesterday we made the excursion - ?pilgrimage - to Haworth, by way of the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway, a heritage line that runs (but only on diesel, not steam, chiz) on Wednesdays. Serious railway buff territory, with replica signage, etc.
At Haworth, the road winds uphill all the way, yea, to the very end, over cobbles, past craft ( Read more... )

Because conference.
Dept of charming yet impractical gestures:
Presenting your speaker with a bunch of flowers, when your speaker has a train journey with luggage in prospect.
Also, although the bunch was in a carrier bag, one of the handles broke. Fortunately I was toting my impedimenta in a rather more robust bag from another conference.
Will ( Read more... )

Crocuses already coming up in the pocket park behind the house.
Also possibly under the same heading, sperm whales beaching themselves along the shores of the North Sea.
These days you don't lure the tourist trade to Skegness with the promise that it's so bracing: you offer dead whales instead. Thousands of people have flocked to the tourist resort ( Read more... )

Had occasion to flaneuse across 3 Bloomsbury squares (Russell, Woburn, Gordon) to and from a work engagement, and spring is busting out all over, houndz ov spring b going arf arf and running madly in circles.
Splendid shows of bluebells all over the place, though not, alas, the wonderful woodland sight of great carpets of blue under trees.
Also ( Read more... )