Given that it had been raining drearily and relentlessly all day and showed no signs of stopping, I bailed on the walk and took an earlier train.

However, I did get in my steam-room and plunge, and a whoosh in the hydro bath (they have now fixed the hydro pump, yay).

It was always pretty much intended to be about the rest and the relaxation and ( Read more... )

I had occasion today to look up Sir Jack Drummond, now best remembered for the famously unsolved mystery of his murder (with his wife and child) on a camping holiday in France in 1952.

There is a slew of theories about why he was killed: most assume that the man who was actually convicted of the crime, elderly local farmer Gaston Dominici, was ( Read more... )

Via something that was being circulated at work yesterday: The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700:
Humans have become much taller and heavier, and experience healthier and longer lives than ever before in human history. However it is only recently that historians, economists, human biologists and ( Read more... )

Today's ODNB Life of the Day, Kathleen Mary Drew Baker (1901-1957)
In 1925 Drew was one of the first women to be awarded a Commonwealth scholarship. This took her to the University of California at Berkeley, where two prominent American phycologists, William Setchell and Nathaniel Gardner, were based. She worked for two years on revising the ( Read more... )

When the Bauhaus art school opened in 1919, more women applied than men - so why have we never heard of them?. Reasonable point that women were being shunted into less prestigious fields of production like weaving and ceramics, but don't we also suspect that a lot of them ended up being a combination of muse and all-round support system to the male ( Read more... )

Today's new problem in the Guardian G2 'Private Lives' feature is from someone who is ever so worried about her sister's weight problem and eating habits:
It's not a matter of education or lack of knowledge about nutrition - she knows what good, healthy food looks like - and would naturally opt for a salad rather than a plate of chips. However, her ( Read more... )

In today's Private Lives column in The Guardian G2, the dilemma for next week (scroll down to foot of page) is:
My husband wants to leave me. We have two children, aged 10 and eight, and he says he is depressed and only loves me as "the mother of his children" now. He has been working and travelling a lot and was away for most of last year ( Read more... )

Further to earlier post:

I give you Maud Pember Reeves, Round About A Pound A Week (1913), reporting on research undertaken in Lambeth ('"not the poorest people of the district," she writes. They are "some of the more enviable and settled inhabitants of this part of the world."') by the Fabian Women's Group, on working class budgetting. In the ( Read more... )

Another annoying recommendation from Michael Pollan in second lengthy extract from his book in today's Guardian G2:
Don't eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn't recognise as foodWhy your great-grandmother? Because at this point your mother, and possibly even your grandmother, are as confused as the rest of us; to be safe we need to go ( Read more... )

Long article in today's Guardian G2: There was a time when knowing what to eat was easy. But over the past 40 years the food industry and nutritionists have interfered with our diet. The result is confusion - and an epidemic of food-related diseases. In the first of two extracts from his new book, Michael Pollan says we should junk the science - ( Read more... )