It's Always More Complicated

Well, that was a week when Resistentialism was rather in the ascendant, viz:

Not one, but two, pots of soup turned out to have broken seals (and this was weird because I check them on arrival so that I can complain to shop if they are defective).

On making online payment for the new garden fence, my card reader gave out low battery warning. When I finally discovered via the chatbot that it is possible to replace the batteries (and mirabile dictu, we had the right sort about), I managed to damage the mechanism and the reader does not turn on. After a certain amount of Further Faff it appears that one can simply order another card reader.

There was an online talk I particularly wanted to access as I have interacted quite a bit with the person who was giving it and it was on a topic of interest to me. The Teams link came up Bad Request. On contacting the institution (which I may add I had to pay a modest sum to attend this event) I was told, oh, you should not have contacted the store (through which all transactions took place), you should have contacted the department that was hosting the event (details of which had been nowhere in any of the communications). Allegedly a recording will eventually be available.

Today somebody on Bluesky was circulating Victorian Vibrator/Hysteria Myth.

However:

We did get the fence replaced!

And I have had my telephone physio consultation, even if this felt a bit like one more round of gatekeeping before proceeding to any actual face-to-face, hands-on, interaction with the Musculo-Skeletal Team. But they will get back to me with details of (sometime in the future) appointment at my preferred location, and meanwhile, here is video link with some exercises.

My dearios will have heard over the years, nay perchance even the decades, the sounds of whingeing coming here from about people woezering on about Modern Life, one thing being 'these days people have no attention span and can't concentrate wo wo wo death ov civ etc etc'.

And in today's Guardian Saturday there is a lovely piece by Prof Emma Smith pointing out that actually immersive reading also has a history, and that in C18th it was wo! wo! wymmynz b getting lost in NOVELZ to detriment of their morals, duty to society etc etc etc and that was seen as Bad Thing.

Also made interesting point about earlier practices of a) re-reading and annotating a fairly limited selection of texts and b) filleting out bits and bobs into commonplace books, which I guess people who are 'read the book the whole book and lots of book' might diss on?

But, dammit, it is not yet online, chiz chiz chiz.

In the realm of codswinging debunkery, I offer up this: Dr Eleanor Janega: You are not, in fact, the granddaughter of the witches they couldn’t burn:

[T]he women who were killed during the early modern witch trials were not, in fact, witches. They were just people. This is not to say that some people accused of witch craft didn’t confess to it on occasion, or maybe even think they were doing some witch ass shit. But that doesn’t mean they actually were doing it.
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[T]he great majority of people who were killed for witchcraft did not think they were witches. In the majority of cases if they confessed that they were witches it was usually because they were tortured repeatedly and at length in order to obtain a confession.

Cracked tiles, wonky gutters, leaning walls – why are Britain’s new houses so rubbish?. Roughly speaking, for the same reason that our rivers and coastal waters are awash with sewage: cutting through the red tape that was holding things together:

Building control used to be run by local authorities but, like so many other public services, it has been progressively privatised since the 80s.... between 1984 and 2017, a culture shift occurred, from one of inspectors “policing” developers to one of them “working with clients” under commercial duress.

Can we imagine an initiative like this these days? (Sigh): The Amazing History Behind London’s Green Cabmen’s Shelters.

Good news for the cats, but bad news re the contamination of the wellsprings of history, what: a medievalist gets medieval on a Gross Distortion of History around Cats and the Black Death: [A]n account with a cute little cat strayed into my danger zone by claiming that the “Black Plague had a lot to do with cats” and, oh babes, it got worse from there.

We are not, ourselves, alas, unacquainted with the horrors of historical confabulation (I am wondering, here, whether somebody just saw the title of Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre - which is actually about workplace resentments in C18th France - and ran with it....) but there is sure a hell of a lot of it there.

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This is depressing about indentured pauper apprentices: Harrowing lives of children sent to work in English mills revealed in first study of kind. Research on remains of 19th-century ‘pauper apprentices’ shows bodies riddled with disease, in study that resonates today.

A number of years ago, the remains were reburied in a ceremony, which involved contributions from the local community, volunteer researchers, scientists and descendants of those excavated. Artwork inspired by the analysis and an exhibition are on permanent display at the Washburn Heritage Centre, which was built on the church.

Sir John Soane's Museum Opens Rarely Seen Drawing Office

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This is infuriating if not entirely unexpected: In Indiana, the culture wars aim at Kinsey — the heart of sex research. Those wonderful collections - not that I am likely to be making a return visit any time soon, alas.

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Celebrating 40 Years of England's Register of Parks and Gardens

Codslapping the recirculation of a factoid on Twitter. I have with heroic effort refrained from the suggestion that Lady Hillingham's supposed diary was in fact an early C20th porno but merely referred back to the problematic nature of the original citation, which even the author of the work wherein it was referenced considered A Bit Sus.

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Yes, I know, this is the time when we sum up the splendours and miseries of the year just gone and our resolutions and anticipations for the new one.

Er - well, that was not so bad as might have been, I suppose? In spite of the central heating crises and the bathroom sink flood? I did get myself out to the opticians and get myself new glasses, even if getting them to behave nicely is an ongoing problem, I must get myself to the opticians again - this got a bit backburnered between weather events and holiday season.

Not quite a relic: two chapters finally forthcoming in edited volumes; various things in progress; have been a Living Archive; still asked To Do things.

Three volumes in the ongoing saga published; almost three new episodes written during the year.

Nobody very close died but there were some sad losses in wider circles over the course of the year.

There were lots of really really awful people being Really Really Awful, but I am heartened by the manifestations of resistance. Even if it had to get That Bad.

According to Goodreads I read 224 books last year, but that doesn't include comfort re-reads, books for review and research reading, so it was somewhat more than that. And some of them were quite long books, I don't seem to have been reading long books much of late.

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Could a robot ever recreate the aura of a Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece? It’s already happening. Isn't there rather a difference between creating something in the style of a previously existing artist (O HAI van Meergeren) and forging ahead with a new vision? cf all the complaints from current artists about their work being scooped up for machine-learning purposes.

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 had the sole responsibility of looking after children and their memsahib. Sadly on reaching Britain, some of these ayahs were discharged without pay. With no formal contract of employment, some with limited English, they were left destitute and homeless in a foreign country. Eventually, records show that the Ayahs Home in London was established, founded by Christian charities as a refuge for ayahs and amahs (Chinese nannies), until placements or return journeys were found. By the 1850s, an estimated 100-140 travelling ayahs visited Britain each year. By 1921, the Ayahs Home was recording up to 223 women per year, signifying the incidence of abandoned ayahs.

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History Workshop Journal: Black British Histories Virtual Issue.

Free online access to articles from 1987-2019 (the earlier ones are only accessible as pdfs)

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Another one of those historical phenomena which was not quite what we have been led to believe: There Never Was a Real Tulip Fever:

[M]erchants really did engage in a frantic tulip trade, and they paid incredibly high prices for some bulbs. And when a number of buyers announced they couldn’t pay the high price previously agreed upon, the market did fall apart and cause a small crisis—but only because it undermined social expectations.
....
All the outlandish stories of economic ruin, of an innocent sailor thrown in prison for eating a tulip bulb, of chimney sweeps wading into the market in hopes of striking it rich—those come from propaganda pamphlets published by Dutch Calvinists worried that the tulip-propelled consumerism boom would lead to societal decay. Their insistence that such great wealth was ungodly has even stayed with us to this day.

Charles Mackay in his popular 1841 work Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. According to this narrative, everyone from the wealthiest merchants to the poorest chimney sweeps jumped into the tulip fray, buying bulbs at high prices and selling them for even more. Companies formed just to deal with the tulip trade, which reached a fever pitch in late 1636. But by February 1637, the bottom fell out of the market. More and more people defaulted on their agreement to buy the tulips at the prices they’d promised, and the traders who had already made their payments were left in debt or bankrupted.

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An eventful life...

Elsie Edith Bowerman:

Elsie founded a branch of the WSPU in Girton, inviting such speakers as Lady Constance Lytton to address the undergraduates, despite lack of co-operation from the college authorities... Having graduated Elsie Bowerman returned to St Leonards, as a paid organizer for the WSPU. On 15 April 1912, while travelling as first-class passengers to America for a holiday, she and her mother survived the sinking of the Titanic. In September 1916 Elsie Bowerman sailed to Russia as an orderly with the Scottish women's hospital unit, at the request of the Hon. Evelina Haverfield, a fellow suffragette whom she had known for several years. With this unit she travelled via Archangel, Moscow, and Odessa to serve the Serbian and Russian armies in Romania. The women arrived as the allies were defeated, and were soon forced to join the retreat northwards to the Russian frontier. While awaiting her passage home, in March 1917, Elsie witnessed the ‘February revolution’ in St Petersburg. A diary that she kept, recording her experiences with the hospital unit, is held by the Women's Library, London.
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She joined the Middle Temple in 1921, read for the bar, and was called—one of the first women barristers—in 1924. She practised on the south-eastern circuit from 1928 until 1946, was involved with the Sussex sessions from 1928 until 1934, and wrote The Law of Child Protection (1933). In 1938, with Lady Reading, she founded the Women's Voluntary Service, and from 1938 to 1940 edited its Monthly Bulletin. During the Second World War she worked for the Ministry of Information (1940–41) and was liaison officer with the North American Service of the BBC (1941–5). After the war she spent a year in charge of the status-of-women section of the United Nations in New York.

And, just because, as it shows what remarkable and often unexpected things can be found in any given archive: Archive Treasures in Britten/Pears Arts. I'm particularly taken by the one that references the North Sea floods of 1953, as I once had to do a presentation to students one of whom was doing their dissertation on that subject - and lo and behold, actually managed to find something in our holdings on the subject! which I would not actually have guessed had I not been desperately trying to look something out.