Author Archives: Natalie Bennett

Not at all pants – well maybe a little

July 12, 2007 – 10:23 pm

Forgive me a touch of scepticism, but I can’t resist pointing to the story around today just about everywhere that discarded pants helped to boost literacy: claiming that it was when urbanisation led people to more widely adopt underwear, unlike those uninsulated peasant farmers, that there were lots of rags around from which to make paper.

As someone on the medieval list pointed out, lots of that underwear would have been made from wool, and thence useless for papermaking, and I’d like to point out that in Caxton’s time (contrary to the story’s claim), paper was not at all cheap – making up half or more of the cost of a book – and imported into Britain right until the end of the 16th century.

But hey, why spoil a nice tale?

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My favourite Paris cafe

July 12, 2007 – 10:13 pm

Yes, okay, a bit personal, and you don’t have to hold the front page, but I have officially changed my “favourite Paris cafe” – it’s now Le Nemours on the Place Colette, and I’ve written about it on My Paris.

You’re welcome to tell me what it should be instead…

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Translate this book

July 11, 2007 – 12:02 am

“German historian Arno Peters wrote a ‘synchronoptic’ history of the world (1952) that gave every century exactly the same column inches. In this subversive book, the Inca civilisation was given as much coverage as Medieval Europe; the twenty-ninth century BC as much as the twentieth century AD. It has never gone out of print in German – but has never been translated into English.”

… or better still, write your own, since knowledge of the early period has come a long way since 1952.

(From Alex MacGillivray’s A Brief History of Globalization, an entertaining read with a great line in anecdote; just a bit short on coherent argument.)

But a great topic for discussion this evening at the Serious Book Club. Thanks all!

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A small and inexpensive test

July 10, 2007 – 12:52 am

You walk into a tabac in Paris – a bit off the beaten tourist track near the University of Paris – and ask for four stamps for postcards to Australia in adequate if it-won’t-make-anyone-think-you’re-a-local French. The woman behind the counter digs in the register, then announces that she’s run out of those, but if you leave them with her she’ll post them when the stamp comes in.

What do you do?

Well, I’ll find out if the postcards arrive.

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Watching the Tour de France in London, from France

July 8, 2007 – 9:24 am

Much more amusing than being there – French television is pulling out every cliche in the book: they’ve just been waxing lyrical about the statue of Queen Victoria in front of Buckingham Palace – not I would have thought anyone’s idea of beauty, and trotting out English and French bulldogs for comparison (the French are about a fifth the size…)

And now we’re getting about our thousandth helicopter shot of the London Eye.

And one of the cyclists is complaining British Airways lost his luggage. (Shows he should have caught Eurostar instead…)

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Not the old days your mother told you about

July 8, 2007 – 9:17 am

“In 1914 it was estimated that 100,000 working class women took abortifacients every year, and by just before the Second World War a government investigation estimated the number of illegal abortions performed each year between 44,000 and 60,000. If self- induced miscarriages are added to that figure, the total could have been between 110,000 and 150,000 a year – comparable with figures today but in a much smaller population…. the government’s own survey …estimated that at least 40 percent of all miscarriages in the 1930s were in fact a result of induced abortions…. [a survey just before the Second World War found] that between 16 and 20 percent of all pregnancies ended in abortion.” (p. 31)

“…in 1938-39 nearly a third of all women conceived their first child before marriage, a figure that rose to to 42 percent of under 20s” getting married. (p. 32)

So how did this happen?

“The most common form of sexual intercourse pre-war was … the ‘knee-trembler’ – sexual intercourse standing up, often outdoors, which was ‘fast, furtive, and rarely fulfilling for young women’.” (p.28)

From Material girls: Women, men and work Lindsey German, bookmarks, 2007.

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