From the Rt Hon. Frank Dobson, MP.
The House of Commons
… “Thank you for your letter, dated 2 July, about EDM 146. I have now signed the EDM, please contact me again if there is anything further I can do on your behalf …

Would you believe it, democracy in action. (And the letter and envelope are both recycled paper!)

(This is is a motion demanding increased charges for high-polluting vehicles. It won’t have any legislative effect, but it is something.)

More on the letter I wrote and the early day motion here.

* What is the relationship between historiography and the writing of historical novels? What happens if the facts get in the way of the story?

The Little Professor is engaged in a fascinating study of the fictional treatments of Anne Boleyn, perhaps THE most popular single character in historical fiction. (No, on second thoughts probably that is her husband, or maybe Julius Caesar? Has anyone ever done a study on that?)

And I do have to look up the one book the prof has found in which Anne doesn’t die: Nancy Kress, And Wild for to Hold.

* As a child I once had the misfortune to draw with a chess grand master who was visiting my club, which instantly made me their “great junior hope”, a pressure that quickly freaked me out, particularly when I realised that to get anywhere I’d have to rote learn vast lists of moves.

But Bobby Fischer has solved the problem. With his form of the game it could be pure thinking and calculation again. (Via Robot wisdom.)

* I’ve enjoyed browsing a selection of presents for the person in your life who already has everything, from the Unemployed Philosophers Guild. I was particularly taken by the St Sebastian pincushion. (Via Grow-a-brain.)

* Want to know where you can find an animal you’re longing to add to your selection of snapshots? The World Wildlife Fund has put up Wildfinder, which will identify locations by common or scientific name. (Via Worldchanging.)

This article, by Madeleine Bunting in The Guardian, is the best I’ve read on the London bombings and what might have motivated the perpetrators.

Via Breebop:

You’re The Things They Carried!

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Water buffalo? Well not too bad.

More about the book here.

I learnt today that my grandfather, Ralph, died on the 18th of last month. He was 86, and had had little contact with our family since he left my grandmother when I was 11. It was a midnight flit, and I don’t think anyone knew where he was for years, although he did spend Christmas with us when I was 17, and I spent a few days with him in Townsville about five years after that.

Mum was always going to visit him, but he was two flights and quite a lot of money away, so she never got around to it. Calling him to tell him that she had been killed was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do.

He found himself a new family in Townsville and I think they did a wonderful job of looking after him. But before he died, they tell me, he destroyed virtually all of his papers, and consequently they had no contact details for me or his ex-wife or anyone else.

It was only because he kept a few of the newspaper articles that I’d written and sent to him that they were eventually able to trace me.

I don’t know why I feel the urge to blog this – I guess it is a small record of a life. By profession he was a radiator mechanic, he had a sister Ina, I believe now dead, and a brother Noel Lee White, whom we are trying to track down (last known location the Gold Coast, I’ll add on the off chance). His life was limited for many years by glaucoma and high blood pressure, and he became very deaf, which made phone conversations pretty well impossible.

That’s really all I can think of to say.

Normal blogging will resume tomorrow.

Philippa Gregory’s The Queen’s Fool is an entertaining, well-researched novel of Tudor times, based on an interesting premise, the female “fool”. Its title character moves from the endangered household of Princess Elizabeth to the unhappy court of Queen Mary. (More here.)

So when I was looking around for a bit of light, entertaining reading, I picked up her The Wise Woman, set earlier, during Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries and nunneries. I thought it would be an interesting contrast to Dissolution, the novel set in the same period that I wrote about recently.

I was, however, severely disappointed with The Wise Woman. The research seems scanty – the characters assume a human gestational period of nine months, which I’m sure was not the belief then, and Alys, the title character, moves from peasant’s shack to castle with ridiculous ease.

But what is really wrong with the book is the nature of the main character. As a foundling she is taken in by a horribly poor “wise woman”; then she becomes a nun; then ends up as a waiting woman in that castle, and throughout she shows not one skerrick of compassion or interest in anyone who helps her – in fact her actions cause, directly or indirectly, the death of all of them. The message of the book seems to be: don’t trust anyone who’s lived in poverty, because they’ll only ever be out for the main chance, and will be thoroughly unreliable.

Aside from the ridiculousness of that message, as a central character in the novel, Alys is just not someone you want to spend time with.

Just how this novel got published I find hard to imagine. Perhaps the editor saw potential in the writer, and was prepared to wait for it to come out, but in the meantime, this is a cautionary tale: just because an author has written a good book, it doesn’t mean their earlier work was worthy of your attention, or your cash.