No, not a sentiment you’ll see often on this blog, but I am talking historically. In the Twenties, I’ve learnt from a biography of the palaeontologist Dorothea Bate (of which more soon), it financed “to the tune of some “thousands of pounds” (rather a lot then) the archaeological excavation of the Roman fortress and ampitheatre at Caerleon in Wales.

Of course the pay-off was exclusive news, but as a promotional method it makes a nice change from free CDs, DVDs and other dross now falling, it seems, out of every newspaper in the land. They’re one of the reasons I’m switching over to entirely web-based newspaper reading – such a horrible waste of resources, when they go straight from the shop to the bin, without even emerging from the plastic wrapper.

Perhaps someone could revive this as a promotional method? (I say in hope rather than expectation – would no doubt be considered far too high-brow.)

Today’s Diaries of a Lady of Quality entry is actually a letter from Lord Alvaney, who seems to me a self-conscious wit, as he makes fun of the doubtful virtues of taking the waters at Buxton, still a big tourist centre.

“Animated by the appetite, which even the diluent powers of common water, assisted by the vibrations of diurnal exercise and the collisive hilarity of reciprocal salutation, would give to a body obstructed by gluttony and rest — they devour with deleterious hunger a farinaceous sponge, the interstices of which are inundated with butter, which might smile at the peristaltic exertions of an elephant, and of which the digestion would be no less an evil than the obstruction.”

Pretentious maybe, but it is still rather fun in its orotund syllables. (Yes, I had to look up farinaceous too – “Made from, rich in, or consisting of starch”. Anyone know what dish is being insulted – just bread?)

No prizes for guessing who is the subject of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’s daily feature. (That link will only work for a couple of days.)

But I’d like to spare a thought for Nelson’s poor wife (while Lady Hamilton gets to swan around in all of the glamorous reflected glory).

…Nelson married Frances Nisbet at Nevis on 11 March 1787. In June the Boreas sailed for home, soon followed by Mrs Nelson in a merchant ship. Nelson and his wife spent the next five years in England on half-pay, much of the time with his father in Norfolk. Frances, who had lived all her life in the West Indies, was severely tried by Norfolk winters in a draughty parsonage …

[then he was a humble junior naval officer. By the time he was a national hero …}

…In September [1802] Lady Hamilton had bought for him Merton Place, Surrey, and there he now settled with the Hamiltons. His relatives were frequent visitors, having swiftly deserted Lady Nelson and echoed Emma Hamilton’s spiteful remarks about her; only his old father declined to break off relations with her. He died in 1802, and that summer Nelson and the Hamiltons went on a triumphal progress across England and south Wales.

The Uncertainty Principle poses an interesting question: which was the worst century to live in? He’s talking Britain; it would be interesting to do an international listing.

TUP agrees with Channel Four that it was the 14th century, with that nasty little visit by the Black Death, but I suspect it might have been the 5th or 6th AD – when the glories of the Roman empire were still a near memory, and everything was falling apart.

(Either pretty well puts hysteria about bird flu, al-Qa’ida and similar in perspective.)

That’s within recorded history – most of the millennia of human existence before that must have been pretty equal in misery. I know they say the early farmers were worse of in terms of nutrition etc, but given the fear and uncertainty that we lived in during our hunter-gatherer existence, that couldn’t have been a ball of laughs either.

The planned new British ID cards have scraped through the Commons, although with a bit of luck the Lords will block them. Even the experts don’t think they’ll be sufficiently reliable, the Guardian reports today:

Mr Tavano also noted the shortcomings of biometric data. “If you play the guitar, if you’re a mason, or when you grow old, your fingerprints can change so they do not match biometric data already stored,” he told Guardian Unlimited. Under the scheme, face, iris and fingerprint scans will be used to identify people.

Just imagine – you get to the airport after the London-Sydney flight, and The Computer decides your iris scan means you’re not you. Maybe the failure rate is only one in 10,000, but look at the queue at Heathrow and imagine how many that means every day.

Getting even darker, an image of America as a threatened rabbit warren, ala Watership Down. (A book I confess I’ve never read, but given its seemingly essential place in the English psyche I probably should.

Finally, the ad man who is happy to dismiss more than half of the human race as ‘crap’. Yes, it is the usual, female, half.

Actually, I bet if you pinned him down, he’d say anyone who wasn’t a carbon copy of himself was “crap”, so probably in his world view there are half a dozen people aren’t. We all know the type – they only promote people who are identikit pictures of themselves, because that’s all they can manage to deal with. If you’ve got breasts, by definition you’re not like them. (No, I haven’t known any women like that, although I have dealt with women who were the opposite – only unthreatening young males need apply.)