Britblog Roundup No 142 is no up on Suz Blog, and the author brings her own inimitable style to the task – definitely one to enjoy.
(And through it I found a spectacularly wonderful new – to me – blog, English Buildings and learned what a traditional English bee skep (predating the days of hives), looks like.)
Note to my (non)-delivery man this morning. At 8.30 on a Sunday morning I will be nowhere else but in bed, asleep. Should you have told me that the delivery will be between 9 and 12, and I not answer my phone at 8.30, due to, obviously, being asleep, perhaps you could get out of your cab, walk 50 yards and ring my doorbell, rather than take the bookcase all of the way back to Lancashire?
Just a thought.
I’ve been enjoying a fascinating discussion on the Mediev-L email discussion list about pepper. Like the original questioner, when I thought about the spice I was thinking of the early modern period, and the early period of European colonialism, but I’ve now learnt that the Greeks employed it in their cuisine, as did particularly the later Romans, and our name for it came from them, and they drew it from Sanskrit.
But there are several different fruits known as pepper – long pepper and black pepper, while European medieval early modern* sources confused chillies and peppers (which suggests to me they didn’t know either very well – or in rather degraded forms.)
There was also the attractively named grains of paradise – a plant of the ginger family with a peppery taste (at least this seems to be the consensus view – some think it was cardamon).
* I got a bit early here, as the commenter below explains. What I find fascinating about that is how late the chilli gets to Asia, yet how essential it now seems to Asian cuisines.
You can feel spirits sink. Summertime ends, misery sets in, and as Anatole Kaletsky sets out, more people die on the roads, greenhouse gas outputs go up, and the children who are still playing outside stop doing so – thus putting on some more pounds. So why are we still changing the clocks?
Child sexual assault we now talk about and to a much better extent than in the past deal with – and listen to the victims.
But sexual assault on males is perhaps, the last great taboo issue to talk about. So you can only admire, if be astonished by, the courage of a 15-year-old victim who has spoken out despite being treated (in Dubai) in a way that many female victims would recognise.
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