Well, I'm never to old to learn something, nordmann, so thanks for imparting the facts about the chair.   I didn't know about the history of this chair.  The series Versailles was mentioned on the accuracy in history thread.  I watched the first two series for the acting but knew some of the things mentioned were decidedly off so I found a blog dedicated to Louis XIV and went there to get some idea of a more accurate background.  The lady who kept the blog said she was annoyed by people other than the King (in the series) sitting in armchairs which wasn't allowed at the time (in France anyway).

I know somebody who went over to Christchurch recently to visit her daughter who is now resident in New Zealand.  I don't know if Christchurch qualifies as a city.  I imagine New Zealand as being a bit like England used to be - with green hills and unspoilt countryside but Caro may tell a different story.  I've never been there and the makers of the Lord of the Rings films may have chosen "good" bits.  The lady I know who went there (it's the same lady whose son was marred at Belfast Castle) said she finds it a nice country.

Changing the subject it seems the BBC are going to make a film of a book by Eleanor Catton called The Luminaries.  I think it is about people seeking their fortune in the New Zealand goldfields (so obviously has a historical background).  I've never read anything by Eleanor Catton so I can't judge the book.  I think so far they have cast one New Zealander but the rest (of the main characters) seem to be from the UK or mainland Europe.  I suppose there would have been people from diverse backgrounds working in the goldfields and any industries allied to the goldfields so hopefully it may not run up against the dreaded dodgy accent syndrome.  As I say I haven't read the book (or anything else by the same author) so I can't really judge its literary merits.

The Luminaries won the Booker Prize and we both (my husband and I) enjoyed it immensely, though we ignored the astrological thread running through it, which was hard to understand.  It is set in the goldfields and basically has twelve men trying to work out who murdered a young man hunting for gold.  There are various threads running through it but they all lead back to this story. I am interested in seeing how they confine this big book to the screen.  

Christchurch is definitely a city - it is the second largest city by population in NZ.  I am wondering about city boundaries - I gather my nearest city, Dunedin, is the third largest city in the world in area.  It seems to extend hundreds of kilometres in one direction (west) and south about thirty.  Christchurch in comparison is small by area.

Just entered late the board. Copious meal this evening not for people liking vegetables...

Côte à l'os "saignant" nearly "rare"



And spent some time on the French thread about the distinction between "cité" and "ville". And now they started a new thread about the distinction between "bourg" and "village". But it gets more and more complicated as the connotation of "borough" (bourg), although the same word, seems to be something else in English as in French...

Too late today...

Kind regards from Paul.

I wasn't sure where to post this but on the same website where I found the information about using apricot kernels etc there was something about using natural (well vegetable) dyes to colour eggs for Easter (normal eggs that henny-penny lays not chocolate ones).  www.sewhistorically.com/how-to-dye-easter-eggs-naturally/  The lady couldn't get anything to work for green so she had used yellow and then overdyed with blue and it had worked.  So simple, but I don't know if I would have thought of that.  I may be lurking on that website quite often now - and not a conspiracy theory in sight there.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

I wasn't sure where to post this but on the same website where I found the information about using apricot kernels etc there was something about using natural (well vegetable) dyes to colour eggs for Easter (normal eggs that henny-penny lays not chocolate ones).  www.sewhistorically.com/how-to-dye-easter-eggs-naturally/  The lady couldn't get anything to work for green so she had used yellow and then overdyed with blue and it had worked.  So simple, but I don't know if I would have thought of that.  I may be lurking on that website quite often now - and not a conspiracy theory in sight there.

Lady,

I guess it only "works" because the two dyes "mix" with its other. If they didn't and one pigment covered the other it would only the last pigment who you would see. But of course they can be transparant and then the yellowish transparent would be covered by the blueish transparant and I guess that could give green...it goes to the fundaments of colouring ...

Kind regards from Paul.

BTW
Lady and other members of the blog.

Spent the whole evening with difficult matters on the French board about Htiler, totalitarism and Hannah Arendt...
http://passion-histoire.net/viewtopic.php?f=108&t=40974

Kind regards from Paul.

Green was, perhaps surprisingly, always quite a difficult colour to achieve using natural dyes. Chlorophyll, the chemical that makes plants green, is green in aqueous solution but tends to go a very muddy brown when it is 'fixed' onto fabric (by mordating with alum, vinegar or urine). A dull or pale green can be obtained by dyeing yellow and using an iron-containing mordant or simply by boiling the yellow dye in an iron pot, but the colour isn't very good. The famous bright Lincoln Green colour (of Robin Hood and his merry men) was, like your Easter eggs, obtained by first dyeing it blue and then overdying it yellow. The blue was obtained using the plant woad (Isatis tinctoria) and the yellow with weld (Reseda luteola) or dyer's broom (Genista tinctoria). Similarly Kendal Green was obtained by first dyeing yellow using dyer's broom and then overdyeing blue with imported Asiatic indigo (Indigofera tinctoria).

My senior school only ever did General Science.  I wouldn't have minded going deeper into Chemistry but it just wasn't on the cards.  However I remember us making (i.e. myself and my fellow pupils) pretty green ferrous sulphate crystals but they soon became oxidised and became ferric sulphate which was a not very appealing brown if I remember correctly.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

...  I remember us making (i.e. myself and my fellow pupils) pretty green ferrous sulphate crystals but they soon became oxidised and became ferric sulphate which was a not very appealing brown if I remember correctly.

Exactly. And medieval dyers were faced with just the same problem: it is difficult to get a green dye that looks good and lasts because, as you say, chemically the brilliant green ferric (Fe³⁺) ions oxidise to dull brown ferrous (Fe²⁺) ions.

And while we're talking about colouring things green ... I was/still am trying to find a good medieval natural and edible green food dye ... the sort of thing that would be readily available to Tudor chefs. By experimentation I've successfully managed to extract green chlorophyll into aqueous and, more sucessfully, into an alcoholic ethanol solution. But whenever I then try to cook with it the green always goes brown (it's them damn ferric ions oxidising to ferrous ions again!). I have however successfully managed to make a green pastry - which was what I was really trying to achieve in the first place - by simply mixing very finely chopped parsely into the flour, in much the same way that lasagne verde is made.

Meles meles wrote:

LadyinRetirement wrote:

...  I remember us making (i.e. myself and my fellow pupils) pretty green ferrous sulphate crystals but they soon became oxidised and became ferric sulphate which was a not very appealing brown if I remember correctly.

Exactly. And medieval dyers were faced with just the same problem: it is difficult to get a green dye that looks good and lasts because, as you say, chemically the brilliant green ferric (Fe³⁺) ions oxidise to dull brown ferrous (Fe²⁺) ions.

And while we're talking about colouring things green ... I was/still am trying to find a good medieval natural and edible green food dye ... the sort of thing that would be readily available to Tudor chefs. By experimentation I've successfully managed to extract green chlorophyll into aqueous and, more sucessfully, into an alcoholic ethanol solution. But whenever I then try to cook with it the green always goes brown (it's them damn ferric ions oxidising to ferrous ions again!). I have however successfully managed to make a green pastry - which was what I was really trying to achieve in the first place - by simply mixing very finely chopped parsely into the flour, in much the same way that lasagne verde is made.

Meles meles, you are really an artist.

With Paul as fan...

I probably said ferrous sulphate because I have to take some "ferrous sulphate" tablets as part of my medication since my red corpuscles reading took a dive a couple of years ago (when it came to light I had coeliac disease).  From what I remember the copper sulphate crystals (blue) changed hue as well.  I said before that we could only do General Science (or Human Biology and Hygiene - it was an either/or situation) but about 3 of us were going to do Chemistry O level but then we had a change of teacher and the new teacher just wasn't interested.  But before we gave it up I remember we did some unsupervised science work in the lab (we only had one lab at my school) which involved adding iron filings (or was it copper filings?) to nitric acid.  The science book said add sparingly but we were a little over enthusiastic and ended up having to open all the windows in the lab (and go outside for a little while) when the chemical reaction took place and the gas was given off.  The gas did make one gag.

Echoing Paul's view, MM is certainly inventive (re the green pasta).  I've always liked the colour green; maybe because I am of part Irish descent.

Not directly to do with the sumptuary law thread but over the last few years in an attempt to enrich my vocabulary (how successfully is a moot point) I have been having a word a day emailed to me by Dictionary.com.  Today's word was "vulgarian" and I thought it was a coincidence considering what we had been discussing re "red 'at no drawers" -" a vulgar person, especially one whose vulgarity is the more conspicuous because of wealth, prominence, or pretensions to good breeding"


Could apply to someone who was "all fur coat and no"...undies I suppose.

I recently received a mail explaining that 'LBGT' is an acronym for 
'Liberty' - 'Bible' - 'Guns' - 'Trump'

I had nothing to say.

I thought a Vulgarian was a citizen of the Kingdom of Vulgaria - the central European state popularised in 'Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang'. In the 1968 film Baron Bombast's soldiers clearly have 'VULGAR' written on their cap bands.

Greetings all... I've been trying for ages to log in, but I've spent some time at various times in hospital, lost my phone, or had it removed without my consent. Spilt my dinner on a tablet, never to work again, dropped another phone down the sink, trod on another, tried to repair another, never to work again and have a box of other tablets phones and pc's that will shortly be getting a Vikings funeral and I've tried many different passwords... in despair I've re-registered.
Anyway... what's it take to get a drink around here now... where is the front page now, how does one summon up the great norrdman?

Normanhurst1 wrote:

Greetings all... I've been trying for ages to log in, but I've spent some time at various times in hospital, lost my phone, or had it removed without my consent. Spilt my dinner on a tablet, never to work again, dropped another phone down the sink, trod on another, tried to repair another, never to work again and have a box of other tablets phones and pc's that will shortly be getting a Vikings funeral and I've tried many different passwords... in despair I've re-registered.
Anyway... what's it take to get a drink around here now... where is the front page now, how does one summon up the great norrdman?

Normanhurst,

how glad to see you here again...I have rememberings...can that be of photos of building a boat...or was that your son...in the meantime received a new kidney and am now reaching for the one hundred...the great nordmann, I don't know what it is with him...although we had great conversations with him...and to the great damn of Temperance...he has still that excellent English...and still not able "to bring a pin in between" (Dutch expression)...especially the logic...but not continually overhere anymore...perhaps only when the stuff is on his "height"?...
One constant in the excellent contributions: our great South-Eastern France one: Meles meles...

And welcome again dear Normanhurst.

Paul.

Normanhurst,
Pull up a muffin, sit yerself down and have a pickled gannet ... they're in the same place as always: behind the trebuchet. Nordmann is still in charge and he pops in now and then; you can always send hm a personal message. From your news you seem to have been through the mill of late ... but at least you haven't mentioned the dreaded Olga from the Volga, so I assume you've at least escaped her clutches. So settle down and have a pint of Old Speckled Newt ... or, knowing where you're from, perhaps a pint of Wadworth's Badger beer, it's wot us meleses like best:

By the way, Paul (Belgian Paul, that is) when I saw your côte à l'os picture, I intended to mention that I finally got round to butchering up my half piggy:




... from that I got a leg joint, the breast (rolled & stuffed) and the filet mignon, plus about 5kgs of general braising steak, and also about a kilo of assorted trimmings which, with all the blood and offal/abats, I made into four haggises (haggi?). All in all nose-to-tail eating with nothing going to waste.

Normanhurst, we thought we had lost you forever. Great to see you back, with or without all your phones. I have only had one phone and it is not a smartphone, just an ordinary dumb phone that my daughter in law picked up on a beach somewhere about 18 years ago.  I still can't work it well, only knowing one punctuation mark, the full stop.

Good to have you back Normanhurst.

Would you like some breakfast, as I'm off to the bakers?

Welcome back sir - I won't offer you any nosh, you seem to have enough on your plate already (nosh, I mean), judging by the pictures above.

Good to know you're still in the land of the living. I worry about these things these days ... (anyone heard from ferval since before summer? Has the queen of the desert abandoned us? Shall we all join hands and contact the living ....?)

Telephones are overrated these days - back in the day we had one installed by my father's employers which allowed only incoming calls. Bar the odd occasion when we might have liked to order an ambulance, fire brigade, lifeboat, exorcist etc, it was more than ample for our needs. The very occasional incoming call gave my mother the chance to practice her "telephone posh voice" and give us all a laugh (we made our own entertainment in those days), and even my doddery old granny responded well and promptly to the Pavlovian dog response conditioning when the bell summoned us all to huddle around the device and gaze at the sheer bakelite beauty of the apparatus as my mother went into her "my husband and I ..." routine.

No app on earth can recreate that.

Meles meles wrote:

I thought a Vulgarian was a citizen of the Kingdom of Vulgaria - the central European state popularised in 'Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang'. In the 1968 film Baron Bombast's soldiers clearly have 'VULGAR' written on their cap bands.

So you are joining the merry throng of our resident comedians then, MM, as well as giving us erudite information?

I somehow "lost" some of my previous post, probably because I clicked to quote from MM's post, but of course I will join my voice to the "virtual" chorus welcoming Normanhurst back.  Glad to "see" you again, Normanhurst.

Thank you for your kind words of welcome...
I see the decorators have been busy since my last visit... I'm having trouble finding my way around.
Nordmann, I wonder if I might trouble you to supply a new password, I'd like to return to my former self, I've had to reregister under a new name, I know it's only one letter different from the old me, but for some of us old buggers, those of us already struggling with an identity crisis, that one letter makes a big difference. (It wasn't me your honour.)

I've been occupying my time studying/researching some of the histories of the new forest where I live.
After a prolonged spell in three hospitals last year, I've moved from the extreme western edge of the forest to the eastern edge, and about as far up the busy Southampton water as you can go.
I've sailed into Portsmouth and Southampton many times over the years but always to the major shipping berths. Where I'm living now is well away from the commercial aspect of the port, to a little backwater with quite a history in itself complete with a tiny shingle beach and one of only two remaining functioning tide mills in the country. Half of which is the local yacht clubhouse. Its all very quaint. It's certainly given me reason to think very differently about this part of the country.

Meles meles wrote:

By the way, Paul (Belgian Paul, that is) when I saw your côte à l'os picture, I intended to mention that I finally got round to butchering up my half piggy:




... from that I got a leg joint, the breast (rolled & stuffed) and the filet mignon, plus about 5kgs of general braising steak, and also about a kilo of assorted trimmings which, with all the blood and offal/abats, I made into four haggises (haggi?). All in all nose-to-tail eating with nothing going to waste.

Meles meles,

I wanted to say only one simple sentence to you and nevertheless had a lot of trouble to compose it...
It has all to do with words that we use every day in our speaking, and although Dutch seems not to exist anymore in Dutch, or you have to seek it on internet, where it is indeed still used in texts but not as a word in a dictionary or even on the internet in Dutch-English translations...
That word was "beslagen zijn in" and lucky I knew it in French too: "être doué en" and from that to English: "being gifted in" and from that back to modern Dutch: "begiftigd zijn met" (my translation)...

And thus at the end my text:

Meles meles, as I see it, you seem to be gifted in all fields of human crafts, intellectual and physical ones...

Kind regards from Paul.

Normanhurst1 wrote:

T
Nordmann, I wonder if I might trouble you to supply a new password, I'd like to return to my former self, I've had to reregister under a new name, I know it's only one letter different from the old me, but for some of us old buggers, those of us already struggling with an identity crisis, that one letter makes a big difference. (It wasn't me your honour.)

I have PM'd you with a new password for your old account, sir.

Recently I read a piece conjecturing about the details of Claudius's visit to his new Roman acquisition of Britannia - which bits were plausible, which bits were invention or indeed just ancient conjecture themselves, and which bits have gone down in the "official" version but which rely on rather selectively plucked items from various local traditions that may as well have been plucked from several other, equally traditional and equally plausible, accounts.

Part of this conjecture featured a tradition in your new neck of the woods, and posits that his landing in Kent as commonly believed is possibly based more on Victorian historiography than fact. This appeared, and still appears from a purely military point of view, to have always made sense based on the perception of that part of the coast as the safe "bridgehead" for Romans into their new province. However when old folk stories and local accounts are analysed there are actually quite a few places where he was deemed to have alighted ship, and amazingly only a few of them from around the Dover area which themselves are of negligible provenance, increasing in detail, antiquity and regularity in fact the further west one goes. And this actually also makes sense militarily if one looks at the timing of his "visit", and what the Romans at that point had "pacified" through total conquest, which tribes they had allegedly neutralised with client treaties, and where their current military excursions of conquest were taking them within Britain. It would have been a time of great dependence on nautical transport in the channel area and also the requirement to have located and fortified better natural harbours nearer to the "action" than Kent provided. The area of great deep water sounds where you live would have been very quickly identified as far better suiting Roman purposes and would, by the time of Claudius's visit, most likely also therefore have been where the highest concentration of Roman military and navy personnel would have been based in coastal garrisons - exactly the kind of protection an imperial big knob would have insisted upon before he set foot on this barbarian shore.

So, Southampton Water's upper reaches may indeed have been the first landscape that Claudius might have seen close up of this new acquisition which would so emphatically cement his hold on power back home, and where - in setting an imperial sandal (and the elephant he brought with him) on this land - he physically demonstrated that he'd "earned" his triumph back home, his right to be called emperor without gainsay, and his place among the great Roman generals of historical renown.

Worth thinking about ...

nordmann wrote:

Part of this conjecture featured a tradition in your new neck of the woods, and posits that his landing in Kent as commonly believed is possibly based more on Victorian historiography than fact. This appeared, and still appears from a purely military point of view, to have always made sense based on the perception of that part of the coast as the safe "bridgehead" for Romans into their new province. However when old folk stories and local accounts are analysed there are actually quite a few places where he was deemed to have alighted ship, and amazingly only a few of them from around the Dover area which themselves are of negligible provenance, increasing in detail, antiquity and regularity in fact the further west one goes. And this actually also makes sense militarily if one looks at the timing of his "visit", and what the Romans at that point had "pacified" through total conquest, which tribes they had allegedly neutralised with client treaties, and where their current military excursions of conquest were taking them within Britain.

You’ve just reminded me of something from my schooldays nordmann. Our literature teacher was a short, rotund man who, nevertheless, had a great, booming voice worthy of a knight of the stage. If a classroom or assembly hall was particularly noisy or rowdy and was in need of being drawn to order then there was no better candidate for the job. Among the various sound bites he would use to get our attention was to roar the following exclamation:

“Julius Caesar has just landed at Walmer!”

And he would dramatically stretch out his arm and point towards the window in the direction of Walmer (about 9 miles from where we were).  The room now quieted he would then add softly:

“Claudius Caesar will seal it at Deal.”  

What’s interesting now (bearing in mind the suggestion regarding Claudius and Southampton Water) is that in the second statement he didn’t say exactly how Claudius would arrive in Deal. No doubt by land from the west.

Nothing erudite like my fellow Res Historians upthread and I know I have promised to go easy on the conspiracy theories but I came across a saying debunking flat earth.  "If the earth was flat cats would have pushed everything off the edge by now".  Or should that be on the moggy thread?

LiR,
On the other hand, then 'if the world is round [well, more or less], how can there be corners?'

Oh Nielsen, I wonder if my legs are longer than they were when I first visited Res Hist - they have been pulled so much!!!

On a more serious note, I came across something on YouTube (I've been sewing by hand mending something and so I had YouTube in the background).  It was interesting - albeit very serious - it is about one of the last surviving people in an iron lung in the USA.  He's led a useful life - been a lawyer - but his iron lung was getting worn out and because they aren't made anymore he was quite worried but a local engineer was able to help out.  He caught polio in 1952 not long before the polio vaccine was discovered so in one sense he was singularly unfortunate.  I hate having "the needle" when I was a child and tried to hide the notifications from the school but that never worked with my mum.  (Which reminds me I've had a letter from the doctors' surgery about perhaps having the flu jab as I'm over 65 - and the vet has also sent a "Dear Pebbles, Please ask your owner to arrange for you to be examined and have your flu jab" one.  But unpleasant as innoculations can be they have kept some very nasty illnesses in check at least to some extent.  Anyway, the link to the YouTube video:- 

Many thanks Nordmann for the new password enabling me to get back into the fold. 
Its very interesting what you write about the possible roman interest here in the upper reaches of Southampton water. Since coming here I've paid a keen interest in searching old earthworks, dykes and ditches on old maps. Surprisingly, maybe because I'm not searching in the right places there appears to be very little Roman influence here, but I'll sure keep looking.

It so good to be back in familiar surroundings, with old friends.

normanhurst wrote:

....  there appears to be very little Roman influence here, but I'll sure keep looking.

Other than, say, Portchester castle, one of the biggest and, despite later works, still one of the best preserved Roman forts in Britain, if not Northern Europe ... and built specifically to command the inner approaches to all the creeks/harbours leading off inland from what are now known as the Solent, Portsmouth Harbour, Southampton Water, the Hamble etc:





:

I'm not terribly au fait with roman settlement in my neck of the woods (Staffordshire).  Wall, a village near Lichfield used to be called Letocetum in roman times.  I suppose Uttoxeter (Staffordshire but more or less adjacent to the Derbyshire border) must have some roman connection because of the -eter in the name. §§§§ I was wrong - Wikipedia says Uttoxeter comes from Wuttuceshaeddre - meaning (says Wiki) "Wuttuc's homestead on the heath§§§§ - though there may have been some roman activity in the locality.

The A5 (Watling Street) passes through the county but it's further south than my hometown.

I've done a bit of cleaning/scrubbing today (plenty more where that came from) and now my jogging (though with me they are lounging) pants have lovely dirty knees.  They are an old pair.  I need a new mop or a long-handled scrubbing brush* or maybe both.

*Though I'm not sure they can be bought now.  If the sign language class is on tomorrow, in the shopping centre near the venue, there is an old-fashioned hardware shop.  I could have a look there.

Over many years but many years ago I was a frequent visitor there and on occasions enjoyed chatting with prof Barry Cunliff who took a keen interest in showing myself and young son around the site especially the archaeological dig he was working on. Its sited someway inside the harbour, I'd always thought that if an invading fleet had penetrated thus far, Portsmouth would have been lost. I was told that the castle was a favourite of king John, it being on the coast he always had a ship ready to put to sea in case he had to flee the country in a hurry. True or not, it may just be a local historians fancy.
When I said not a lot of roman interest hereabouts, I was really refering to my new local stomping grounds. Chiefly, the new forest. OS maps show only about a mile of roman road, but its hard to find details of where it came from, or where it lead to. A big problem I have now of course is that I can only get about with the aid of crutches. But I plan to sort that problem... I've bought a small motorbike with gurt fat knobbly tyres. I recon I should be able to get all over the forest on that... so long as I'm not caught.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

Oh Nielsen, I wonder if my legs are longer than they were when I first visited Res Hist - they have been pulled so much!!!

On a more serious note, I came across something on YouTube (I've been sewing by hand mending something and so I had YouTube in the background).  It was interesting - albeit very serious - it is about one of the last surviving people in an iron lung in the USA.  He's led a useful life - been a lawyer - but his iron lung was getting worn out and because they aren't made anymore he was quite worried but a local engineer was able to help out.  He caught polio in 1952 not long before the polio vaccine was discovered so in one sense he was singularly unfortunate.  I hate having "the needle" when I was a child and tried to hide the notifications from the school but that never worked with my mum.  (Which reminds me I've had a letter from the doctors' surgery about perhaps having the flu jab as I'm over 65 - and the vet has also sent a "Dear Pebbles, Please ask your owner to arrange for you to be examine and have your flu jab" one.  But unpleasant as innoculations can be they have kept some very nasty illnesses in check at least to some extent. 

Lady,

excuses, had such a backlog here and just entered the board. Still on Passion Histoire in the thread about Hitler and the grand tendencies and the influence on each other...
http://www.passion-histoire.net/viewtopic.php?f=108&t=40974&p=553491#p553491

Wanted to expand on the history of the kidney dialysis machines, while I had the modern ones, which were a dream in comparison with those of the Sixties and there were only a few in the big cities...


A nurse who was there from the beginning told me, how labour intensive it all was in the beginning,. They had each time to clean the panels and to put them again in the machine. Nowadays it are throw away tubes and one put each time new tubes in the machine. It is a bit as the reverse osmosis in our factory that we used to separate the contaminating electrolytes from the water based paint that we used for electrophoresis.
http://broughttolife.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/techniques/kidneydialysis
https://www.davita.com/treatment-services/dialysis/the-history-of-dialysis


And there was a man in the bed next to me, who came already 16 years to the dialysis centre...

Kind regards from Paul.

Nielsen and other contributors,

excuses, had such a backlog here and just entered the board. Still the whole evening doing research on Passion Histoire in the thread about Hitler and the grand tendencies and the influence on each other...kind of debate of the "Historikerstreit"...even on a more general level of determinism versus free will in history
http://www.passion-histoire.net/viewtopic.php?f=108&t=40974&p=553491#p553491

Kind regards from Paul.

I had a lurk on the board yesterday but didn't really have anything to contribute.  It's intriguing reading about the roman presence in the southern UK, but as I say I don't have sufficient knowledge to make a worthwhile contribution on that matter.

Thinking about how it used to be with iron lungs and as Paul has mentioned with the old-fashioned dialysis machines makes me realise that although coeliac disease in a darn nuisance I am (relatively) fortunate in that it can be managed.  (Of course I'd still prefer not to have it).  I don't think anyone has found a cure for rheumatoid arthritis yet; it's still a question of treating the symptoms.

Have had a bit of a day today (well it was a bit of a night last night more precisely).  I think I mentioned that the chap who was going to look at the roof for me said he would come back when his car was functioning again and he could bring his ladders.  There was another proviso that the weather be relatively fine though.  He did mention that he had contracted an illness that people who work with asbestos can get and that he had more or less retired so I said well not to make himself ill.  There was a noise last night and some water had seeped from the flat roof and made one of the plaster boards damp and it collapsed.  That was in the kitchen.  My neighbour is booked up till next May but I asked if he could put the tarpaulin over the flat roof.  He's at work now but he has said he will.  Hopefully that might be a temporary stop-gap at least.  I've rung a plumber as well because I had to unscrew the u-shaped joint underneath the wash basin in the downstairs loo (in what used to be a cole-hole - well a cupboard on the outside of the house but it was converted into a loo (on the inside) when my late parents had the extension done several years ago.  The pipe was blocked (under the wash basin).  I managed to unblock it but I can't get a good seal putting it back together.

I saw that Priscilla was looking at the board so welcome back Priscilla and I am looking forward to your contributions.

Thinking of Normanhurst's MM's exchange above -it's a long time since I went there but I went camping with the Guides many years ago near Southampton.  We were adjacent to the Beaulieu estate where the car museum is.  Well, we might even have been on the estate but not allowed on the holy of holies, really private part of the estate.  I don't think we actually went to Porchester Castle but it does look a magnificent edifice from the photograph posted.  I went with my parents to the Isle of Wight the following year and saw Carisbrooke Castle (the one where a donkey works the wheel to make the bucket go down the well) but I don't think that goes back to roman times.

Addendum - a plumber has put a seal on the trap (is that what the u-shaped bend under a sink/washbasin is called?) so it's not leaking at present so I'm slightly less in the wars than I was - now to try and "sort" the roof.

Another contender for the place were Claudius came ashore is Chichester Harbour in West Sussex.

Cassius Dio (writing in the early 3rd century) in his history of Rome says that Claudius came, not as an invader, but specifically at the invitation of Verica, King of the Atrebates, whose territory had been invaded from the north by the neighbouring Catuvellauni. Chichester harbour was in Atrebates territory (Verica is supposed to have had a residence just a little inland) and is a large natural harbour comprising a sheltered inlet off the eastern Solent which further divides into several tidal creeks, together large enough to accommodate a large fleet, and where transports could be beached and disembarked at low tide, and then refloated at high tide.

Chichester Harbour is also immediately adjacent to the huge 'romano-british' palace of Fishbourne; it is enormous covering more area than Buckingham Palace. Construction at Fishbourne started about 80AD but from excavations and remains there was already a strongly romanised community living there for decades before Claudius' arrival. The palace itself appears from inscriptions to have been built for one, Tiberius Claudius Cogidubnus (or Togidubnus), who was presumably an important British client king of Rome (the name Cogidubnus/Togidubnus is of course British not Roman). Now, interestingly a statue of Cogidubnus as a child was found during excavations of the palace, carved in Italian marble and almost certainly produced in Rome. Accordingly it seems likely that Cogidubnus had been educated in Rome, probably because he was the son of a prominent British leader, and indeed he may have been Verica's son.

Which all goes to imply that the Roman 'invasion' was initially nothing of the sort but that their arrival was at the request of a local British King who had been maintaining close relations with Rome for some time and it was only once they advanced further north and east into the territories of hostile tribes that the fighting started. The Romans likely landed, not on a hostile shore at Richborough or Dover, but at a friendly, well-known, sheltered harbour, such as at Chichester.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

Have had a bit of a day today (well it was a bit of a night last night more precisely).  I think I mentioned that the chap who was going to look at the roof for me said he would come back when his car was functioning again and he could bring his ladders.  There was another proviso that the weather be relatively fine though.  He did mention that he had contracted an illness that people who work with asbestos can get and that he had more or less retired so I said well not to make himself ill.  There was a noise last night and some water had seeped from the flat roof and made one of the plaster boards damp and it collapsed.  That was in the kitchen.  My neighbour is booked up till next May but I asked if he could put the tarpaulin over the flat roof.  He's at work now but he has said he will.  Hopefully that might be a temporary stop-gap at least.  I've rung a plumber as well because I had to unscrew the u-shaped joint underneath the wash basin in the downstairs loo (in what used to be a cole-hole - well a cupboard on the outside of the house but it was converted into a loo (on the inside) when my late parents had the extension done several years ago.  The pipe was blocked (under the wash basin).  I managed to unblock it but I can't get a good seal putting it back together.

 
Lady,

I feel with you. A lot of stress...don't say it to me...that many times in such urgent situations...as a tenant rang in panique to me...or as the former daughter-in-law rang for a crisis situation in her bed and breakfast. Perhaps there rings a bell to MM about similar urgencies in his B&B?

Kind regards to both from Paul.

I know I'm preaching to the converted here because we are * into facts rather than conspiracies here but  this video is very short, just over 2 minutes - a blacksmith debunks the "steel beams wouldn't bend" notion.

* Though even on Res Hist we don't have 100% agreement on whether Richard III was a "bad 'un" or a "good 'un".

Well that has been an .... interesting .... experience. My old login decided not to work. I asked for a new password (assuming that I had misremembered it) and was told the admin was blocked from sending a new one out.
So then I tried to register again, only to be informed my email address was in use by another member.
Hence my regeneration (unlike Doctor Who I do not need to take advantage of the forthcoming GRA).

Green George wrote:

Well that has been an .... interesting .... experience. My old login decided not to work. I asked for a new password (assuming that I had misremembered it) and was told the admin was blocked from sending a new one out.
So then I tried to register again, only to be informed my email address was in use by another member.
Hence my regeneration (unlike Doctor Who I do not need to take advantage of the forthcoming GRA).

George,

I had the same experience on several sites, even as trivial as a site of the house market...
George, you can guess it, now the whole community is ardently guessing if you were an old BBC member or whatever
But from wherever you come a warm welcome to you.

Kind regards from Paul.

Green George wrote:

Well that has been an .... interesting .... experience. My old login decided not to work. I asked for a new password (assuming that I had misremembered it) and was told the admin was blocked from sending a new one out.
So then I tried to register again, only to be informed my email address was in use by another member.
Hence my regeneration (unlike Doctor Who I do not need to take advantage of the forthcoming GRA).

George,

I had the same experience on several sites, even as trivial as a site of the house market...
George, you can guess it, now the whole community is ardently guessing if you were an old BBC member or whatever
But from wherever you come a warm welcome to you.

Kind regards from Paul.

PaulRyckier wrote:

George,

I had the same experience on several sites, even as trivial as a site of the house market...
George, you can guess it, now the whole community is ardently guessing if you were an old BBC member or whatever
But from wherever you come a warm welcome to you.

Kind regards from Paul.

Thank you, Paul.
I suspect Sumer bound to guess correctly who I used to be.

Oh yes that one, the poultry and Mesopotamia...

Dear... you made my evening (je maakte mijn avond goed/ you made my evening "well"? or without "well") or better morning...here at the other side of the English Channel...

Kind regards from your friend Paul.