On the back of an envelope…
When I was about fifteen – living in Somerset – I discovered penfriends. I can’t remember much about any of them and the long distance relationship was generally very short-lived…. Read more »
Category: Social History
Salad Days
Sir John Evelyn, best known for his diary, was also a vegetarian and a fan of salads and would hopefully have approved of the salad pictured above. His 1699 book… Read more »
They flog horses – don’t they?
The writer of Ecclesiastes observed that the race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong – but he’d probably never tried to buy tickets online… Read more »
A Taste of India – possibly
When the first dedicated Indian restaurant – the Hindoostanee – was opened in London in 1809 by an enterprising immigrant called Dean Mahomed, it boasted of “Indian dishes, in the highest… Read more »
Battersea’s Patron Saint?
So far the only saint with any Battersea connections seems to be Saint Ethelburga, who was probably just visiting her brother Saint Erkenwald, Bishop of London who may have… Read more »
Water water everywhere – in bottles at least
There may not be life on Mars but it’s just been confirmed that there is water – a whole underground lake of it around 12 miles across. But it’s probably… Read more »
I Go – I Come Back!
“I go – I come back” was one of the phrases born out of the whimsically surreal and satirical radio series It’s That Man Again (ITMA) which entertained wartime and… Read more »
A tale of many sandwiches
The other day we found a traditional sandwich in a London pub. Not in some far corner of the east end but at a pub in Mayfair. There it was… Read more »
Blue is the colour….
David Mitchell commented in the Observer on 1 April 2018: ‘I liked the old passports too, though not primarily because of their colour, but because they were bigger and had a… Read more »
Things we forgot to remember
I’m interested to see whether this year’s Last Night of the Proms (on Saturday 9 September) takes up last year’s invented tradition when a good number of European flags mingled… Read more »