Month: April 2019

Geography & Environment

March winds, April showers

Planet Earth’s climate changeability has seen at least five Ice Ages come and go up to now, but in the current interval […]

Planet Earth’s climate changeability has seen at least five Ice Ages come and go up to now, but in the current interval the UK’s springtime can be summed up in the old saying:

March winds and April showers,
Bring forth May flowers.

Andrew Lang included this in his 1897 collection of folk tales and rhymes entitled ‘The Nursery Rhyme Book’ and the weather conditions it describes are as true today as they were then.

They can be explained scientifically when one considers the seasonal movements of the jet streams and the gulf streams, along with the increasing hours of sunshine during springtime. The clash of air rising from warmer land with that from the cold seas causes windy weather in March, especially in the west, and rain showers quickly followed by outbreaks of sun in April.

The UK’s position off the north-west of the European continent subjects it to a whole variety of weather phenomena. Snow is not unknown in springtime, but usually there are cold, not quite freezing nights, with warm days. After this, in May the plants are ready to display their beautiful flowers.

(Image: Kenneth Mallard at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)

06/04/2019
3 min
6 years
197 words

Celebrations & Holidays

Christmas Day

Christmas Day, on 25th December, is perhaps the biggest celebration of them all. It is one of only two days in the […]

Christmas Day, on 25th December, is perhaps the biggest celebration of them all. It is one of only two days in the UK when all shops are closed and it is coupled with Boxing Day as a two-day Bank Holiday. Although Christianity commandeered it as a remembrance of Jesus’s birthday and gave it their own name, it is fundamentally a secular holiday with ancient roots.

Saturnalia was the Roman Empire’s winter solstice festival, lasting a week and comprising drunkenness and general unruliness, while Yule was the British pagan equivalent. This lasted twelve days and was a fire festival in gratitude for the ‘re-birth’ of the sun. Pagan elements of Christmas include bringing a tree indoors and decorating it, hanging up mistletoe and holly, feasting, lighting candles, outdoor singing and gift-giving.

St. Nicholas (Santa Claus), who helped produce the New Testament in 325, was merged with the pagan god Woden, but his red suit and chubby red cheeks are entirely thanks to the advertising team at Coca Cola in 1931. Christmas today is a strange assortment of ancient and modern rituals, not least of which is the little white lie that otherwise honest parents feel compelled to tell their children about… shhh!

(Image: Karen Warfel at pixabay.com)

05/04/2019
3 min
6 years
207 words

Inventions

Television

Two Scotsmen played significant roles in the invention of the television, albeit in opposite directions. The route taken by the older of […]

Two Scotsmen played significant roles in the invention of the television, albeit in opposite directions. The route taken by the older of the two, Alan Campbell Swinton, FRS (1863-1930), proved to be the most productive. However, the younger man, John Logie Baird, FRSE (1888-1946), is more famous, even though his mechanical televisions soon became obsolete.

Campbell Swinton set out his ideas for constructing an electronic television using cathode ray tubes, in a letter entitled ‘Distant Electric Vision’ published in 1908. He gave more details in a lecture in 1911. Several engineers had been looking into developing a device for transmitting still and moving images, without much success, and Campbell Swinton gave them the way forward, omitting to patent any of his proposals.

He recognised the disadvantages of mechanical sets and advised the BBC against their use. Nevertheless, Baird was pioneering their production and was the first to demonstrate a working television, in 1926, on the basis of which he formed a manufacturing company. Two years later it was the first to broadcast to a ship and to New York. It also demonstrated the first colour and stereo images, but Philo Farnsworth in the USA was quickly overtaking the field with his Campbell Swinton-inspired electronic TV.

(Image: maxpixel.net)

05/04/2019
3 min
6 years
205 words

Sport

Real Tennis

Real tennis, or just ‘tennis’ to its aficionados, came long before lawn tennis, but is a rather niche sport today. It is […]

Real tennis, or just ‘tennis’ to its aficionados, came long before lawn tennis, but is a rather niche sport today. It is played in Britain, Australia, the USA and France and there are fewer than fifty professional courts, twenty-seven of which are in Britain. The world’s oldest tennis club still in operation is The Leamington Tennis Court Club, which opened in 1846 and offers real tennis amongst its exclusive facilities.

Real tennis is very different to lawn tennis..

Played indoors with handmade solid balls and wonky wooden rackets, the score words are the same as in lawn tennis ~ love, 15, 30, 40, deuce, advantage ~ and there is a net in the middle, but it requires more agility than its younger off-shoot. It also has a handicap system which rates ability so that players at different levels can still play each other.

Tennis was popular in the 16th century and King Henry VIII (1491-1547) was renowned as a skilled player, with courts built at Hampton Court Palace. It declined in the era of the Puritans but there was a revival in the 19th century. This was halted, however, by the invention of lawn tennis in the 1870s. This is when it became ‘real’.

(Image: Dani Lurie at Flickr.com / CC BY 2.0)

03/04/2019
3 min
6 years
207 words

Culture

Curry houses

In the 1970s/80s, going out for a meal in the evening became very popular and ‘going for an Indian’ meant that you […]

In the 1970s/80s, going out for a meal in the evening became very popular and ‘going for an Indian’ meant that you were going to a curry house. As most curry houses (restaurants) opened until quite late, it was the destination of choice for any group of people finishing off a night on the town, rather drunk and competing with each other to consume the spiciest curry on the menu!

The British who lived in India from the eighteenth century onwards developed a taste for the cuisine and wanted to reproduce it on their return home. Not all of the spices were available in Britain and the first published curry recipe, in 1747, only included pepper corns and coriander seeds. Author Hannah Glasse later added more spices to her instructions ~ “To make a Currey, the India Way” ~ in her best-selling book, ‘The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy’.

The first curry houses appeared at the beginning of the 1800s, but it was a century later that their number multiplied, firstly in London and then in other areas where immigrants from South Asia settled. The oldest curry house still in business today is the Veeraswamy in London, which opened in 1926.

*Many curry dishes have been devised specially for the British market, along with the all-encompassing ‘curry powder’. Image: Rosemary Potter at cookipedia.co.uk / CC BY 4.0*

(Top image: Chan Walrus at pexels.com)

02/04/2019
3 min
6 years
233 words

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Quoting Neil Oliver...

I love Britain more than anywhere else in the world. With all my heart I declare that those of us born here, or who have made a home here by choice, are the luckiest, most blessed of all people. I am British. I will always be British.