A friend is reading Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World – and she’s been regaling me with stories of toshers, pure-finders, mudlarks and the sewers of Victorian London. Here’s how the book begins: It is August 1854, and London is a city of scavengers. Just…
I like to learn and one of the things I have learned is that I really don’t like being taught. There’s been a few notable exceptions but generally being “taught” is not my cup of tea and brings out the worst in me. So – rather at cross grain – I enrolled in a short online Creativity course. It helped…
There’s a move afoot to rename the ten American military bases named for Confederates No more forts named for the traitors and white supremacists of the Confederacy. Here’s Elizabeth Warren on the subject: If they are to be renamed for successful military figures who were not traitors, how about Fort Tubman? Tubman – the first woman to lead an armed…
Good friends, gone now. Their photographs on my wall. Until some stranger takes them down, throws them away. No reason to keep them after all. Last week I learned via a Facebook post that Marty Sternstein had died on April 18th. This past week has seen a a social media outpouring of tributes in his memory. Marty was 78 when…
Knowing that as far as our Federal Government is concerned I am – along with pretty much everyone else – expendable, I am committed to avoiding contracting COVID-19. So that means not going shopping. And it means arranging for deliveries. Almost a full time occupation in itself. And that means someone else taking the risks on my behalf because they…
May the tide carry you out beyond the face of fear. Three poems for Sunday. Yesterday it snowed and I made tartar sauce – just mayonnaise, lemon juice, mustard and a chopped pickle – to go with the cubes of frozen fish. And today they say the temperature will rise into the 60s F. We have moved from an abundance…
It’s not coronavirus alone but it was almost a final straw on top of other financial threats. Schools are braced for a dose of tough reality.- UK private schools feel pandemic squeeze And so it begins – the great corona virus contraction of 2020. The old new normal is now the new abnormal normal. After the global recession of 2008-2009…
Doesn’t look like any of us are going to be traveling any time soon so I’m glad to have the vicarious opportunity via the tea towels. We have quite the drawer full – gifts over the years from Brit visitors and souvenirs bought on various trips to the UK and elsewhere. Each one has a story. And now so handy…
To a Sewist extraordinaire, with thanks. This is just to say … . (Pictures to follow once they have been released from cardboard quarantine.) Sew – in anticipation of the opening of the package and – with many apologies to Paul Lawrence Dunbar: We Wear the Masks We wear the masks that we both chose They hide our cheeks and…
Politics without mercy, demonic world events, power without responsibility, nature takes flight. National Insecurity The Under Secretary leans forward and draws an X and her ear-drops dangle like swords of Damocles. As a mottled butterfly is invisible against the ground so the demon merges with the opened newspaper. A helmet worn by no one has taken power. The mother-turtle flees…
There I was I was minding my own business drinking an early morning cuppa in isolation, socially distanced and hunkered when there was a flash of lightning and a tremendous thunderclap right overhead. Just one, followed a quick pelt of rain. And because I was deep in The Black Death – the way one is in the novelty phase of…
What Schools Have To Be About Now A colleague shared an article – That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief from the Harvard Business Review and it struck a chord. Suddenly – with the pandemic – the future, that had been lurking and looming on a horizon in plain sight, had arrived all at once. And everything was different and everything…
Dear Friends and Neighbors: Based on personal observations and reports from others, many, if not most, grocery stores and other essential retail outlets in our area do not appear to be in compliance with the current New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) “Guidance for Cleaning and Disinfection for COVID-19 For Retail Stores.” How We, as Individual Citizens, Can Help…
So many parallels between our current pandemic and the plague that swept through London in 1665, at least as described by Daniel Defoe in Journal of the Plague Year. It’s a novel, written many years later in – 1722 – by a remarkably talented fabulator. So always good to take it with a shovel of salt. But here’s one big…
They say the war is over. But water still Comes bloody from the taps. from ‘Redeployment,’ Howard Nemerov In April 1961 the BBC Light program broadcast the first episode of a new radio drama: The Avenue Goes to War. It was based on the R. F. Delderfield novel of the same name. It’s the story of one suburban street in…