Friday, 25 April 2025

Those Hardy Pioneer Women

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      Don't ever let anyone tell you that women can't be tough if they need to be. And the ones who needed it most were the pioneer ...
Wednesday, 7 December 2022

Gotta Sell Those Hats!

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       There's always another day in Tahiti. Apropos of the natives' light regard for time, Mrs. Winkelstroetter tells us of the boa...
Tuesday, 1 March 2022

The Danger of Dealing with a Witch

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      Unrequited love! One of life's great frustrations! Haven't we all been a position whereby a little love magic would come in ha...
Sunday, 2 January 2022

A Noise Annoys a Caterpillar

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      Caterpillars! They descended as a ravenous plague on the Catskill Mountains of New York State in the years 1897-9. Green worms, or tre...
Sunday, 5 December 2021

Come Home; It's Time for Your Execution!

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      Here's a scenario: you've committed murder, and have been sentenced to death. Alas! The facilities for your execution are not ...
Saturday, 6 November 2021

"Is This Not the Carpenter?"

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     No matter how important you become, the people you will find hardest to impress are those you grew up with, who knew you when you were ...
Thursday, 28 October 2021

How Gordon Died

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      Of all late Victorian heroes, probably none has captured the imagination more than General Charles Gordon. It is little wonder: a lone...
Monday, 4 October 2021

"Seadromes": an Idea Whose Time Never Came

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       In 1844 Edgar Allan Poe produced a short story about a balloon crossing the Atlantic in three days. Fast forward a century, and we di...
Sunday, 5 September 2021

The Remarkable Birth of Television

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       At one point in The Living Shadow , the first novel in The Shadow series, the mysterious crime fighter communicates with his agents v...
Saturday, 24 April 2021

The Fabulous Londonderry Gold Bubble

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       It is a little known fact that Scrooge McDuck arrived at the Kalgoorlie gold fields in the pouch of a kangaroo.  It just goes to show...
Wednesday, 25 November 2020

A Leopard by the Tail

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     Yes, it is possible to kill a leopard in single combat, but it is not something recommended. Five years ago I reported two cases : taxi...
Thursday, 1 October 2020

Of Cricket Balls and Sparrows

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      Considering the Brits' penchant for tradition and eccentricities, I'm not surprised that the stuffed cricket is still in the M...
Thursday, 10 September 2020

Women of Tunisia, 1913

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      Far be it from me to claim an intricate knowledge of the fine points of Islamic law. However, I understand that men are required to co...
Tuesday, 25 August 2020

The Fireman Prince

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      We know him as King Edward VII - Edward the Peacemaker - but for most of his life he was Bertie, Prince of Wales, the eldest son of Qu...
Monday, 10 August 2020

Hide! The Comet is Coming!

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      Halley's Comet, as everyone knows, appears every 76 years - more or less. Its return in 1986 was a damp squib. We were all disappo...
Sunday, 13 October 2019

The Blind Girl Sees

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"I see men; but they look like trees, walking." (Mk 8:24, RSV)      Such were the words of a blind man in the process of regaini...
2 comments:
Wednesday, 14 August 2019

Chased by Mickey Mouse Gas Masks

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     What was it like on the home front in England during the Second World War? Well, for a start, they suffered very severe rationing. Als...
1 comment:
Sunday, 23 June 2019

The Virgin Matriarchs of Albania

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     Here's a scenario: imagine you live in a backward society where the male population keeps getting whittled away by blood feuds. Wha...
Thursday, 9 May 2019

The Balloon Locomotive

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     Due to its weight, a train requires a low gradient, which normally means cuttings and switchbacks in mountainous terrain. However, reac...
Wednesday, 10 April 2019

The Witches Who Failed to Fly

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      It is, of course, well established that the Great Witch Craze of the 16th and 17th centuries, stretching even into the 18th, represent...
1 comment:
Thursday, 17 January 2019

The Dubious Delights of the Upper Salween

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      Often a reader of earlier publications realises he has stepped into a world which no longer exists. The south western province of Yunn...
Thursday, 20 December 2018

Would You Like to Live in a Palace?

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     People think that a royal palace is the last word in up-to-date luxury, replete with everything the heart can desire, and that people ...
Tuesday, 20 November 2018

Traitors to the Human Race

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     "The love of money", said Phocylides, "is the mother of all evils" - a maxim which was to become proverbial in the ...
Wednesday, 19 September 2018

The Riddle of the Amazonian Amazons

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      Imagine, if you will, that beyond your towns and farms - the only world you know - dwell large settlements of aliens from outer space,...
Tuesday, 14 August 2018

The Tale of a Silly Shakedown

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      1995 . It's said that bad luck comes in threes. I had just injured my leg in a skiing accident, my tenants had done a flit and let...
Wednesday, 13 June 2018

Weird Happenings at the Battle of Acoma

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     God, gold, and glory should have been the motto of the Spanish conquistadors. Possessed of an inordinate greed for wealth and power, co...
Tuesday, 1 May 2018

Quick Thinking in Time of Danger

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     Picture the scene: South Africa, 1877. The Zulu War is raging. Meanwhile, Britain has officially annexed the Transvaal, and the locals ...
1 comment:
Wednesday, 4 April 2018

"We Could Have Been British Saboteurs"

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     One moonless night in May 1942, six British Commandos drove into Italian occupied Benghazi in a "battle waggon" painted  to r...
2 comments:
Thursday, 1 March 2018

An Island Without Wheels

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     For twenty years before I was married I travelled the world - from Greenland to Madagascar to Easter Island. Even so, I had the consta...
Thursday, 1 February 2018

African Stupidity

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     Even first aid has changed since I was a boy. I can remember when mouth-to-mouth resuscitation came in. Before that, artificial respira...
Sunday, 14 January 2018

Elephant Antics

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     When the platypus was first discovered by Europeans, many people refused to believe it was a real animal. But what about elephants? If ...
1 comment:
Saturday, 2 December 2017

A Real Life Evangeline

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      Evangeline  was a famous poem by Longfellow about a woman who lost her lover, Gabriel during the Acadian expulsions, and continued sea...
Sunday, 19 November 2017

Egypt's Cannibal Year

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     Famine! You don't hear about it any more in industrial societies, but in pre-industrial periods its grim spectre was always lurking...
1 comment:
Saturday, 14 October 2017

Hunting Squirrels with Snogg and Squail

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     Until recently, it never occurred to me that Englishmen ate squirrels. Heck! They weigh only a half or three quarters of a pound [220 t...
4 comments:
Wednesday, 27 September 2017

The Girl I Met Without a Face

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     I've just seen just seen the trailer for the family movie, Wonder , based on the children's book of that name, about a boy with...
Saturday, 9 September 2017

The Slaves of Savage Senegal

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    Of course, slavery existed in black Africa long before the white man arrived. Across the western grasslands and into the dense tropical ...
Friday, 11 August 2017

Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean

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      Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean  (2009) by Edward Kritzler: when you see a book with this title going cheap in a collection of remaind...
Sunday, 25 June 2017

Swinging a Dead Cat

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     Now doubt many of you will have enjoyed the James Herriot stories about a Yorkshire vet in the 1930s and 1940s, and the television seri...
Saturday, 10 June 2017

Holy Suicide

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     The word "Juggernaut" entered the English language to describe something huge and inexorable, implacably crushing down anythi...
Wednesday, 24 May 2017

How a Drunken Sailor Captured a Fort

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     The British Empire, it is said, was won in a moment of absent mindedness. Certainly, it wasn't planned. On the coasts of India, for...
Saturday, 13 May 2017

You DON'T Know What You're Standing in Line For?

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     A writer who had lived many years in Hong Kong claimed that Asians in general, and Chinese in particular, do not queue. They will push ...
Monday, 17 April 2017

Born in a Forced Labour Camp

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Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire? ( Zechariah  3:2)       I am writing this on Easter Day, an appropriate day, one might think...
Friday, 31 March 2017

A Life Cut Short at 109

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      Cobar, New South Wales: in 1870 three teenagers camped by a waterhole, where they collected some colourful rocks. When they showed the...
2 comments:
Saturday, 4 March 2017

Quick Thinking in the Heat of Battle

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     Robert Clive! He was one of the heroes we learnt about in primary school, the way Americans learnt about George Washington. At least, w...
1 comment:
Sunday, 12 February 2017

The Black Pearls of Fatu Hiva

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     It's not often that an apparently improbable account is confirmed by a unrelated story. Careful readers of this blog may have notic...
1 comment:
Friday, 6 January 2017

Voyage to the Edge of the World

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     "No-one goes beyond the reef!" insisted Chief Tui in Disney's latest cartoon, Moana . Of course, as the story developed w...
Sunday, 11 December 2016

A Sherry for the Saviour

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     Now that Christmas is coming up, we might take a glimpse at its celebration in India in the 1920s. One person who went there at the age...
Wednesday, 23 November 2016

Sex, Sorcery, and Swordfish

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     The power of mind over matter can be quite spectacular, when the "matter" is the human body, and not always for the best. Tak...
Monday, 31 October 2016

The Adventures of a Curio Collector

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     Every now and then one comes across people whose adventurous lives one can only envy. Thus, in my university days, when I imagined I ha...
Wednesday, 5 October 2016

Tombstone for a Trout

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   I think this photo speaks for itself. I took it, believe it or not, from the Boy's Own Paper  of June 1920.