A nice morning but an awful afternoon.
11:30 Lois and I go for a walk in Pittville Park. They are starting to decorate the Pump Room for Christmas, which is nice. There are already 2 tall Christmas trees and lots of lights, but it's still a work in progress: oh dear! Still it isn't December yet, so maybe it'll be ready in time - let's hope so!
approaching Pittville Pump Room from the south
the park and lake
14:00 The afternoon is where the day starts to unravel. Trying to clear some unwanted apps off my phone to make more space, I inadvertently change the display entirely so it's unrecognisable, and now, after about 3 hours of fiddling about, I can only run apps on it by some very roundabout methods - damn, damn, damn!
The phone is several years old - perhaps it's time to replace it. But I'm not sure - the jury is still out on that one.
In the meantime, all I can say is - damn, damn, damn !!!!!
17:00 Later I get my phone screen and apps back where I want them, but I'm still thinking of maybe upgrading to a more modern phone. I've had this one a few years now and the buttons on the side are getting a bit unreliable, which is annoying, to put it mildly. We'll have to see.
20:00 We watch a bit of TV, the latest programme in Alice Roberts's new series on "Britain's Most Historic Towns".
This is not quite so informative as previous programmes in the series, but simply because the history in it is so much more familiar - the era when, thanks partly to improved shipbuilding techniques and also to officially-sanctioned "pirates" like Sir Francis Drake and John Hawkins, who were raiding Spanish galleons sailing to the Caribbean or to the Spanish Netherlands (present-day Holland and Belgium), England became not just richer, but also a major player on the European scene.
Roberts makes it clear that slave-trading also played a part in their activities: Hawkins even had a picture of a slave on the top of his coat-of-arms - my god! But mercifully Roberts doesn't labour the point too much. After all slaves were sadly a part of life in those days pretty much all over the world and slave-trading was being practised by pretty much all the world's peoples (and always had been).
John Hawkins with coat-of-arms
Lois and I had forgotten that Drake claimed California for Queen Elizabeth on his 3-year-long circumnavigation of the globe (1577-1580) - I wonder what happened to that claim. Maybe it's never been revoked. Could Donald Trump's legal team pursue that one maybe?
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment