08:00 We get up. Today is a two-delivery day - exciting!! Budgens, the convenience store in the village deliver our groceries for next week, and Waghorne's the butcher's deliver our meat, cheese and pies: except we forgot to order ham - damn!
10:00 Lois spends much of the morning chasing up Amazon orders to her relatives in Oxford and finding out why some of them didn't arrive earlier this week. What madness! Then she plants our 4 shiny new lavender plants in the bed outside our front door.
Lois plants our shiny new lavender plants
14:00 Steve, our American brother-in-law, has tipped me off about an interesting article about a local Roman Villa, the one at nearby Chedworth: article by Livia Gershom at smithsonian.com .
The discovery of an intricately crafted Roman mosaic might not
seem wholly surprising, but archaeologists say there’s
something very unusual about the design seen at Chedworth Roman Villa in Gloucestershire,
England: It dates to the mid-fifth century A.D., decades after the end of Roman rule in Britain and in the midst of a period popularly dubbed the Dark Ages
Historians have long thought that early Britons
abandoned Roman villas and population centres following the breakdown of the
imperial administrative system. But the new find suggests otherwise.
“It has generally been believed that most of the population
turned to subsistence farming to sustain themselves,” says Martin Papworth, an
archaeologist with the United Kingdom’s National Trust,
in a statement “… What is so
exciting about the dating of this mosaic at Chedworth is that it is evidence
for a more gradual decline. The creation of a new room and the laying of a new
floor suggests wealth, and a mosaic industry continuing 50 years later than had
been expected.”
It's nice to know that the country didn't descend into complete chaos the moment the Roman army and civil servants went back to the continent, to put it mildly! The label "Dark Ages" which has been used to characterise the period after the Romans left, has been an unfortunate one - it may have been "dark" from the point of view of having fewer contemporary written sources, but it makes many people imagine that a lot of "dark" mayhem-type-things were going on, which is a pity!
Lois and I have visited nearby Chedworth Roman Villa many times since we moved to Cheltenham in 1972. The last time was in 1988, when our friends the Drury family were visiting us.
flashback to 1988: our daughter Sarah (11) with Naomi Drury, now a GP!
Lois is behind them, paying for the tickets to enter Chedworth Roman Villa: God bless her !!!!
all 5 children: (left to right) Naomi, Daniel and Quentin Drury,
and our daughters Sarah (11) and Alison (13)
me, aged 42, in my British Embassy sweater, taking a break from the frantic sightseeing
- poor me !!!!!!
Gosh that seems like a long time ago now - my god!!!
Yes, the Dark Ages - also a long time ago, to put it mildly!!!! I recently read a thoughtful commentary by historian Walter Berkowitz on Onion News about how important it is to keep our eyes open about world developments and to make sure that we see the occasional news broadcast.
When we ignore the lessons learned by previous
generations, we do so at our own peril. It is foolish, if not the height of
hubris, to believe history has nothing to teach us. In our current age, one in
which it can seem the world around us is being upended every day, we may be
tempted to believe that what has gone on before is no guide to the future.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that those who cannot remember the past are
condemned to repeat the Renaissance.
Mark my words, an era of renewed interest in classical
scholarship and humanistic values has happened before, and it could happen
again.
Unless we take steps to prevent it, a genuine broadening
of intellectual and aesthetic horizons could be brought about at any time. Fail
to heed historical lessons, and we may face a future in which a new generation
of Renaissance men and women walks among us—brazen polymaths who treasure
learning for its own sake and will stop at nothing to expand the scope of human
knowledge and understanding.
If we don’t remain vigilant, we could end up with another
Michelangelo or Galileo on our hands.
In order to avoid a return
to that time, we must take a long, hard look at the forces that once delivered
Europe from the Dark Ages, and then sound the alarm when our society appears to
be going down the same path. We must stay on guard in case large portions of
the population begin to place a higher value on secular pursuits and question
the orthodoxy of long-held religious beliefs, eventually causing the Roman
Catholic Church to lose much of its influence upon daily life.
Wise words, and a timely warning shot across our bows, that's for sure! We can always rely on Berkowitz, he's always got his finger on the pulse, to put it mildly!
16:00 I'm once again grateful to Steve for pointing out the above article in the Smithsonian to me. Today is the 35th wedding anniversary of Steve and my late sister Kathy, and Steve is having an anniversary lunch today: port and stilton on Carr's table water crackers - yum yum! Lois and I will be toasting Kathy and Steve at our evening meal tonight.
Kathy and Steve's photo on our "wall of fame" in the living-room
20:00 We watch a bit of TV, the second part of an interesting new series on the archaeology of the Amazon region of South America.
Last week presenter Ella Al-Shamahi was looking at the sites of ancient cities, now pretty much vanished, that used to line the banks of the Amazon in Brazil until about 400 years ago - they were seen by the first European missionaries, but disappeared soon after due to diseases brought by the newcomers: influenza and smallpox, mostly.
This week we see British archaeologist Mark taking Ella on an arduous climb to view a remote outcrop of rock near the Colombian Amazon.
When they get to the outcrop Ella finds herself looking at some very ancient rock paintings. Many of these paintings are believed to have been made by some of the first human inhabitants of the region.
You can't carbon-date paintings unfortunately, but some of the animals depicted died out long ago, so that gives some kind of a guide. Mastodons, for instance, became extinct in this region about 12,000 years ago. We also see early varieties of horses: horses became extinct here at an even earlier date - about 13,000 years ago - yikes!
cave painting of a mastodon, an ancient relative of the elephant
Almost all the peoples of South America are descended from those first early settlers that crossed the land-bridge from Asia to Alaska that existed during the last Ice Age. But there are a very small handful of tribes who have rather different DNA from the majority - we meet one of these tribes in tonight's programme, the Surui. These tribes share ancestry with the Aborigines of Australia, but it's not yet been discovered how this genetic component arrived on the continent, or when.
Fascinating stuff !!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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