Today has arrived - hurrah! It's my proto-birthday, not my real one with the presents, which is tomorrow, but the day when Lois and I have our birthday meal followed by a long nap in bed - and today we really go to town on the nap bit - 3 hours: my goodness! Still, we deserve it, don't we haha!
my proto-birthday meal: chicken and something pie
with dauphinoise potatoes, peas and red cabbage - yum yum!
..followed by chocolate salted caramel pudding - yum yum (again)
As usual when we get near sports cars, I have to restrain Lois - she always feels an irresistible urge to "drape herself" over the bonnet of one of these vehicles or (even worse) over the bonnet of a London bus. Luckily there are a lot of people about this morning- a guided tour is taking place, and this seems to intimidate her maybe. I only know that she keeps her feet on the ground today, which makes a nice change!
flashback to January 2011 - Lois asking for a "leg up"
onto our son-in-law Francis's Porsche: happy days!!!!
14:00 We go to bed and have our nap, not emerging for 3 hours - oh dear! Then we go downstairs and unwind with a cup of Earl Grey tea and the puzzles from this week's Radio Times.
We get most of the Popmaster questions this week after a lot of back-of-the-mind searching and a few false starts. We've still got it you see haha! [Don't kid yourselves - you haven't had it for a long time! -Ed] [I dispute that! - Colin] [Sorry, the Editor's decision is final - bad luck! - Ed]
19:45 My proto-birthday is now made complete with a delicious coffee cake, made by Lois, with 7 candles on it, one for each eleven of my years: makes sense to us! Who would want 77 candles on the top of a cake - it would be sheer madness !!!!
Facts come spilling out at a rate of knots in this programme, but it's really interesting, because it covers those aspects of Henty VIII's kick-start of the English Reformation that we don't often hear about: the military side.
Who knew that England was quite a weak country militarily, one of the weaker ones in Europe, when Henry VIII came to the throne?
It makes sense when you think about it. We didn't need much of an army or navy, we didn't really have either of those, just a few local militia here and there, and we just requisitioned private boats if we needed them. And we didn't bother about having an effective spy network or intelligence organisation. Why should we bother with all that? They all cost money, and anyway we had the North Sea and the English Channel to keep us safe.
Nor did the continental powers have any particular reason to concern themselves with us - they were too occupied with making sure their own neighbours didn't encroach on their land borders, so that was all right.
Spain and Portugal were the superpowers of the day. England hadn't shown much interest in founding colonies, let alone an empire in the New World. What had we done? John Cabot had sailed from Bristol in his little boat the Matthew and "discovered" Newfoundland, and later Frobisher and others tried to find the North West Passage through the icy wastes of the Arctic, just to help our trading businesses, and that was about all.
Bristol Harbour, 2002: Lois stands in terrible rain on the deck of the Matthew,
Cabot's little boat, together with our daughter Alison (right) and Alison's husband, Ed (left)
Henry VIII had to change all that, having broken with the Roman Catholic Church and setting himself up as head of the Church of England. All of a sudden all the continental powers were "out to get us", drag us back into the Catholic fold and punish us severely, so that no other country would try such a thing ever again.
Henry countered this hostility by setting about the process of acquiring the cutting-edge weapons and armoury of the times, building castles and setting up gun emplacements along the Channel coast, and building a proper navy and an intelligence network. Much of the money for all this came from the dissolution of the old monasteries, vast buildings which we didn't need any more, and we even used a lot of the stones from the monasteries to help build the new castles.
See, simples really isn't it! That's the way you do it!
Alice presents the programme from Walmer Castle near Dover, one of the castles built by Henry VIII to bolster our Channel defences.
Lois and I were hoping to see a bit more of Walmer castle, because my dear late sister Kathy was born somewhere in part of the castle complex, in a building which had become a temporary nursing facility. Walmer is a tiny place that most people have never heard of. We don't see much of the place tonight, however. Perhaps next time!
flashback to 1948: me and little Kathy with our father
at the Duke of York's Royal Military School near Guston outside Dover, Kent,
where my father was a teacher
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!!
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