Danskcolin: Monday March 13th 2023

Today is a write-off due to extraordinarily gusty winds - as much as 50 and 60 mph. Malvern, our new home town since October 31st 2022, is a crazy place to live!

Malvern today according to local news - a "very windy place"

The forecast, however, says that the strong winds will moderate around 3 pm, so we make plans to get out of bed around then and go for a walk.

As it turns out, however, there's no let-up in the winds, so instead we stay indoors and just consort with each other. We have a cup of Earl Grey tea on the sofa, with one of Lois's delicious home-made flapjacks. And Lois reads me out articles from her copy of "The Week", which gives a digest of last week's news from home and abroad.

It's some comfort, however, to know that it's windy too for our good friends in Pennington, Illinois USA, as we discover when we tune into the influential American news web-site Onion News' local WONN5 website. In fact it may be even worse over there than it is here, because it's officially been labelled "as windy as a bastard" - I don't think it's quite that bad here, not yet anyway! But I stand willing to be corrected!

And the 10-week forecast for the coming week or so in Pennington looks even worse than today.

and the outlook doesn't look much better, to be frank!!!

Wow, you've got to feel for those poor guys in Pennington haha!

And poor Margaret !!!!!

16:15 We hear on the news that over 50% of Britain's energy needs so far today have been sourced from wind farms - goodness, the world is changing all right, no question!

16:30 Lois reads me out some choice articles from "The Week". Safe to say that it's been a relatively quiet week, but as always the "Wit and Wisdom" column of the week's quotes is good value, and there's some real "doozies" here today - my goodness!

Enough said haha!

20:00 We curl up on the sofa to watch the 2nd part of Prof. Richard Miles's series on "Archaeology: the Secret History".

Archaeology today is a serious subject, with schools in all the major universities, so it's a shock to discover that not much less than 300 years ago, it was looked on as an adventurer's way to make a quick fortune, grabbing any stuff they thought they could sell, like statues or any treasures made from precious metals; while leaving behind, or throwing away, everything else, for example everyday objects that could have given historians vital clues to how ordinary people lived in the past.

"Grab it and run!" was certainly the motto of Spanish army engineer and amateur so-called archaeologist Roque Joachim de Alcubierre, who excavated Pompeii's twin town of Herculaneum.

What a madness it was!!!!

Presenter Richard Miles sifts through some of the priceless historical relics

that Alcubierre and his men left behind - my goodness!!

After that, the next stage of archaeology's history was the era of the power grab by the then superpowers, Britain and France. When Napoleon set out to conquer Egypt he took hundreds of specialists with him, surveyors and academics, so that he could understand its history and culture as well as rule it. Yes, the great powers wanted not only to own the planet, but also to own the past, as a proof of their greatness - a different kind of madness!

And after 1815, when Napoleon was off the scene, Britain became the recipient of much of Egypt's treasures. It was Giovanni Belzoni, an Italian ex-circus strongman turned explorer with an interest in engineering, who solved all the transportation problems and brought the first piece of Egyptology to London.

Belzoni solved all the logistical and transportation problems

and managed to bring a massive statue of Ramses II to London

Belzoni's first bit of "booty" was the statue of Pharaoh Ramses II, which is still in the British Museum, the first of many such relics to end up there. The museum had nowhere to put Ramses to begin with, so the statue was left out in the London rain. But the British public were soon going crazy over the greater and greater numbers of Egyptian relics that were turning up in their midst.

Of course the British Museum is now under enormous pressure to return this "booty", and this story has even popped up on the Hungarian news media. By chance, later this evening, Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend, sent me this story about the continuing pressure on the British Museum, featured on the influential 24.hu website.

"To give back, or not to give back" - the British Museum's current dilemma,

as reported in the Hungarian media

But back to the programme!

In the course of the 18th century, archaeology begins to emerge as a science. In 1818 the University of Leiden appoints the world's first ever Professor of Archaeology, and from 1851, archaeology is being taught as a discipline at Cambridge. The Rosetta Stone opens up the possibility of studying the past through contemporary inscriptions in hieroglyphs and later in cuneiform writing, and the development of photography makes it easier to share the study of finds between universities world-wide. Discoveries in the Americas of Mayans and others, made historians realise that there was more to archaeology than just Egypt, Greece and Rome.

Finally, in the 1880's, British archaeologist Augustus Pitt-Rivers, investigated Cranborne Chase, a huge area of prehistoric settlements in Wiltshire, and at the same time established and laid down all the fundamental principles of modern scientific archaeology, including precise recordings of all finds and the first ever archaeological examinations, and preservations, of human remains. And this was only 100 years since the bad old days of treasure-hunter Alcubierre, so rapid progress indeed.

a photograph of one of Pitt-Rivers' excavations

at Cranborne Chase, Wiltshire

Pitt-Rivers was also a music fan - while his team were working at Cranborne Chase, he hired a brass band to keep them entertained as they worked, which was a nice touch!

Fascinating stuff!!!!

21:00 We go to bed on the first programme in a two-part documentary series about the tragic life of TV presenter Paula Yates.

Lois and I don't read the tabloid press, so we were unaware of the tabloids' awful harassment of Paula. We used to watch her contributions on Channel Four's "Big Breakfast Show", where she conducted the show's celebrity interviews on her famous double-bed. She was always quite cheeky, provocative and forward with her celebrity guests, and so I always assumed she must be pretty thick-skinned, so it's a shock for me to see tonight that - surprise, surprise, she was a human being all along just like the rest of us, and could quickly get hurt by the avalanches of insensitive and intrusive coverage that she got.

Her first marriage was to Bob Geldof, dubbed "The Saintly Bob" because of his pop world Live Aid campaign to raise money for charities working to fight famine in Africa. And unfortunately for Paula, she was castigated for her alleged extra-marital affairs, while there was a relative silence over the "Saintly Bob"'s own affairs. Isn't that always the way, says Lois.

Paula's affair with Australian popstar Michael Hutchence of INXS apparently started shortly after her interview with him on an edition of "The Big Breakfast Show" in 1994.

Later we see her appearance as a guest-contestant on "Have I Got News For You", the satirical news quiz, where she was remorselessly and quite needlessly harassed about the story of her breast implants, of all things, by the show's regulars, Angus Deayton, Ian Hislop and Paul Merton. The accusation was that she was deliberately shouting to the press about her breast implants to get publicity for her latest book.

Lois and I hope that they all feel suitably ashamed of themselves now, looking back - my goodness!