Well, our little Australian family, especially our 12-year-old twin granddaughters Lily and Jessica, are getting all excited that their big camping trip 350 miles down to the Southern Ocean is now just one week away, as soon as their final school year at their local Primary School finishes later this week. The twins will be proudly mounting the stage in the school Assembly Hall, collecting their graduation certificates, before they'll be whisked away by mum and dad for their big trip south to the enticingly named Native Dog Beach (!) on Bremer Bay.
And those sea breezes coming up from Antarctica will be a relief after the hot weather they've been having in Perth, that's for sure. Today they've been "enjoying" a high of 104F (40C) - what madness, isn't it !!!!
And just contrast Perth's tropical temperatures with the temperatures here in East Hampshire this morning, as we sit, huddled up in our winter coats, in a village hall outside nearby Petersfield, for Lois's church's Sunday Morning Meeting.
What a crazy planet we live on !!!!!
Lois and me (right) shivering in our overcoats in a village hall
just outside Petersfield for Lois's church's Sunday Morning Meeting - brrrrr!!!!!
Grahame, arguably the meeting's most famous members - he's a noted archaeologist specialising in Roman finds - is a "no show" this morning. He came back last week from a 3-week trip to Egypt, complaining of having picked up a dose of "Pharaoh's Revenge" - the legendary tummy bug.
This is despite the fact that, unlike our daughter Sarah and her little Australian family, Grahame and his party were certainly not camping in tents. They were staying in one of Cairo's poshest hotels, the 5-star Sofitel, with Nile views - what madness !!! Only two of Cairo's hotel have 5-star status, so the hygiene must have been impeccable, and I expect Grahame picked up the bug, Pharaoh's Revenge (the bug not the computer game(!)), on one of the group's many side-trips.
But what madness!!!
(left) Cairo's Sofitel hotel, one of only 2 Cairo hotels with 5-star status, where Grahame
was staying when he picked up a nasty dose of "Pharaoh's Revenge", and (right)
flashback to August: archaeologist Grahame seen here in happier times, mopping his brow,
while showing meeting-members, including Lois, around the former Roman town of Silchester
Poor Grahame !!!!
15:00 Later, our other daughter, Alison, living 10 miles away in Churt, just over the county line in Surrey, drops by for an entertaining chat and a catch-up, with her daughters Josie (19) and Rosalind (17). Ali and husband Ed and their family will be hosting Lois and me on Christmas Day, which will be nice, but before that, they'll be attending a performance of the critically-acclaimed Fawlty Towers - the Play, at the G Live Theatre in nearby Guildford, which should be fun.
(top) our daughter Alison and her daughters Josie and Rosalind, who drop in for a chat
with Lois and me this afternoon, and (centre, below) the G Live Theatre,
Guildford, where the family will be seeing "Fawlty Towers the Play" next weekend
And after Christmas, the family will be jetting off to Sweden for a skiing holiday. But they won't be camping - they'll be staying in a nice, warm ski lodge which makes sense!
21:00 Camping, however, has been going on in Britain for thousands of years, as we find out this evening from this week's edition of Countryfile, which includes an interesting segment on the the people who built Stonehenge.
It turns out that most of the ancient camping sites, where the builders stayed, have now been unearthed by archaeologists, with some fascinating relics, even including some of the snack food that the builders left behind. What madness!!!
It's been known for some time that most of Stonehenge's great stones were quarried in the Preseli Hills of South West Wales.
How did they get the stones transported from there, however? It must have been overland, and probably not by sea, experts think, because sturdy enough boats from that era have never been found.
And what about the time it would have taken to get these enormous stones from South West Wales to Salisbury Plain?
So the transportation must have been quite a business, in other words, and incredibly, archaeologists have even found, not just the tools, but also the snack food left behind by the people transporting the stones all that distance, 5000 years ago.
Although the job of transporting the stones would have taken a significant amount of time, archaeologists stress that people back then wouldn't have been obsessed, like we perhaps would be, about doing the job in as short a time as possible. The erection of Stonehenge had huge spiritual import for them, and they wouldn't have been trying to see how quickly they could do it, which makes sense to Lois and me, to put it mildly!
And it turns out that maybe the most special stone of all, the Altar Stone, was brought from even further way, from almost the northernmost tip of Scotland.
The organisation demanded for moving that stone 450 miles would have been tremendous, when you consider all the separate communities along the route at that time. And it does show that these communities were very much connected, and that they were somehow working together to help assemble materials and to build this incredible monument 5000 years ago.
In its earliest phases Stonehenge was simply a cemetery, made up of a number of holes in the ground for cremation burials, so, basically, a place to honour the ancestors. There are actually 400 burial mounds in the area around Stonehenge, so it was easily one of the biggest burial grounds existing in Europe at that time. Chemical analysis of the cremated remains found here, however, has revealed that the people being buried didn't come from around Salisbury Plain. They actually came from quite a way west of there, possibly Cornwall or Wales, which is weird.
Why? I definitely think we should be told, don't you!
Also, soon after the time the monument was being erected, new groups of people were coming into the area, we're told, perhaps attracted by the monument, and coming from Europe. And they had "Steppe DNA", so, DNA that comes from Eastern Europe. And these new arrivals brought with them, a new technology - metal-working, and also a new culture.
Confused? Well, Lois and I certainly are!
When will archaeologists unearth [no pun intended!!!] the real answer to what Stonehenge was all about?!!!!
However, I can't let you go without announcing Colin's "Pun of the Week" award, for this summary by one of the programme's presenters:
Will this do?
[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment