Saturday, February 22, 2014

'Science' Books?

I received a list of best-selling science books on kindle in my emails this morning.   Amazon seems to have a strange idea of what constitutes a science book...well, it differs from mine, anyway.



Of these, I would only include Quantum by Manjit Kumar with science as its focus.  The rest, I suspect, are medically-themed memoir.

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Abbott's Nook

I imagine myself a medieval monk


brown-cowled


running an errand for the abbott


racing through his nook


...and time.


His chapel becomes an inn


while along the lane that led to his windmill


is a new-build for the recently-retired.



'The best is yet to come,' promises the hoarding



- looking to the past.

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Medieval Chester

The Romans have gone.  The Anglo-Norse community that displaced the remaining Roman-British (in some sort of quiet genetic conquest) have been defeated by the Normans.

The ruinous Chester fort has been upgraded: firstly by King Alfred's daughter, Aethelflaed, and then by the Normans themselves who have added a castle and extended the walls to the south and west so that they reach down to the river.

There are churches now, but the Roman pattern of roads have been retained - etched more deeply in the Anglo-Saxon buhr and now this Norman town.  Since I knew very little about the Normans, I started with a study of the people: Cheshire under the Norman Earls  by B.M. C. Husain


 and a biography on one of the more important later earls, Ranulf III by James Alexander.


Today I have been trying to make sense of the medieval town.  With the help of the excellent mapping medieval Chester website, I have printed out a large map to stick on the wall



and then spent the day going through the chapter on topography in Life in a Late Medieval City noting down what went there.


The Romans seemed to have been obsessed with baths; the Anglo-Saxons with producing coins (and hiding them away in caches).  The Normans seemed to have been over-endowed with religious orders: one abbey full of Benedictine monks, a Benedictine nunnery and then no fewer than three friaries: the Black (Dominicans), the Grey ( Franciscans) and the White (the Carmelites).  There were also at least 13 churches and three hermitages. There were also three different streets associated with brothels (close to the monks (who don't seem to have been particularly celibate)).  All of this in one small town of a maximun of 4,600 people (in 1377).

Tuesday, February 04, 2014

The Dee Bore

Ancient, they say:



a Roman-straight road



bisecting lines



marking clusters



making grids.



There used to be a ferry man



tacking together the frayed edges



before this steel-edged rivet.



Upstream the city and the weir



downstream the flatlands and the face-whipping wind



home of fat-bellied planes bumbling in with high tech pollen.



The people pause



wait



peer along the canalised banks:



and, on cue, the silver line



crumples



becomes dashed. Salt meeting sweet.



A place to cut or fold?



The sea shrugs.