a reading day

I walked to the postbox, since I had a couple of letters that needed to catch today's post (Saturday's collection is at the earlier time of 10.30 am, a trap for the unwary).  It was enough to make me think I'd better give gardening a miss for another day, as my not-developed-into-a-cold but not-gone-away-yet snivelliness and incipient sore throat felt worse in the raw air.  A waste, since it was not raining or freezing.

Still, what is the point of being given a pile of books for Christmas and not making the time to read them?  Reading in the daytime, when you could be doing something else, is different to picking up a book for an hour in the evening after a busy day, when you are already tired from whatever it is you were doing all day.  Since Christmas I have finished The Wars of the Roses and Alison Weir's biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine, which usefully goes over events already covered in The Plantagenets in more detail.

I think I could now list from memory all the kings and queens of England from the Norman conquest to the present day.  I have not got them quite off pat, since I get slightly hazy around Edward IV, and a lot of the dates are still plus or minus a decade or two, apart from the battle of Bosworth field and for some reason the death of King John.  It's a shame that learning lists of monarchs has been so out of favour for so long.  We certainly weren't taught them when I was at school.  I have a feeling that Michael Gove might have wanted to reinstate them when he had the cabinet brief for schools, but that didn't last long.  It's not just that Mediaeval power politics and skullduggery have so many modern day parallels, but that the list of monarchs makes a useful framework on which to hang other facets of history.  Visited an interesting building, heard some music, read how a whole town disappeared into the sea, listened to a Radio 4 documentary about the development of cutlery?  With a rough internal timeline you can catalogue everything in chronological order and have some idea what was happening at the same time, and what came two centuries before or afterwards. It doesn't stop you from imagining what it would have felt like to be a woman on one of the Crusades as well, if you want to, but you are less likely to end up with a steampunk mashup of history in which the Peasants' Revolt sweeps past Nelson's column.

After Eleanor I toured the North Sea in Tom Blass' fascinating The Naked Shore, and ambled around England with Matthew Engel in Engel's England, an amiable and only slightly cricket infused tour of thirty-nine counties.  He seemed to quite like Essex, despite having retreated to Herefordshire about a quarter of a century ago.  And after that I leaped back twelve centuries to the point when the British Isles emerged from the last Ice Age, with Nicholas Crane's The Making of the British Landscape.  You can see another facet of my historical investigations emerging, which is that I wait for them to come out in paperback.