25 April: Walter de la Mare

On this date in 1873 the writer Walter de la Mare was born in Greenwich. He is probably best remembered for his works for children, for his poem The Listeners. 10 things you might not know about him:

1. He was descended from a family of French Huguenot silk merchants on his father’s side and the Scottish naval surgeon and author, Dr Colin Arrott Browning on his mother’s. He is not any relation to the poet Robert Browning.

2. He disliked the name Walter and preferred to be known to his family and friends as “Jack”.

3. He worked from 1890 to 1908 in the statistics department of the London office of Standard Oil. While he was there he began writing in his spare time, and eventually left when Sir Henry Newbolt arranged for him to get a Civil List pension, allowing him to write full time.

4. His first published short story, Kismet, appeared in the journal Sketch in 1895.

5. His collection of poetry, Songs of Childhood, was published in 1902.

6. While he’s probably best known for children’s poems, there was more to his writing career than that. He’s also known for his ghost stories, of which HP Lovecraft was a big fan. As well as a number of short stories, De la Mare wrote two supernatural novels, Henry Brocken (1904) and The Return (1910).

7. Richard Adams was also a fan and used several of de la Mare's poems as epigraphs in Watership Down.

8. He met his wife, Elfrida Ingpen, at the Esperanza Amateur Dramatics Club. She was ten years older than him.

9. He believed that all children are visionaries, starting life in possession of a “childlike imagination” but at some point the influence of the external world causes the childlike imagination to retreat “like a shocked Snail into its shell". It’s replaced by what he called a “boylike imagination” which is more logical and analytical. However, in the case of some, the childlike imagination grows bolder and able to face the world, and that is when you get artistic and intuitive people.

10. He died in 1956 of a coronary thrombosis. His ashes are buried in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral, where he had once been a choirboy.

New!!!

The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.

The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.

Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.

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24 April: The Trojan Horse

This date in 1184 BC is the traditional date when the Greeks presented Troy with a giant wooden Horse. 10 things you might not know about the Trojan war and the Trojan horse:

1. The Trojan War is a legendary conflict that took place between the ancient Greeks and the city of Troy. The inciting incident is said to be the abduction of Helen, the wife of Menelaus, by Paris, a prince of Troy. The war rumbled on for ten years before the Trojan horse incident.

2. We know about this war because the story is told in the epic poems “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” attributed to Homer. There have been numerous translations of the story by John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Louis MacNeice and many more.

3. Did this war really happen or was it an epic tale Homer made up? Respected historians of the past, such as Herodotus, the so-called ‘Father of History’, and Eratosthenes, a mathematician, certainly thought so and came up with actual dates for it. Writings from other places, including Egypt, mention this war as well. It has also been said that the graphic descriptions in Homer’s works suggest he must have been there and seen it happen. All that said, modern scholars are a little more sceptical. They’d say there probably was a war, but Homer exaggerated it and added some mythic embellishments.

4. Perhaps the horse wasn’t a gift at all, or even a horse, but a siege engine. The classical poets, it has been suggested, misunderstood what they were seeing. The fact that military machinery is sometimes named after animals, or that siege engines were sometimes covered with wet horse hides to protect them against flaming arrows might have led to this misunderstanding.

5. The Trojan horse was a strategy thought up by the Greeks to end the war once and for all. They built a massive wooden horse and left it outside the gates of Troy. Then they pretended to sail away as if they’d conceded defeat and left the horse as a peace offering. However, hidden inside the horse were soldiers who, late at night, opened the gates and let in the Greek army, who’d quietly sailed back again.

6. The horse was said to be about 30 meters (98 feet) tall. It was intricately carved and must have taken considerable time and effort.

7. Stories differ in terms of how many soldiers were actually inside, from a handful to about forty. These soldiers included famous figures like Odysseus, Menelaus, and Ajax.

8. The Trojans saw the horse as a symbol of victory and a religious offering. It’s possible that a spy named Sinon helped convince them it would bring good fortune if they brought it inside.

9. Not everyone believed it, however. A Trojan priest called Laocoön suspected treachery and famously said, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” the Trojans ignored his advice.

10. The term Trojan horse has entered the modern vernacular as a cautionary tale about being aware of possible deception. A malicious computer program that tricks users into running it is called a "Trojan horse".

New!!!

The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.

The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.

Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.

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Get it for your kindle

23 April: English Language Day

Today is English Language Day. 10 things you might not know about the English language:

1. English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family. People who speak it are called Anglophones. The name comes from the Angles, ancient Germanic peoples who migrated to the island of Great Britain. While English has a lot of words it has “borrowed” from other languages, most of the core vocabulary and the first words learned by children are mainly Germanic words from Old English. In fact, it is not possible to speak or write English without using any of these words.

2. How many words are there in the English language? A tricky question as words are constantly being added at a rate of something like 14 new words a day, or one every 98 minutes. A group of people called The Global Language Monitor have taken it upon themselves to keep track of how many words there are in English. On 10 June 2009 they announced the 1,000,000th word. (It was “Web 2.0” meaning the second generation of the Internet.) And it goes on. An English dictionary from 1989 has about 170,000 words, 220,000 if obsolete words are included. The average English speaker only knows about 40,000 of them. Over 1,500 of them were invented by William Shakespeare.

3. English is the most spoken language in the world thanks to the British Empire’s influence. It’s the third most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. However, it’s estimated that there are more people who’ve learned English as a second language than there are native speakers.

4. There are some jobs for which a reasonable command of English is a requirement. It’s the language used in aviation so airline pilots must be able to speak it and understand it well enough over a radio with interference. They are required to take a proficiency test which includes aviation terminology. Also scientists would find English pretty useful as over 80% of published scientific papers are in English.

5. English is an official language in 59 countries including India, Ireland, and Canada. It isn’t, however, an official language in the USA or the United Kingdom, because it’s the dominant language for historical reasons and it’s never been deemed necessary to define it as such. It’s also a co-official language of the United Nations, The EU, and many other international and regional organisations.

6. It’s often said that the English word with the most definitions is “set”. This was certainly the case in 1928 when the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was published. “Set” had 430 definitions and took up several pages in the dictionary. More recently, Set’s crown has been stolen by “Run”, probably due to technology, for example, running a computer programme or trains running on time.

7. There is a word for words that are used which don’t add meaning to a sentence, ie. words such as “like”, “actually,” “honestly,” and “basically”. No, the answer is not “annoying”! The technical term is “crutch words”.

8. Many other languages have genders for objects, French and German for example. English only uses genders when talking about people (or possibly animals or ships). However, in the olden days, English used genders in the same way other languages do. However, when the Vikings invaded and brought their language with them, the genders of many nouns differed from the Anglo-Saxon ones, so it’s theorised that people stopped using them to avoid confusion.

9. English can be a tricky language to learn, what with words which can mean the opposite of each other (eg “cleave” and “overlook”). Pronunciation isn’t always straightforward, either. The combination “ough” can be pronounced in 10 different ways, as in this sentence: “A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.”

10. It used to be even more complicated as the English alphabet used to have more letters, including ‘thorn’, a letter written like a p, but pronounced ‘th’. Also there was a ‘yogh’, pronounced as ‘ch’ in Middle English; and the long S that looks much like the letter F you often see in inscriptions in churches.

New!!!

The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.

The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.

Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.

Get it in paperback

Get it for your kindle

22 April: Immanuel Kant

This date in 1724 was the birthdate of Immanuel Kant, German philosopher. 10 things you might not know about him:

1. He was born in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He was the fourth of nine children, and the eldest to survive. He came from a line of saddlers – his father and both his grandfathers were in the saddlery business.

2. His parents gave him the name Emmanuel, but after learning Hebrew, he changed it to Immanuel.

3. The family were part of the Pietist movement, a branch of the Lutheran church. They believed in striving for piety and morality, and in hard work. Their paster’s influence allowed Immanuel to study at the best school in town, the Friedrich College. The school day began at 6am, six days a week, and prayers were said before every lesson. They studied Latin, theology, mathematics, music, Greek, French, Polish and Hebrew. There were no holidays and the only day off was Sunday. No natural sciences were taught, though. Kant only learned those once he was at university.

4. It seems he soon caught up in physics and astronomy, though. He theorised that the Solar System was condensed from a single cloud of gas, that the Moon's gravity would slow down Earth's spin, and that the Milky Way was a large disc of stars. We now know the latter theory was correct.

5. Kant never travelled more than sixty miles from his birthplace. He declined an invitation to become a professor in Berlin because he didn’t feel his health was up to it.

6. When his father died in 1746, he had to drop out of university and work as a tutor in order to make ends meet and support his family. He taught many subjects including Mathematics, Physics, philosophy and physical geography, but was never well off.

7. He never married and it’s likely he died a virgin. It seems he had little to do with women, even the sisters he was supporting financially. He never visited them, and when one of them dropped by his house when he had guests, he apologised for her bad manners.

8. In his later years, Kant kept such a strictly ordered routine that his neighbours could set their Clocks by his daily walks.

9. His health was never good. He suffered from deformities of the shoulders and chest and his head was too large. He took many drugs to alleviate his problems but they tended to make things worse. One of his self-medications was to drink half a bottle of red Wine every evening.

10. He died on February 12, 1804 aged 79. His last words were “Es ist gut” (It is good).

New!!!

The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.

The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.

Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.

Get it in paperback

Get it for your kindle

21 April: The Parilla

In ancient Rome, a festival called the Parilia was celebrated on this date. 10 facts about this festival:

1. It was in honour of Pales, the deity of shepherds, flocks and livestock.

2. Pales was worshipped by rural communities in Italy but as Rome grew larger more powerful, so did the cult of Pales as the protection of crops and livestock became even more important.

3. The Parilla also happens to fall on the date generally accepted as the founding of Rome.

4. Celebrations and rituals on this festival included the cleansing and purification of Cow stalls and Sheep pens; shepherds asking forgiveness for any violations of holy places their animals might have committed; cattle being driven through bonfires. Humans jumped through bonfires as well.

5. The Vestal Virgins played a vital part in the proceedings, opening the festival by distributing straw, ashes and the blood of sacrificed animals. Offerings of food were made, and the whole thing ended with an al fresco feast.

6. Marcus Atilius Regulus built a temple to Pales in Rome following his victory over the Salentini in 267 BC. It might have been on the Palatine Hill, or possibly on the Campus Martius or the Aventine Hill as was the norm for victory monuments.

7. Nobody is quite sure whether Pales is male, female, or a hermaphrodite, although the latter wasn’t really a concept the Ancient Romans got into.

8. Another possibility is that Pales was a set of Twins, perhaps linked to the Palici brothers of Sicily. Twins are closely associated with Rome, the anniversary of which was also being celebrated.

9. Pales is often depicted as a handsome young man (or woman) carrying a shepherd’s crook, surrounded by sheep and other livestock.

10. A little known story suggests that Pales and Vesta were once lovers and that Pales appeared to her as a Donkey. Hence Pales may be the inspiration for the donkey-headed character Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

New!!!

The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.

The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.

Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.

Get it in paperback

Get it for your kindle

20 April: Annie Hall

On this date in 1977 Woody Allen's film Annie Hall premièred. 10 facts about this film:

1. This film earned Woody Allen his first two Oscars (for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay). It also won best actress and Best picture, the second shortest film to win the Best Picture Oscar (the shortest being Marty (1955) at 91 minutes). It’s also hailed as a film of great cultural significance.

2. Nevertheless, Woody Allen wasn’t satisfied with it. To his mind, it didn’t live up to his original vision.

3. Which wasn’t a romantic comedy at all. Allen and his writing partner, Marshall Brickman, conceived the story as an exploration of the main character’s life and psyche, with the romance being just one aspect. Another sub plot was a murder mystery but that was dropped fairly early on. That idea eventually became Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993).

4. The original title was Anhedonia, a condition in which a person is unable to feel pleasure or joy. United Artists hated the title as they couldn’t see an effective way to market it. Other titles suggested were "It Had to Be Jew," "A Rollercoaster Named Desire," and "Me and My Goy." It wasn’t until three weeks before the premiere that Allen decided the name of the female protagonist would be an acceptable title.

5. It’s essentially named after the lead actress, Diane Keaton. Her real name is Diane Hall and her nickname is Annie.

6. Keaton dressed in her own clothes during filming, despite pressure from the costume designer to adopt a less “crazy” look. However, her style became a fashion craze after the film’s release.

7. One of the film’s innovations was the way it used split screen scenes. One scene shows the two main characters in therapy at the same time. It was quite low tech, in fact, as it was shot on two adjacent sets with a thin wall between them.

8. When Annie and Alvy are people watching and one passer by is dubbed “The winner of the Truman Capote lookalike contest”, the passer by in question is the real Truman Capote in a cameo role.

9. The scene where Alvy sneezes and a container of cocaine is spread around the room wasn’t scripted. Woody Allen actually sneezed during the scene. Test audiences loved it so much that the sneeze was kept in.

10. Included among the original script’s fantasy scenes were Alvy and Annie time travelling to the Garden of Eden, the French Resistance, and Nazi Germany, parodies of other films including Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and a basketball game between the New York Knicks and philosophers like Friedrich Nietsche and SSoren Kierkegaard. Allen was sorry to lose most of them, but one in which a sentient traffic light convinces Alvy to fly across country and win Annie back, he allegedly hated so much that he tossed the prints into New York City’s East River.

New!!!

The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.

The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.

Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.

Get it in paperback

Get it for your kindle

19 April: Rice Krispies

On this date in 2001 Over 100 staff and students in Friley Hall kitchen at Iowa State University baked the world’s largest Rice Krispie square. 10 things you might not know about Rice Krispies:

1. Rice Krispies are made by cooking Rice at high temperatures so that it expands or puffs up, in a process known as “oven popping”.

2. They contain air pockets created when starch molecules bond. Adding liquid puts pressure on these pockets and they break, which is what makes the characteristic “Snap, Crackle, Pop” sound they are famous for.

3. The cartoon mascots, Snap, Crackle and Pop were created in the 1930s by Vernon Grant. They are the first and longest-running cartoon characters to represent a Kellogg's product. They have distinct personalities. Snap is the eldest, the responsible leader; Crackle is the affable middle child and Pop is the mischievous youngest. According a poll by Scientific American in 2002, Americans are more likely to be able to name the Rice Krispie mascots than they are Supreme Court justices.

4. For a while in the 1950s they were joined by a friend called Pow. He was a tie in with the craze for everything space related and wore a space suit. His name, rather than being related to the sound the cereal makes, was to do with the nutritional power of the grains.

5. Over the years, Kellogg’s have occasionally got into trouble for making claims about their cereal, for example, that it boosted a child’s immune system and helped them concentrate in school. Law suits ensued and they were forbidden from making such claims. They can, however, inform people that Rice Krispies contain Niacin, iron, vitamin B6, riboflavin, thiamin, folic acid, Vitamin D and vitamin B12.

6. Snap, Crackle and Pop are known by different names in other languages: Cric! Crac! Croc! In French, Knisper! Knasper! Knusper! In German, Pim! Pam! Pum! In Spanish and Piff! Paff! Puff! In Swedish.

7. In Australia and New Zealand, they’re called Rice Bubbles.

8. In 1963, The Rolling Stones recorded a Rice Krispie ad. Mick Jagger sang "Wake up in the morning, there's a Snap around the place, wake up in the morning, there's a Crackle in your face, wake up in the morning, there's a Pop that really says this is for you!"

9. Iowa State University’s world record mentioned above was beaten in 2010 in California where a Rice Krispie treat measuring 3.66 m long x 2.44 m wide x 2.13 m tall (12 ft x 8 ft x 7 ft) and weighing 4,678.35 kg (10,314 lb) was made. I also found a reference to another at the University of Wisconsin in 2015 which weighed 11,327 pounds.

10. In America in 2022, there was a Rice Krispie shortage caused by a 71 day strike by workers at the Rice Krispie factory combined with ongoing supply chain issues as a result of the covid plague.

New!!!

The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.

The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.

Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.

Get it in paperback

Get it for your kindle