15 February: The Blue Danube

On this date in 1867 Johann Strauss' Blue Danube Waltz was played for the first time at a public concert in Vienna, Austria. 10 things you might not know about this piece of Music.

1. Today, we're familiar with this as an instrumental piece, but the original version performed on 15 February 1867 had words. It was written for a four part choir and was performed at a concert of the Vienna Men's Choral Association. See below for an English translation of the first verse.
2. Strauss was first commissioned to write a choral piece in 1865, but he didn't get around to starting it then because he was so busy.
3. The impetus for him to get cracking on his commission was the Seven Weeks’ War in 1866. Austria was defeated by Prussia, so there was an economic depression and low morale among the people of Vienna. Strauss was encouraged to revisit his commission and write a joyful waltz song to help lift people's spirits.
4. He was inspired by a poem by Karl Isidor Beck, who'd ended each stanza with ‘By the Danube, beautiful blue Danube’.
5. At the time the piece was written, the Danube didn't flow through Vienna. It's never been Blue, either!
6. Josef Weyl, a member of the Choral Society, added some humorous lyrics poking fun at the war, the bankrupt city and its politicians.
7. Reception of the choral piece was lukewarm. At the time Strauss's reaction was "The devil take the Waltz, my only regret is for the coda - I wish that had been a success!"
8. The orchestral version was played later in the year at the World's Fair in Paris, and also in New York. It was heard for the first time in Britain at the promenade concerts in Covent Garden in September.
9. On New Year's Eve in Vienna, the waltz is broadcast on television and radio stations at midnight. It's also a regular piece at the Vienna New Year's Day Concert.
10. In popular culture, its best known appearance is probably in the Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the scene in which a spaceplane docks with a space station. Kubrick made an association between the spinning motion of the satellites and people dancing waltzes.

Danube so blue, 

so bright and blue,

through vale and field

you flow so calm,

our Vienna greets you,

your silver stream

through all the lands

you merry the heart

with your beautiful shores.

NEW!

Settling the Score

Another collection of short stories, even more murder and mayhem with carol singers, an orchestra out for revenge, a sinister magic stone and a haunted mansion.

Available on Amazon:
Paperback            E-book


A Tale of Two Sisters

During a battle with supervillains, a horrific accident leaves the Warner family with no option but to believe their youngest daughter, Jessica, is dead. It doesn't occur to them that the bad guys could, or would, save her.

Jessica wakes up with no memory of who she is or how she came to be on a space station with two bionic legs, a bionic arm and a bionic eye. She is told her family abandoned her and is sent back to Earth with a mission - to kill them. While Jessica wants to kill her family, along with the twin boys who once rejected her, she knows what the Alliance of Supervillains are asking her to do is a suicide mission. She decides to get her revenge in her own way.

As Jessica puts the first part of her revenge plan in motion, she finds herself with an agonising decision to make. Before she can decide, the Alliance come for her, determined to make her do their bidding. This time, it's the Alliance who leave her, crippled and at the mercy of the Warner family, who have no idea who the Alliance's Black Rose really is.

Jessica finds herself having to re-think her decisions in light of what she now learns about her family, the Alliance, the twins, and herself. It would appear the Alliance have left her with an unwanted and permanent reminder of her time with them. Or have they?

Jessica's older sister, Jill, knows her destiny is to be a doctor and specialise in bionics and genetic variant medicine. She is also hopelessly in love with Christopher, Crown Prince of Galorvia. Can their romance survive the lies Christopher told her when they were both at school, an unplanned pregnancy and Sophie, the wannabe princess who comes between them?

Available on Amazon
Paperback

E-book

14 February: Valentine Cards

Here are ten things you might not know about Valentine cards.

1. The first Valentine card was sent in the 15th century. It was a love poem sent by the Duke of Orleans to his wife while he was a prisoner in the Tower of London.
2. The first designer of Valentine cards in the US was a woman called Esther Howland who has become known as "Mother of the American Valentine." Her business, which was active in the 1850s, earned her the equivalent of $3 million a year in today's money. She was inspired by the cards people were already sending in Britain.
3. Today, about a billion people send cards on 14 February, making it the second largest seasonal card sending time. Christmas, of course, comes first.
4. In 2019, Hallmark alone was offering over 1,150 different designs of Valentine's card.
5. People don't just send Valentine cards to husbands, wives or lovers. It's also very common for people to give them to their teachers, their kids, their mothers and even their pets.
6. People even send Valentines to fictional characters. The city of Verona in Italy, the setting for Romeo and Juliet, receives about a thousand love letters addressed to Juliet every Valentine's Day. There's even a bunch of people called the Juliet Club whose job it is to answer them all, and award a prize, the "Dear Juliet" prize, for the best letter.
7. The tradition of not signing Valentine cards may well have originated in Victorian times, when it was considered bad luck to sign them.
8. Another Victorian tradition was to send "vinegar Valentines" to people you didn't want as a suitor. These cards would contain comic insults and messages of rejection.
9. Adorning Valentine cards with ribbons dates back to the Middle Ages when the sweethearts of knights would give them ribbons as good luck tokens when they were competing in tournaments. Lace is often used since the word "lace" comes from the Latin word for a snare or net, and the sender is hoping to snare the heart of the recipient.
10. The type of card a person send can give an insight to what sort of person they are. For example, a card with a long poem inside is a sign of a patient person who takes the time to read the poems to make sure they are a good fit; trendy people go for cards which are left blank for the sender's own message, but people who select cupids are lazy. If you want to analyse the sender of your card, visit https://www.rd.com/advice/relationships/valentines-day-card-secrets/

NEW!

Settling the Score

Another collection of short stories, even more murder and mayhem with carol singers, an orchestra out for revenge, a sinister magic stone and a haunted mansion.


Available on Amazon:

Paperback      E-book

A Tale of Two Sisters

During a battle with supervillains, a horrific accident leaves the Warner family with no option but to believe their youngest daughter, Jessica, is dead. It doesn't occur to them that the bad guys could, or would, save her.

Jessica wakes up with no memory of who she is or how she came to be on a space station with two bionic legs, a bionic arm and a bionic eye. She is told her family abandoned her and is sent back to Earth with a mission - to kill them. While Jessica wants to kill her family, along with the twin boys who once rejected her, she knows what the Alliance of Supervillains are asking her to do is a suicide mission. She decides to get her revenge in her own way.

As Jessica puts the first part of her revenge plan in motion, she finds herself with an agonising decision to make. Before she can decide, the Alliance come for her, determined to make her do their bidding. This time, it's the Alliance who leave her, crippled and at the mercy of the Warner family, who have no idea who the Alliance's Black Rose really is.

Jessica finds herself having to re-think her decisions in light of what she now learns about her family, the Alliance, the twins, and herself. It would appear the Alliance have left her with an unwanted and permanent reminder of her time with them. Or have they?

Jessica's older sister, Jill, knows her destiny is to be a doctor and specialise in bionics and genetic variant medicine. She is also hopelessly in love with Christopher, Crown Prince of Galorvia. Can their romance survive the lies Christopher told her when they were both at school, an unplanned pregnancy and Sophie, the wannabe princess who comes between them?

Available on Amazon

Paperback

E-book

13 February: Penicillin

On this date in 1929 Alexander Fleming read a paper about penicillin to the Medical Research Club in London. The response was apathetic. 10 things you might not know about penicillin.

1. Alexander Fleming made his famous discovery on 28 September 1928. That morning, he discovered that a petri dish with a culture of Bacteria in it had been left open and had been contaminated by mould that had blown in through the Window. Luckily, rather than just throw the spoiled culture away, as many others might have done, it occurred to him that this mould might actually be useful, so he began to study it.
2. He may have been a brilliant scientist, but he was less good at communicating his findings. Hence his presentation of his paper the following February met with a lukewarm reaction, and his attempts to persuade others to work with him in developing it met with little success.
3. One of the first people to be treated using penicillin, almost exactly 12 years after Fleming's presentation to the Medical Research Club, was a policeman named Albert Alexander, who had a severe face infection. The story goes that he contracted it because he got scratched in the mouth with a thorn while pruning his Roses. There's no evidence of the truth of this story, though, and it's more likely the infection was from injuries her received during a bomb raid during the second world war. However, there wasn't enough of the drug and so although Alexander's condition began to improve, after it ran out, he died, in spite of efforts to extract and recycle penicillin from his urine.
4. The following year, a woman called Anne Miller was successfully treated for an infection after a miscarriage.
5. Even so penicillin wasn't available to the general public in the UK until 1946, although there was a race in America to industrialise production so there would be sufficient available to treat Allied troops who were injured during the planned invasion of Europe on D-Day.
6. How does Penicillin work? In a nutshell, it blocks the chemicals that help hold bacterial cell walls together, so they let in water and burst.
7. Fleming himself predicted the problem that bacteria might become resistant to penicillin if the drug was over used. He warned of this very issue in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
8. About 10% of people report an allergic reaction to penicillin. However, only about 1% of people actually are allergic. Only 0.03% of people suffer life threatening allergic reactions to it.
9. In 1942, Edward Abraham theorised as to what the structure of penicillin might be. In 1945, Dorothy Hodgkin won a Nobel Prize when she confirmed his theory using X-Ray Chrystallography.
10. In 1957, John C. Sheehan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology figured out how to chemically synythesise penicillin.

NEW!

Settling the Score

Another collection of short stories, even more murder and mayhem with carol singers, an orchestra out for revenge, a sinister magic stone and a haunted mansion.

Available on Amazon:
Paperback            E-book


A Tale of Two Sisters

During a battle with supervillains, a horrific accident leaves the Warner family with no option but to believe their youngest daughter, Jessica, is dead. It doesn't occur to them that the bad guys could, or would, save her.

Jessica wakes up with no memory of who she is or how she came to be on a space station with two bionic legs, a bionic arm and a bionic eye. She is told her family abandoned her and is sent back to Earth with a mission - to kill them. While Jessica wants to kill her family, along with the twin boys who once rejected her, she knows what the Alliance of Supervillains are asking her to do is a suicide mission. She decides to get her revenge in her own way.

As Jessica puts the first part of her revenge plan in motion, she finds herself with an agonising decision to make. Before she can decide, the Alliance come for her, determined to make her do their bidding. This time, it's the Alliance who leave her, crippled and at the mercy of the Warner family, who have no idea who the Alliance's Black Rose really is.

Jessica finds herself having to re-think her decisions in light of what she now learns about her family, the Alliance, the twins, and herself. It would appear the Alliance have left her with an unwanted and permanent reminder of her time with them. Or have they?

Jessica's older sister, Jill, knows her destiny is to be a doctor and specialise in bionics and genetic variant medicine. She is also hopelessly in love with Christopher, Crown Prince of Galorvia. Can their romance survive the lies Christopher told her when they were both at school, an unplanned pregnancy and Sophie, the wannabe princess who comes between them?

Available on Amazon
Paperback

E-book

12 February: Santiago

This date in 1541 saw the founding of Santiago, Chile, by Pedro de Valdivia. He named it Santiago del Nuevo Extremo or "Santiago of the New Frontier." By the end of the century, it was a settlement of just 200 houses. It's now the largest city in Chile and also its capital. Here are 10 things you might not know about it.

1. As of August 2019, around 6,300,000 people live in an area of 641 square kilometres/248 square miles. The city's elevation is between 500-650m/1,640-2,133 feet above sea level.
2. The city is named for Saint James.
3. It is nicknamed "The City of the Island Hills".
4. It is situated in the Santiago Basin, a bowl shaped valley surrounded by mountains - the Andes to the east and the Chilean Coastal Range to the west. The mountains contribute to a significant problem with smog.
5. There is a cemetery here especially for Clowns. The clown mausoleum is decorated in bright colours.
6. The city is the home of the Chilesaurus. The fossils of a previously unknown breed of Dinosaur were found there in 2015. The creature is 3 metres long and resembles a platypus, but is actually a relative of the T-rex.
7. It's home to the highest Skyscraper in Latin America - the Gran Torre Santiago which is 300m/984 feet high and has 64 floors. The building houses the largest shopping mall in South America.
8. Santiago is twinned with Ankara in Turkey, Manila in the Philippines, and Riga in Latvia. It also has a "Friendship Pact" dating back to 1997, with Paris, France.
9. It has the oldest university in both American continents - the Universidad de Chile was founded in 1622.
10. The most famous person to come from Santiago is probably the poet and diplomat, Pablo Neruda.

NEW!

Settling the Score

Another collection of short stories, even more murder and mayhem with carol singers, an orchestra out for revenge, a sinister magic stone and a haunted mansion.

Available on Amazon:
Paperback            E-book


A Tale of Two Sisters

During a battle with supervillains, a horrific accident leaves the Warner family with no option but to believe their youngest daughter, Jessica, is dead. It doesn't occur to them that the bad guys could, or would, save her.

Jessica wakes up with no memory of who she is or how she came to be on a space station with two bionic legs, a bionic arm and a bionic eye. She is told her family abandoned her and is sent back to Earth with a mission - to kill them. While Jessica wants to kill her family, along with the twin boys who once rejected her, she knows what the Alliance of Supervillains are asking her to do is a suicide mission. She decides to get her revenge in her own way.

As Jessica puts the first part of her revenge plan in motion, she finds herself with an agonising decision to make. Before she can decide, the Alliance come for her, determined to make her do their bidding. This time, it's the Alliance who leave her, crippled and at the mercy of the Warner family, who have no idea who the Alliance's Black Rose really is.

Jessica finds herself having to re-think her decisions in light of what she now learns about her family, the Alliance, the twins, and herself. It would appear the Alliance have left her with an unwanted and permanent reminder of her time with them. Or have they?

Jessica's older sister, Jill, knows her destiny is to be a doctor and specialise in bionics and genetic variant medicine. She is also hopelessly in love with Christopher, Crown Prince of Galorvia. Can their romance survive the lies Christopher told her when they were both at school, an unplanned pregnancy and Sophie, the wannabe princess who comes between them?

Available on Amazon
Paperback

E-book

11 February: Boris Pasternak quotes

This date in 1890 saw the birth of Boris Pasternak, the Russian author. Wrote Dr. Zhivago. 10 quotes from him:

1. Man is born to live and not to prepare to live.
2. Even so, one step from my grave, I believe that cruelty, spite, The powers of darkness will in time, Be crushed by the spirit of light.
3. I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.
4. Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.
5. How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?
6. Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.
7. When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.
8. As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.
9. And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.
10. An unshared happiness is not happiness.

NEW!

Settling the Score

Another collection of short stories, even more murder and mayhem with carol singers, an orchestra out for revenge, a sinister magic stone and a haunted mansion.

Available on Amazon:
Paperback            E-book


A Tale of Two Sisters

During a battle with supervillains, a horrific accident leaves the Warner family with no option but to believe their youngest daughter, Jessica, is dead. It doesn't occur to them that the bad guys could, or would, save her.

Jessica wakes up with no memory of who she is or how she came to be on a space station with two bionic legs, a bionic arm and a bionic eye. She is told her family abandoned her and is sent back to Earth with a mission - to kill them. While Jessica wants to kill her family, along with the twin boys who once rejected her, she knows what the Alliance of Supervillains are asking her to do is a suicide mission. She decides to get her revenge in her own way.

As Jessica puts the first part of her revenge plan in motion, she finds herself with an agonising decision to make. Before she can decide, the Alliance come for her, determined to make her do their bidding. This time, it's the Alliance who leave her, crippled and at the mercy of the Warner family, who have no idea who the Alliance's Black Rose really is.

Jessica finds herself having to re-think her decisions in light of what she now learns about her family, the Alliance, the twins, and herself. It would appear the Alliance have left her with an unwanted and permanent reminder of her time with them. Or have they?

Jessica's older sister, Jill, knows her destiny is to be a doctor and specialise in bionics and genetic variant medicine. She is also hopelessly in love with Christopher, Crown Prince of Galorvia. Can their romance survive the lies Christopher told her when they were both at school, an unplanned pregnancy and Sophie, the wannabe princess who comes between them?

Available on Amazon
Paperback

E-book

10 February: Alex Comfort, author of the Joy of Sex

Alex Comfort, the author of the sex manual The Joy of Sex was born 100 years ago today, on 10 February 1920. Ten things you probably didn't know about him:

1. Sex wasn't the only topic he was an expert in. He was also an expert in ageing (gerontology) and in fact, wasn't entirely happy that he became so famous for a book about sex and his work on ageing was relatively unknown.
2. He'd also been fascinated by molluscs since he was a young man and wrote articles for the Conchological Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
3. He wrote his first book, The Silver River, when he was still at school. This book told the story of a voyage to Argentina and Senegal. He also wrote fiction - several novels including No Such Liberty, The Power House and On This Side Nothing.
4. When he was at school he tried to invent a new and better type of gunpowder but it didn't end well. His concoction exploded in his hand, leaving only his thumb.
5. He studied medicine at Trinity College, Cambridge and went on to become a surgeon.
6. He was a staunch pacifist and a conscientious objector during the second world war. He also wrote letters and pamphlets on the subject of pacifism.
7. In 1961 he spent a month in prison for organising a protest against nuclear war.
8. He was still writing letters in 1989 - at that time he wrote to The Guardian denouncing the poll tax.
9. He was married to his first wife for 30 years but ironically they divorced soon after The Joy of Sex was published. He'd been having an affair with his wife's best friend for more than ten years, and subsequently married her.
10. The Joy of Sex was originally going to be called Cordon Bleu Sex with chapters entitled Starters, Main Courses, Sauces, etc - but the owners of the Cordon Bleu name objected.

NEW!

Settling the Score

Another collection of short stories, even more murder and mayhem with carol singers, an orchestra out for revenge, a sinister magic stone and a haunted mansion.

Available on Amazon:
Paperback            E-book


A Tale of Two Sisters

During a battle with supervillains, a horrific accident leaves the Warner family with no option but to believe their youngest daughter, Jessica, is dead. It doesn't occur to them that the bad guys could, or would, save her.

Jessica wakes up with no memory of who she is or how she came to be on a space station with two bionic legs, a bionic arm and a bionic eye. She is told her family abandoned her and is sent back to Earth with a mission - to kill them. While Jessica wants to kill her family, along with the twin boys who once rejected her, she knows what the Alliance of Supervillains are asking her to do is a suicide mission. She decides to get her revenge in her own way.

As Jessica puts the first part of her revenge plan in motion, she finds herself with an agonising decision to make. Before she can decide, the Alliance come for her, determined to make her do their bidding. This time, it's the Alliance who leave her, crippled and at the mercy of the Warner family, who have no idea who the Alliance's Black Rose really is.

Jessica finds herself having to re-think her decisions in light of what she now learns about her family, the Alliance, the twins, and herself. It would appear the Alliance have left her with an unwanted and permanent reminder of her time with them. Or have they?

Jessica's older sister, Jill, knows her destiny is to be a doctor and specialise in bionics and genetic variant medicine. She is also hopelessly in love with Christopher, Crown Prince of Galorvia. Can their romance survive the lies Christopher told her when they were both at school, an unplanned pregnancy and Sophie, the wannabe princess who comes between them?

Available on Amazon
Paperback

E-book

9 February: The Dodo

On this date in 1507, Pereira discovered Santa Appolionia Island, later named Reunion. Here, he thought he saw a Dodo bird. In fact, he'd probably confused it with a different bird as the dodo was only native to Mauritius. However, it's a good enough time as any to present some facts about the dodo. It became extinct over 300 years ago, and was possibly the first animal to die out as a result of human activity. Here are 10 things you might not know about these birds.

1. The word dodo either derives from the old Portuguese word dondo, meaning idiot or fool, or the Dutch word dodaars, meaning a fat behind, in reference to its tail feathers. At one time there were over 70 names for the bird including Didus ineptus, meaning inept dodo, the scientific name given to it by Carl Linneaus, although the scientific name that was officially adopted in 1760 was Raphus cucullatus, meaning "hooded bustard."
2. What did they look like? One of the first recorded mentions of the dodo was in the journal of Vice Admiral Wybran van Warwijck who described them as being larger than a Swan with three or four Black feathers where their wings should be, and ash coloured tail feathers.
3. While the Dutch settlers on Mauritius did eat them, the dodo wasn't the first choice of meal for many. Van Warwijck recorded that the meat was tough unless it was cooked for a long time and then it was fairly tasteless, except for the belly meat. The Dutch called it walghvodel, meaning "tasteless bird" because its meat was so tough and lost its flavour after lengthy cooking.
4. As many as 17 dodos might have been shipped to Europe. Not many of them survived the journey but one of the ones which did ended up in London where it was put on show as a public attraction and was seen by a writer named Hamon L'Estrange, who was told by its keeper that it ate stones to aid its digestion. Our images of them largely come from such specimens, which would have been well fed, which leads scientists to believe that in the wild, they wouldn't have been as fat and awkward as we tend to think. They probably wouldn't have had large necks or breasts, because they didn't fly and wouldn't need well-muscled breasts.
5. Dodos are thought to have been loyal to their mates and to lay one egg at a time in nests on the ground. As well as the eggs being an easy meal for the predators introduced by the settlers, such as Rats, this meant the rate of reproduction was too slow to keep the species alive.
6. The Natural History Museum at Oxford University had the only complete specimen of a dodo skeleton back in the 1700s - but they burned it because it had decayed. They didn't know it was the only one in the world. They kept the head and a foot, however.
7. What they had was sufficient to extract some DNA, so that in the 21st century scientists were able to use it to ascertain that the dodo was a distant relative of the Pigeon. The closest relative of the dodo alive today is the Nicobar pigeon.
8. Although it couldn't fly, studies of its leg bones suggest the dodo could run quite fast, and it's also thought to have used its large beak to defend itself or fight off other dodos encroaching on their territory.
9. We can't know for sure what they used to eat, but the best guess of today's scientists is that they ate fallen fruit, nuts, seeds, bulbs and roots, and possibly shellfish. Since some of them did survive long sea voyages, they probably weren't too fussy about what they ate.
10. The dodo lives on, however, in language and literature. We describe things as being "as dead as a dodo" and has appeared in several works of fiction. Before it went extinct it was often used as a symbol for exotic lands, and of gluttony, because they appeared to be fat. Possibly the most famous dodo appeared in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It's thought that not only did Carroll visit the Oxford museum with the girl who inspired Alice to see the dodo remains which were once there, but he might have identified with it, since his real name was Dodgson and he had a stutter, so might have referred to himself as "Do-do-dodgson".

NEW!

Settling the Score

Another collection of short stories, even more murder and mayhem with carol singers, an orchestra out for revenge, a sinister magic stone and a haunted mansion.

Available on Amazon:
Paperback            E-book


A Tale of Two Sisters

During a battle with supervillains, a horrific accident leaves the Warner family with no option but to believe their youngest daughter, Jessica, is dead. It doesn't occur to them that the bad guys could, or would, save her.

Jessica wakes up with no memory of who she is or how she came to be on a space station with two bionic legs, a bionic arm and a bionic eye. She is told her family abandoned her and is sent back to Earth with a mission - to kill them. While Jessica wants to kill her family, along with the twin boys who once rejected her, she knows what the Alliance of Supervillains are asking her to do is a suicide mission. She decides to get her revenge in her own way.

As Jessica puts the first part of her revenge plan in motion, she finds herself with an agonising decision to make. Before she can decide, the Alliance come for her, determined to make her do their bidding. This time, it's the Alliance who leave her, crippled and at the mercy of the Warner family, who have no idea who the Alliance's Black Rose really is.

Jessica finds herself having to re-think her decisions in light of what she now learns about her family, the Alliance, the twins, and herself. It would appear the Alliance have left her with an unwanted and permanent reminder of her time with them. Or have they?

Jessica's older sister, Jill, knows her destiny is to be a doctor and specialise in bionics and genetic variant medicine. She is also hopelessly in love with Christopher, Crown Prince of Galorvia. Can their romance survive the lies Christopher told her when they were both at school, an unplanned pregnancy and Sophie, the wannabe princess who comes between them?

Available on Amazon
Paperback

E-book