Category Archives: International

American places

For the fainthearted . . .

The Simpsons, there is a familiarity in the lines, in the characters, in the plots, in the place names.

Apparently, there are a number of Springfields towns that share their name with the city that is the fictional home of The Simpsons

One Springfield lies between Stonewall, Colorado and Ulysses, Kansas. City names with their own familiar feeling.  The names hint at Civil War generals: “Stonewall” Jackson of the Confederacy and Ulysses S. Grant from the Union army.

One can move around a map of the United States and find …

Losing touch

For the fainthearted . . .

BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed investigated the handshake and social interaction. Covid is said to have changed the ways in which people interact, touch has become slight or non-existent. Handshakes and embraces have been replaced by elbow bumps and fist pumps.

It was sad to think that human beings were going to be even more distant from each other than had already been the case with the replacement of face to face encounters with online conversations.

It is more than a dozen years now since I heard the man speak …

Cricketing certainties

For the fainthearted . . .

I like first class cricket, the sort that is played in matches lasting four or five days – it has a reassuring certainty, when there are results, they are results that are beyond question. Sometimes the requirement of absolute certainty creates scenarios that would be considered bizarre in other sports.

If, in the first innings, one team has scored 50 runs and the other team has scored 500; and then, in the second innings, the first team has scored 50 runs for the loss of nine wickets and is 400 …

Critical thought

For the fainthearted . . .

In a lesson surveying the roots of anti-Semitism, we watched an Imperial War Museum video which noted that the superstitions and myths about Jews which had been believed through the centuries included them being blamed for the Black Death in the Fourteenth Century.

In 1347, the Black Death was a bubonic plague that swept through Europe. Estimates of how many died from the plague vary. It is believed that the pandemic devastated the nations of Europe, that it killed between a third and two-thirds of the population between 1347 and …

Stopped overnight

For the fainthearted . . .

It is a long time since the A38 was the main route from the Midlands to the West Country, but its lay bys between Worcester and Tewkesbury still provide overnight parking for lorry drivers taking their statutory rest. The drivers find safety in numbers, two or three stopping in each spot. The distances in England are not great, but sufficient to exhaust the hours available to a driver in a single day.

Stops elsewhere can punctuate journeys of a different scale. A service station on the autoroute south of Bordeaux …

Remembering Precious Ramotswe

For the fainthearted . . .

There was a brightness in the sunlight that seemed to celebrate the passing of the equinox, the darkness was again beaten, the light had regained its dominance. There was still a chillness in the air, a film of ice on the car windscreen, but it was an exhilarating cold, one that brought alive the senses.

Driving the road towards Tewkesbury, trees starkly outlined against the morning sky were a reminder that winter was recent, leafless, they were skeletal silhouettes. A mist lay across the fields and there was a hint …