So today was my physio let's see how you're doing assessment, at the different health centre -

- which I was in a bit of a swivet about getting to, because the obvious straightforward route is the longest, and there are shorter ones but these involve a tangle of residential streets -

- not to mention, whichever way you slice it, the road winds uphill all the way, yea, to the very end, because the health centre is bang opposite Parliament Hill.

Nonetheless, I found a route which seemed doable, which said 24 mins (and that was not actually starting from home base but from the road by the railway line), which I thought was possibly optimistic for an Old Duck such as myself, but mirabile dictu it was in fact just over 20 but under 25 minutes, win, eh?

And took me along streets I have seldom walked along since the 70s/80s when I was visiting them more frequently for Reasons.

Had a rather short but I hope useful meeting with the physio - some changes to existing exercises and a new one or two.

Thought I would get a bus back as I had had time to check out the nearby bus stops, and there was one coming along which according to the information at the stop was going in a useful direction.

Alas it was coming from the desired direction, but still, cut off a certain amount of homewards slog.

But this did sound awfully like that spate of books where people had A Bright Idea to Do Something for A Year and got a book out of it, which was clearly the intention, and this struck my cynical ayfeist self as 'My Spiritual Pilgrimage to a Mystical Experience, Conversion, Faith, and Publishing Deal'.

Could I become a Christian in a year?

(How long did it take St Augustine? asking for a friend.)

For my perpetual Christian road-trip – beginning in the last months of 2022 and ending in early 2024 – I purchased a 21 year-old Toyota Corolla and stocked the glove box with second-hand CDs. I filled up my calendar with Christian retreats, church visits and stays in the houses of Christian strangers all across the highways and byways of the UK – Cornwall, Sussex, Kent, Hertfordshire, Birmingham, north Wales, Norfolk, Sheffield, Halifax, Durham, the Inner Hebrides – seeking out every kind of Christian, from Catholics to Orthodox Christians: Quakers, Pentecostals, Evangelicals, high to low Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, self-professed mystics, focusing on my generation specifically, those in their 20s and 30s, the youngest set of adults in Britain.

I was also, in the light of this article today, intrigued that it was two bloke friends who set her on this path: I’m delighted to see gen Z men in the UK flocking back to church – I just hope it’s for the right reasons. So am I. I have a friend who has been involved in the much-delayed and still unsatisfactory response of the C of E to certain abuse cases and some of those seem to have been connected with cultish manifestations which were praised for bringing in that particular demographic.

(And having noted the other day that Witchfinder Hopkins was pretty much in that demographic of young men aged 18-24, I'd really like to know where these Gen Z converts are in relation to issues like ordination of women, LGCBTQ+ inclusivity, etc etc.)

But this promised to be a short video, by one of my academic crushes.

(Indeed, should I ever meet Professor Hutton I fear I shall melt down and revert into A Teenager in Love to the embarrassment of all.)

Ronald Hutton on Matthew Hopkins, the English Civil War's 'Witchfinder General': 'What really happened when a breakdown of the legal system in the English Civil War fuelled a series of witch-hunts? In this 10-Minute Talk, Professor Ronald Hutton FBA delves into England's witch trials and Matthew Hopkins, the self-proclaimed Witchfinder General.'

It was really local, it was really atypical -

- and I never realised how very young Hopkins was, as well as being in a socially marginal position. (Do we think that these days he'd be an incel mass shooter?) In the 1968 movie he was played by Vincent Price who was well on in his career by that date.

Wo, wo, 'tis the EndofaNera.... street performers rue end of busking at Leicester Square. You know, having some acquaintance with a) colourful Victorian streetlife and b) historical studies of the policing of same I bet there were people bemoaning the loss of those colourful if dodgy characters, though I also have some distant recollection of people going spare over e.g. barrel-organs and other street music at a possibly somewhat later date, rather like the occupants of Leics Sq businesses who cannot hear themselves think, let alone make phone-calls.

***

More from the Cambpop people on the latter end of life over time: Did anyone “retire” in the past? and How did the elderly poor survive in the past?

For centuries, the elderly were regarded as the category par excellence of the ‘deserving poor’, and charitable aid took a broad spectrum of forms. Begging, while not necessarily condoned, was often regarded as an acceptable and unthreatening pursuit when undertaken by the aged. One longstanding area of philanthropy specifically focused on the elderly were alms houses. These were funded by voluntary donations (rather than through the poor law) and usually offered separate private accommodation for older people. At most, 2-3 percent of those over 60 secured an alms house place. There was great geographical variability, but alms house inmates were disproportionately selected from the ‘respectable’ female and church-going elderly.

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Cassie Watson, whose work on murder some of you may have read (it's excellent), has turned her attention to violence short of lethal: Investigating the ‘Assault Deficit’ - assault was in fact a vague and ill-defined term:

By 1861 when the Offences Against the Person Act came into effect, the word assault was not actually defined. Instead, it was used to designate a variety of specific acts that might cause physical harm to another person. It was left up to judges to decide what was meant by ‘harm’. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the word ‘harm’ was typically associated with the effects of physical assault, and so the phrase ‘bodily harm’ was used more regularly than ‘harm’. However, it seems likely that the wider concept implied in today’s usage — encompassing both emotional harm and negligence — was understood. However, if the harm took some other form, for instance disease or mental trauma, an indictment under the 1861 statute could fail.

***

This is a reasonable account of the problem with 'simple' solutions - 'if you just only....' whether the solution is some tech fix or Returning to 'Nature' and 'the Natural Way': The Flawed Ideology That Unites Grass-Fed Beef Fans and Anti-Vaxxers.

As somebody who has been wont to point out that actually getting Drs Ehrlich and Hato's magic bullet to where it would do some good was a complex process, I am on board with being v sceptical of solutionism.

What I read

Finished My Favourite Mistake in a mad whirl, really, it just kept going.

Anthony Berkeley, The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) - a group of mostly amateur criminologists sit round discusssing (and also do a bit of freelance detecting) apropos a recent case in which it was assumed that woman who ate the poisoned chocolates was not the target as they were sent to someone else who gave them to her husband: who had it in for the apparent target? - naturally it transpires that massively complicated plot was aimed at the actual victim but the who, how and why remain matters for debate. This was not at all bad, so I downloaded a couple more of Berkeley's Roger Sheringham mysteries from Project Gutenberg.

Unfortunately a bit less prepossessed by The Mystery at Lover's Cave (1927) and The Layton Court Mystery (1925) because we perceive a pattern of Sheringham flailing around and building up theories, coming across clues (sometimes by vast coincidence) and then constructing an entirely new theory, and then right at the end the whole thing turns more or less inside out when the actual murderer is revealed, too late or in circumstances in which it seems prudent to take no action. Do not think I shall proceed with the oeuvre.

Have been thinking for a while of a re-read of Little Women (1868). Alas, these days one does not just glide over the plonking moral lessons that are constantly invoked as one follows the story.

Have just finished Trailblazer, which I was dipping in and out of all week, because I did find the chatty style really rather irksome. Also a few niggly things (e.g. how can you mention Hertha Ayrton without the being rejected for Fellowship of Royal Society because married woman? - surely totally pertinent to the kinds of things Barbara Bodichon was campaigning about???).

On the go

Have just picked up Alison Li, Wondrous Transformations: A Maverick Physician, the Science of Hormones, and the Birth of the Transgender Revolution (2023), which I have been meaning to get to for a while.

Up next

Well, one of the books I am reviewing has finally turned up, so that, I guess, is in my future.

So today I, in company with partner, excursed.

We went over to Holland Park - an area I rather seldom visited even in former times - to take in the small Barbara Hepworth exhibition at the Piano Nobile gallery:

Barbara Hepworth: Strings
which has some very choice things from private collections, gosh, I would like to have one of those small Hepworths ‘hand sculpture’ she called them, e.g. this one.

Also features a couple of small versions of the famed Winged Figure that features on John Lewis in Oxford Street.

Other sights of interest encountered included

Pottery Lane, once a 'wretched and notorious slum known as the "Potteries and the Piggeries"' and now exceedingly gentrified.

and

Lansdowne House, which has a blue plaque commemorating its use as studios by several rather second-division late C19th artists. Nothing to commemorate its importance as a recording studio in the 60s and 70s. It now consists of 13 'beautiful apartments' and is Grade II heritage listed.