I am swotting up on English History at the moment, for reasons that I don't really have time to go into now because I need to be done by some time next week and so far I am only up to the Romans.
Growing up in Australia, I learned a lot about bushrangers, explorers and the Snowy Mountain Scheme in history lessons. We also did some bits about ancient Greece and Rome, and the Chinese got a look in, but as far as British history goes, what we learned about (and this seems odd, in hindsight) can be boiled down to three things: Medieval crop rotation systems, the Battle of Hastings and World War II. Why only these three? Who knows.
Over the years I've filled in quite a few of the gaps, but I have always meant to get around to trying to put the bits I do know into some kind of order and work out what is missing, which is what I'm finally doing now. One of the books I'm using is The Tribes of Britain by David Miles, who, today in particular, I am loving for no other reason than this:
The Daily Mail, not usually noted for its coverage of archaeology, asked "Is this the King of Stonehenge?"
(It's not all that relevant here, but for the record he is talking about the Amesbury Archer, who is a guy who was burried with lots of stuff, beakers* mainly, around the same time Stonehenge was constructed.)
I know the Daily Mail can be an easy target, but really, they do ask for it sometimes, and today is definitely one of those times. (If you are reading this sometime in the future, or are not in the UK, or have just been under a rock today, by the way, they ran a spectacularly stupid smear story this morning which more or less called Nick Clegg a Nazi).
Nick Clegg, while I remember, was the punchline to the best election related joke I have seen so far (from Popbitch): How do you make Heather Mills angry?
(It's wrong, I know. But it's funny.)
*Beakers: more significant than you might think in prehistoric Britain. They are quite the bone of contention.
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