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Musings from the Isle of Man

This month, after battling horizontal rain, howling winds, an interminable ferry journey and an indigestible egg and cress sandwich, the blog has landed on the Isle of Man for a short break. Mildly ironic, yes, but since there seems to be no Isle of Woman, we will just have to make do. From the very beginning the men living here in the middle of the Irish Sea certainly conformed to male stereotypes, shaping the legends and dominating the narrative. The mythical warrior and sea-god, Mannanan Mac Lir, was apparently the first lord of the island - he wore his magic cloak, rode his magic horse and conjured up magic mists to protect the island. More ‘real’ men followed – Celts, Vikings, pirates, monks and missionaries, and there was a veritable jumble of battles between kings and lords who were mostly named Olaf or Godred. There are visible remains of the stone circles, cairns, carved crosses, churches, graves, castles, walls, harbours and fortifications that mushroomed across this small is...
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Five Long Years

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  A short blog this month. The heat has sapped all energy, the quill pen is drooping, the inkwell is dry and the fine linen wove paper has turned brown and crispy. And yes, it did start to become more tolerable in mid-August, but now it’s post-heatwave anxiety time. What just happened? Will the plants ever recover? Is there enough water around for wildlife? When did you last see an earthworm? Will there be another blowtorch event in September? What should I be doing? So, let’s keep this blog short and focused. There is so much rage-engendering stuff going on that it would be quite easy to blow a gasket and find Meta, Donald Trump, the Water companies, Reform Uk, Elon Musk and that bloke down the road who thinks you are a shape-shifting lizard all having a go at you. Or worse still to have a complete meltdown, like poor, doomed Howard Beale, the character played by Peter Finch in the 1976 film Network . So instead, we’ll concentrate on just one thing,and take ourselves back to Augus...
Location: Milton Keynes, UK
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Following the Threads

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The language of needlecraft The English language brims over with the imagery of sewing and textiles. You can embroider the truth, weave a web of lies, spin a yarn, needle someone, or stitch them up while knitting your brows and pinning blame elsewhere. All part, of course, of the rich tapestry of life. The phrases are not always complimentary and there is probably some ingrained misogyny there, given that it’s mostly women who have been the ones making tapestries, embroideries, quilts, ceremonial dress, hassocks and wall hangings. Women, often anonymous and invisible, creating beautiful work – examples of which you can easily find in a museum or church near you. We’ll look at some of the great works a little later (you probably won’t have missed the recent arrival of the Bayeux Tapestry), but we should never ignore the art under our noses. Weaving stories Stories and myths centred on textiles are found in most cultures. In Greek mythology a ball of thread and a clever woman saved These...
Location: Milton Keynes, UK
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Off The Shelf

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OFF THE SHELF! Their lordships the Earl of Sandwich, the Duke of Wellington and Lord Cardigan, together with Laszlo Biro, are among many others whose names are embedded in the English language because of something they wore, cooked or invented in some way. For example, in the mid-nineteenth century, the women’s rights advocate Amelia Bloomer wrote favourably about wearing a loose trouser outfit. The idea caught on and ‘bloomers’ quickly became quite the thing for women who wanted less restrictive clothing. Such eponyms are interesting, often quite benign and celebratory of the innovators and inventors. However, no such kudos attended the Reverend James Bowdler, who, in 1807 published ‘The Family Shakespeare’. He believed that the plays could not be read ‘safely’ to women and children unless they were highly edited, cutting out any nasty bits. He changed the text of Hamlet so that the suicide of Ophelia became an unfortunate accident and removed all trace of Doll Tearsheet the prostitut...
Location: Milton Keynes, UK
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Nothing to LOL about here!

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All those acronyms We are up to our necks in acronyms. From the RSPCA to the DWD, to CID and HMRC, they are impossible to ignore. They have entered our lives, with numbers increasing daily (along with the new varieties of emoji - which are not actually acronyms, so we’ll save that issue for another day). The first acronyms of note were SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) and POTUS (President of the United States), created in late 19th Century America, as ways of saving words in the telegraph system. The explosion of acronyms during the last hundred and fifty years or so has tended to develop through technology, medical science, warfare, and legal systems, as well as traditional use by societies and charitable organisations. Many acronyms do not trip off the tongue lightly – The NUWSS (National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies) founded in 1897 – is a bit of a mouthful, and today, the UN Refugee Agency, (UNHCR) is not the easiest to recall. But other acronyms become familiar w...
Location: Milton Keynes, UK
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Colliding Worlds, Parallel Universes

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Colliding Worlds, Parallel Universes April already, and the blossom is out, the martins are nesting and we can feel the sun’s warmth on our necks. It’s the time of year, as Chaucer noted in The Canterbury Tales , when people long to go on ‘pilgrimages’, (or jolly outings, more likely). Chaucer wrote the Tales between 1387 and 1400, a turbulent time for the world. War and the Black Death had killed millions, there was conflict between competing popes, anti-Semitism was rife and crusader armies were fighting the expanding Ottoman Empire. Huge technological advances were being made, mainly in military hardware and the use of gunpowder. In England, having crushed the Peasants Revolt in 1381, the autocratic rule of Richard II led to his deposition in 1399. Sounds familiar? It might well have been 600+ years ago, but there’s much we can relate to. Chaucer created some lively women fictional characters in the Tales , and there were, of course, many exceptional women living at the time. But yo...
Location: Milton Keynes, UK
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March Winds

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MARCH WINDS When in Rome…. In ancient Rome, March began with festivals to celebrate the start of the military campaigning season. They were dedicated to Mars, the god of war (his name is for ever linked with the month), who became the focus of religious and military cults across Europe. Now, in March 2026, wars rage and powerful men sit in gold encrusted rooms showing footage of real war interspersed with clips from action movies and describing ‘beautiful B2 bombers’ or dismissing their enemy as ‘toast and they know it’. It’s a bit worrying that the worship and cults of Mars seem actually less deranged than the present day. Mars was esteemed for his virtue, was the protector of agriculture, had a romantic liaison with Venus and was father to Cupid, as well as Romulus and Remus. However, he wasn’t actually real, unlike the men bashing each other’s countries to bits at the moment. Music for marching So having set this dismal context for March 2026, we should pause for a moment and look a...
Location: Milton Keynes, UK
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