Author Archives: Ellen Hawley

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About Ellen Hawley

Fiction writer and blogger, living in Cornwall.

Telling the girls from the boys in Anglo-Saxon England

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We seldom know less than when we’re sure of ourselves, and since we all know that the men in Anglo-Saxon England were warriors and the women were, um, you know, women, a recent article revisiting those assumptions makes for good reading.

What did it mean to be an, um, you know, woman in Anglo-Saxon England? Oh, hell, we all know the answer to that. They pottered around the house, fussing over whether it needed new curtains. In their spare time, they birthed children and kept them from falling into the fire or the lake or the river, and they spun, wove, dyed, sewed, embroidered, cooked, baked, healed, fed, cut hair, made fires, sharpened blades, worked in the fields, churned butter, chopped wood, and basically didn’t matter one little bit to the economy or the culture.

I don’t sound sour, do I? I don’t have any reason to be.

Irrelevant photo: I’m reasonably sure these are  honeysuckle berries. Some species of honeysuckle have edible berries and some don’t, although as someone or other said about mushrooms, “They’re all edible, but some of them only once.” So beautiful as they are, I won’t be making jelly out of them. Especially since I don’t make jelly.

So what’s with this new study?

It re-examines pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon burials, focusing on the ones that were dismissed as outliers because they didn’t fit the expected pattern.

The pre-Christian part of that sentence is important, because people buried stuff with their dead–the things that mattered to them; the things they used in life–so they tell us a good bit about how people lived. Christian cemeteries don’t give us that gift. 

As a general rule, weapons, horse-riding equipment, and tools (as in, not household tools) are associated with men. Jewelry, weights for spinning yarn, sewing equipment, and beads are associated with women. But that’s not an absolute. The exceptions are those outliers, and for years archeologists dismissed them because they messed with their expectations. 

A study by James Davison looks at what’s been swept aside, arguing that the Anglo-Saxon approach to gender may have been more fluid than we’ve assumed. Working with burials that took place between the fifth and eighth centuries in Buckland, Dover, he finds that grave goods don’t always align with the sex of the skeleton, and in an article about his work he talks about two burials in particular, both of people who had high status in the community.

How does he know their status? From how much effort went into digging the graves. Digging graves is hard work. I haven’t dug any myself, but I’ve planted plants and dug a drainage ditch, both of which are easy by comparison, and I can testify that the earth we live on is heavy and full of rocks and roots and clay and other fun stuff. People put more effort into the graves of people they considered important.

And then there are teeth. Cavities indicate that the person had access to sugar, which was a luxury, and an absence of horizontal lines on the teeth (enamel hypoplasia, in case you care) indicates that the person didn’t go short of food. All of that plus rich grave goods will tell a clear story about a person’s standing in the community.

With that bit of background tucked under our gender-appropriate haircuts, let’s consider Grave 30, which holds the skeleton of a person who was somewhere between 35 and 40 years old. The skeleton’s definitely male and the grave was particularly deep for the period–0.61 meters–so figure high status. Other markers of status are the teeth (five cavities, so a taste for sugar, and if we still measured status by cavities, I’d be a fucking queen) and no markers of malnutrition. 

If you’re still not convinced by that, you can run your virtual fingers through the grave goods: a bone comb, a silver-gilt brooch and a silver pin (standard parts of a woman’s clothing, but upscale ones), 84 beads, a silver pendant, a buckle, a knife, and a set of iron keys. High status. 

Keys? They were important markers of women as keepers of the home. Some women were buried with actual keys and some with symbolic ones–presumably because the real ones couldn’t be spared.

Hang on, though: this is a male skeleton. With the kind of things that would typically mark a woman’s burial. And they were held in high esteem by the community.

What can we make of this? It’s hard to know, since the people who could’ve explained it are dead and nobody seems to have thought it was worth documenting. Should we decide the person was a transexual? That strikes me as importing a twenty-first-century interpretation onto a seventh-century life. So should we say this was a man who was accepted as a woman? Or who was accepted as a man but lived the way women typically lived. After all, you don’t have to renounce one sex to live in a way that’s more typical of the other one. 

Basically, we can’t know. What we can know is that the picture of Anglo-Saxon culture that we’ve been given is oversimplified. 

 

Grave 93

Now let’s wend our morbid way to Grave 93, where we’ll find a skeleton of about the same age that’s written up as possibly female, since it’s not as well preserved as the one in Grave 30. The grave isn’t as deep, but it’s large, so the person was of high status, if not quite as high. The teeth are interesting: they show some evidence of cavities but also of occlusal fissures, which are often caused or exacerbated by feminizing hormones, particularly during pregnancy. 

Hoping to move our skeleton from the Possibly Female category into the Probably Female one, I asked Lord G about hormones and occlusal fissures and ended up trolling through a series of articles about dental sealants. In other words, I learned nothing of any use. So we’ll have to leave our friend in the Possibly Female file. 

Sorry. I liked the story I was building, but we’ll be boring and stick with the few facts we have at hand.

Whatever sex the person was, they were buried with a sword, a spearhead, fragments of a decorated shield, one glass bead (it was probably attached to the sword, and I could spin you a good story around that too, but we’re trying to stay with fact, remember), an iron rod, a bronze band, iron fragments from a buckle, and a bronze ring. Swords were associated with the burials of men, but not just any men. Swords were for (sorry to keep using the phrase) a high-status men. Of the seventeen graves excavated, only this one contained a sword.

If the skeleton was female, what do we make of what was buried with it? Maybe that this person lived and fought as a man and was considered a man. Maybe that women–or at least this woman–fought as a man without having to be considered a one. In other words, women could be accepted as warriors. A person doesn’t have to be transexual to mess with gender roles. It’s also possible that this woman was the last survivor of her family and was buried with the family heirlooms, although if that had been true I’d expect her to have had the traditional woman’s goods as well. 

 

C’mon, though, give us a conclusion

Sorry, I can’t. Archeologists are amazing in their ability to unearth bits of the past, but they’re frustrating creatures who refuse to give us details they don’t actually know. Or the good ones are, anyway. So hats off to the ones who refuse to oversimplify the picture of how people lived in the past, and a boot up the backside to the ones who left us with the neat and inaccurate images we’ve carried in our heads for so long.

English slavery: the legal history

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This post comes to you from the Department of Contradictions. It’s a big department, so don’t wander off on your own, please. We may never see you again.

The most familiar parts of England’s relationship with slavery–at least to me, so I’ll quietly assume it’s true for you too, since I’m clearly the pattern for all humanity–are the slave-based economy of its colonies and its involvement in the slave trade. And right behind that comes the work of its abolitionists. But if we stick to those, we’ll miss a couple of messy and interesting parts of the story. So let’s look at whether slavery was legal under English law. It’ll be heavy on top-down history, but in a later post I hope I’ll be able to get into what English slaves did to free themselves. It’ll be useful to know the legal stuff when we get to that.

Ready? Good. Stick together please. I did warn you.

Irrelevant photo: Fields showing the medieval divisions–long strips, because those plows were hard to turn.

Early history

I’m American originally and make a lot of standardized (not to mention silly) American assumptions, so first let me remind you (we’re identical, remember, so your mind will be as silly as mine) that slavery hasn’t always been based on color differences, or even on national or ethnic differences.

You already knew that? So did I, but the image in my mind appears in black and white anyway, so it’s worth repeating. 

When William the Conqueror seized England’s throne and everything that went with it, he sent his minions to count up what he’d conquered, and in 1068 they reported that, among other things, 10% of the population was enslaved. At least some of these would’ve been Anglo-Saxon slaves held by Anglo-Saxon slaveholders. 

A bit later, in 1102, England abolished slavery. Take a minute to notice that, please: slavery was outlawed. 

The country kept serfdom, though, and although serfdom wasn’t slavery, it was a close and unpleasant relative, the kind who drinks too much, doesn’t wash often, and starts fights at family parties. It wasn’t until the 17th century that the last form of serfdom, villeinage, was abolished.

But even in the middle ages, some people (for which you can read some people who were powerful enough to have left a record of their opinions) found it abhorrent. Henry II (1154 to 1189; you’re welcome) freed some of his villeins “because in the beginning nature made all men free, and afterwards the law of nations reduced some under the yoke of servitude.”

Just after you think, Wow, you ask yourself, Why didn’t he free them all, right? It’s a fair question. The answer is that I haven’t a clue, but if you’re constructing an argument that England’s law, culture, and history don’t accept slavery and its various cousins, make a note of that quote. It’ll be useful. 

Be careful to ignore all the evidence that runs counter to your argument. You’ll find plenty of it and it’ll only confuse the picture.

Now let’s zip forward to 1569, when someone named Cartwright was seen whipping a man and the courts got involved, because it looked like assault–or technically, battery.

Wait, though, Cartwright said. He’s my slave, so I have the right.

The court disagreed and ordered the man freed, saying that  “England was too pure an air for slaves to breath in.” 

No, the spelling isn’t mine. The letter E was rationed back then. They weren’t going to waste one just to mark the difference between breath and breathe. They knew we’d figure it out.

As far as is known, the slave was  from Russia. He was white and Christian.

Important as the ruling was, exactly what it meant in terms slavery’s legality remained hazy, but it would’ve been clear enough for the Russian. He was free. 

History’s an ironic s.o.b., though, because at about this same time England first got involved in the international slave trade, and from here on the picture is black and white, not white and white, because the slaves they were transporting came from Africa. 

Slave trading was small-scale stuff at first, but by 1660 the Royal African Company was incorporated and it went into the trade on an industrial scale, transporting 212,000 slaves, almost all of them branded on their chests with either the name of the company or DY, for Duke of York. Out of those, 44,000 died on the slave ships. I trust I don’t need to tell you about the conditions on the slave ships. If I do, ask Lord Google about the Middle Passage. The conditions were brutal, degrading, and–look at the numbers–often lethal. 

That 212,000 isn’t the total number of slaves transported by English ships, only by that one company. The total would be something along the lines of 3.1 million, and only 2.7 million of those survived the trip.

If you want a historical landmark for the start of industrial-scale slave trade, we’re talking about Charles II’s reign, and yes, I had to look that up, so don’t feel bad. 

And with that, we’re ready to introduce a new subhead, because this one’s wearing out.

 

Contradictory rulings

In 1677, an English court heard a case involving a group of slaves who were “wrongfully detained.” (The quote’s from Peter Fryer’s book Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, so no link. If you want to go deeper into the topic, the book’s a good place to start.) The case involved a squabble between two white men, a plantation owner in Barbados and a naval officer who argued that “as there could be no possession of people as property, therefore his action in detaining the enslaved persons was more akin to the feudal practice of villeinage, which tied people to land, thereby making them immovable as simple property.”

So we won’t find heroes on either side of this case. It was two charmers fighting over human property. One wanted them as slaves and the other as serfs. The court ruled that “since black people were bought and sold and as they were infidels, they ranked as merchandise and therefore could be treated as property for the purposes of the claim.” (We’ve gone back to Josh Hitchens for that quote. See the first link if you want to go deeper.)

Two things stand out in this ruling: one, people could be considered property; and two, this could be justified by checking their religion against England’s own. If they didn’t match, the people could become property. 

The people involved were not set free.

A second ruling at the end of the century repeated the role of religion in deciding whether a person could be property: “heathens” could be; Christians couldn’t.

Logically enough, this led to a widespread belief that becoming a Christian would free a person, and English slaveholders went to some lengths to make sure their slaves got no chance to convert, and ditto the communities where they–the slavers–kidnapped people to enslave them.

On the other hand, not long after that ruling we find one that says, “The common law took no notice of blacks being different from other people,” and another saying “That as soon as a Negro comes into England, he becomes free. . . . One may be a Villein in England, but not a Slave.”

Neither ruling touched on the slave trade or slavery in English colonies. They applied only to within the borders of England.

 

Except…

Except that they didn’t exactly apply within the borders of England, because slavery did exist within its borders, unchallenged. They were about slaves coming into England. 

Why should the law consider them different from the slaves already there? Beats me, but it did. 

Still, slaveholders continued to bring their slaves into England, and they were worried enough about the risk that they asked the attorney general for an opinion on the subject, which he dutifully issued in 1729. A slave, he said, remained a slave while in England, baptism didn’t free a slave, and a slave could be compelled to leave England and return to the colonies. He didn’t cite case law or precedent–the altars English law worships at–but the opinion was taken seriously and used in court by lawyers who managed to keep a straight face while doing so.

 

A bit more case law

Legal rulings wobbled backwards and forwards on the issue for a good–or not so good–long time. In a 1749 ruling, slaves remained slaves. In a 1763 ruling, they not only became free, they could charge their former masters with ill treatment. 

Then we get to the case of Jonathan Strong, who was brought to England as a slave, beaten so badly that the slaveholder threw him out on the street when Strong was no more use to him, and later tried to reclaim him when he saw that he’d recovered. Strong was held in jail before he could be put on a ship, and he managed to contact the men who’d help him recover from his beating. 

It all ended up in court and Strong was set free, after which one of the men who’d helped him, Granville Sharp, was sued for £200–a shitload of money at the time–for interfering with the slaveholder’s property. The slaveholder also challenged him to a duel, an invitation Sharp was sharp enough to decline.

He was also sharp enough to defend himself in courts, since he couldn’t find a lawyer who thought he had any defense, and he did a good enough job that the plaintiff’s lawyers dropped the case and the plaintiff had to pay the costs.

Actually, three times the costs. So we get to do a victory dance, but we’ll have to cut it short because the ruling avoided setting a precedent. What’s more, five years after he was beaten and thrown out on the street, Jonathan Strong died as a result of his injuries. He was 25.

By now, Sharp had become a campaigner, and he was involved in a few more cases that rescued individuals but didn’t yield a decisive ruling on slavery’s legality. 

That sets the scene for the 1772 Somersett case. James Somersett had been enslaved in Massachusetts, was brought to England as a slave, and after two years escaped. He was recaptured and held on a ship bound for Jamaica but rescued by legal intervention.

When the case went to court–we’ll skip over the legal arguments–at last a judge came back with a decisive ruling: slavery was so “odious” that it could only exist if authorized by law–and no English law had ever authorized it.

But, despite appearances, the Somersett ruling didn’t abolish slavery in England, it only prevented slaves from being forced to leave the country against their will. This was no small thing, because the slaves in England tended to be servants. (I’ve read of one group who worked in a quarry, but they seem to be the exception.) Without minimizing the horrors of slavery, the threat of being deported to, say, a sugar plantation in Jamaica if they tried to run away was a powerful one. 

So slavery itself continued on English soil, and English newspapers continued to advertise the sale of slaves and searches for runaways. 

 

The abolition of slavery

England’s involvement in the slave trade became illegal in 1807, but slavery within England wasn’t abolished until 1838, when it was abolished in the colonies as well. Except, ahem, for the parts of the world ruled by the British East India Company, which were ruled by the company, not its government.   

The slaveholders were paid compensation. The slaves not only weren’t compensated, in the colonies they were pushed into what were a thinly disguised form of slavery called apprenticeships. By then, though, slavery had already died out within England, not because of new laws or court rulings but because, Fryer argues, the slaves themselves had become a powerful anti-slavery force and freed themselves.

But that’s another post–or it will be if I can find enough detail to make it work. 

Spring flowers in January

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Having lived in Minnesota, a state that’s in the middle of the US and hangs from the Canadian border by clinging to an icicle, I suspect that what my neighbors in Cornwall call winter is really spring. Here are a few flowers that bloomed not in January (the headline’s a lie) but in December.

Primroses on a neighbor’s lawn

Camellia, ourside a differnt neighbor’s house

Periwinkle–ours. It’s a good thing it’s pretty, because it’s trying to take over the yard.

Wishing you good weather, wherever you are. Apologies for the not-quite-convincing post. I need a bit of down time.

Portcullis House and Westminster Palace, the crumbling seats of British government

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If you need a simple image to stand in for the complexities of Britain’s crumbling infrastructure–and who doesn’t, every hour on the hour?–look no further than Portcullis House, which was built in 2001 as office space for 213 MPs, along with their staff members and (I have to assume) general hangers-on. Already rain is leaking in and panes of glass are dropping from its gloriously dramatic atrium roof.

The original budget for this marvel of architectural longevity was £165 million, although the actual cost was £235 million. But don’t grumble. What’s £70 million between friends? The building was supposed to last for 120 years (or 200 years, according to a different article), so that’s a bargain, right?

Okay, maybe it’s worth a grumble. That works out to roughly £1 million per MP, and the price includes, as a kind of bonus, £440 per MP for reclining chairs (not available to staff and hangers-on) and £150,000 for a dozen or so fig trees that were imported from Florida to grace the atrium–at least until (slight exaggeration alert) they get bashed to bits by falling glass.

On the positive side, anyone’s welcome to enjoy the fig trees. 

The price doesn’t include some £10 million in legal costs over a contract that wasn’t awarded to the lowest bidder.

Irrelevant photo: stormy seas near Bude

Last May, the building needed mechanical and electrical repairs estimated at £143 million. But that’s just a start. A more recent estimate that includes the roof comes in at $235 million. So that’s the same amount as it cost to build, right? 

Possibly. Maybe it’s more, because I’m not sure if the second estimate includes the original £143 million or if it’s in addition. Never let me loose around numbers.

 

Yes, but . . . 

. . . in 2002, the National Audit Office reported that the building had been constructed to a “high standard of architectural design, materials and workmanship,” so you shouldn’t worry about any of this. Such a high standard that in 2018 MPs were already mumbling about lawsuits because of leaks and cracks in the roof. 

Sorry, just found another article: make that 2016. If anything’s happened beyond mumblings and grumblings–you know, anything in the way of actual lawsuits–I can’t found traces of it.

 

But what about the roof?

The atrium roof is the dramatic bit of what’s gone wrong. It’s made of double-glazed panels–basically air sandwiched between two sealed panes of glass. Their goal is to keep the heat in and let the light through, and double-glazed panels aren’t bad at that until they start to leak, which one–or maybe that’s two; it’s all a little murky–did, dumping lots o’ water on the floor many yards below. All across the political spectrum, it was described as a deluge. 

It’s heartening, in our politically divisive climate, that we can still find something to bring political enemies together. 

So far, not much glass has fallen out, but then you don’t need a whole lot of falling glass to make the average person who has to walk underneath it nervous. They’ll be putting up a safety net, just in case.

The problem is that there’s no simple way to get up to the roof. It wasn’t designed with repairs in mind. It was pretty. How much can you expect for £235 million, after all? The only way to inspect it is with a drone and the only way to do maintenance is to send up an abseiling team. Which, predictably, means not a lot of maintenance gets done.

I’m trying to picture a team abseiling with a double-glazed window panel and I can’t do it. They’d end up blown to Buckinghamshire. (It’s a non-metropolitan county, whatever that means.) I suspect any replacement has to involve a crane. And yet more money.   

The roof above the offices is also leaking, and rain’s finding its way into MPs’ offices. On the other hand, the walls and windows are bomb proof. If you want to harm 213 MPs, you’d do better to use a rainstorm than a bomb.

 

Wait–we’ve lost track of Westminster Palace, and it was in the headline

If those 213 MPs weren’t housed in Portcullis House, they would (I think) be in Westminster Palace, where both the House of Lords and the House of Commons meet. It’s positively overloaded with history. It’s also overloaded with leaks, mice, and fire hazards. The pipework is so complicated and interwoven that the pipes can only be patched, not replaced. The heating stays on because the folks in charge aren’t sure they could restart the system if they once turned it off.

And did I mention asbestos? It’s full of asbestos. And electrical plugs that spark and fizz. Toilets leak–at least one of them into an MP’s office–and I have it on good authority that this is worse than rain. A fire patrol is on duty 24 hours a day–and needs to be. Between 2007 and 2017, they had 60 small fires. 

In 2018, a stone angel on the outside of the building dropped a chunk of masonry the size of a football onto the ground. In 2022, an exclusion zone was set up.

So why doesn’t the building get fixed or replaced? It’ll be expensive. And everyone will either have to move out for a while, which some number of traditionalist MPs resist, or the repairs will have to be done while government totters on around it, making the repairs both slower and more expensive. A specially convened committee recommended moving everyone out. So far, the recommendation has been ignored.

Both choices are problematic, so the only sensible alternative is to do nothing, which costs an estimated £2 million a week.

I’ve seen various estimates for how much a full slate of repairs will cost, including £3.6 billion, £13 billion, and between £9.5 billion and £18.5 billion. So what the hell, make up a number. Construction never comes in at the estimated cost anyway. 

If you want links for all those estimates, sorry, I’m bored. Look them up yourself.

A cross-party committee–possibly the same one whose recommendations about moving out while the building’s repaired are being ignored–said there was “a real and rising risk” that “a catastrophic event will destroy the Palace.” Possibly from an angel hurling something worse than a stone football. 

The thing is, schools and hospitals around the country are genuinely falling apart–that’s what I meant about the infrastructure crumbling, and it comes without an exaggeration warning. The buildings most recently in the headlines were constructed on the cheap with a particular kind of concrete that’s now past its use-by date. In the face of that, it’s hard for a government to let itself be caught committing however many billion pounds into for repairs at Westminster. 

But even before the latest crumbling schools and hospitals became public knowledge, no government, no party, no nobody wanted to be associated with the outrageous expense of fixing the building. The rest of the country–schools, the National Health Service, local government, and oh, so much more–are being squeezed by austerity, a political word that means We’re shrinking your budget and don’t much care what sort of problems that creates becasue it’ll look like your fault. So again, a few billion pounds to fix the seat of government isn’t a good look.

Neither is the money that subsidizes food and booze for MPs and Lords at Westminster, but that’s less public, not to mention a slow drip as opposed to a deluge, so they continue. One theory holds that some of the traditionalists don’t want to move out of Westminster Palace for repairs because the subsidies wouldn’t move with them.

So before any serious repairs are undertaken, that angel’s going to have to drop something more dramatic than a stone football. And have excellent aim.

“Party Gate” artwork sweeps the Turnip Prize

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This year’s Turnip Prize winner is Mr. Keep Calm for his artistic creation, “Party Gate.” 

You know about the British scandal called Partygate, right? It was about the government of the day throwing parties inside (and outside) 10 Downing Street during the pandemic while the rest of the country was in lockdown and less well-connected people were being fined (some heavily) for breaking the rules. Not to mention while families were being kept from saying goodbye to dying relatives. It shocked us all that a government led by someone as correct and responsible as Boris Johnson would do such a thing. Not one of us had noticed the first two, three, or fifteen parties they threw. Even the ones that made the front pages.

So that explains the work’s title, but what’s the Turnip Prize? It was created in 1999, after Tracy Emin won the prestigious Turner Prize for a piece of art called “My Bed,” which was–you got it–an unmade bed, presumably hers, although never having slept with her, or wanted to, I can’t vouch for that. 

The Turnip contest rules specify that any work that displays “too much effort” is disqualified.

Mr. Keep Calm’s work qualified. “I was too lazy to take the gate to the recycling tip and decided to enter it into the Turnip Prize,” he said. “It’s a great honour and I can see this as an opening for greater works to come.”

Competition organizer Trevor Prideaux said, “Mr. Keep Calm . . . clearly has what it takes to be recognised in modern art circles and will be remembered in art history for no time at all!”

Irrelevant photo: fields after a frost.

Did a New Zealand MP pledge loyalty to King Charles or a skin rash?

New Zealand hasn’t cut its ties to the British crown, so its MPs have to pledge allegiance to the monarch-of-the-moment, who at the moment (spoiler alert) is named Charles. So some members of the Māori Party pledged allegiance in Māori–not a controversial thing to do; it’s one of the country’s official languages–using harehare, a word for Charles that can also mean a skin rash. Or something unpleasant. 

A skin rash and its related meanings are the more common translations, but either Charles or Charlie is arguably accurate. Te reo Māori–the Māori language–is like that. One word can have so many meanings that I stopped turning to the dictionary. It was leaving me more confused than I was when I started. And if that isn’t difficult enough for someone trying to learn it, the language has multiple variants, so pronunciations and meanings shift depending on where you are and who you’re talking to.     

In the past, the Māori Party has called for New Zealand to divorce itself from the monarchy, but I’m wondering if a skin cream wouldn’t be more appropriate.

 

Countries that don’t exist

I seem to remember Ikea selling a shower curtain that featured a map of the world with New Zealand deleted, possibly because some people are phobic about rashes. But that’s ancient history–it happened at least two years ago and probably more. Who remembers that far back? The updated version of Your Planet, Edited, comes to us courtesy of Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, which was asked whether Australia existed and answered no. It was sure enough of the result to put it in a nice little text box.

And that’s how I learned about a longstanding conspiracy theory that claims Australia’s fake news. 

Are they serious about that? These days, who can tell? 

Once the news of Australia’s non-existence hit social media, an Australian wanted to know, “Does that mean I don’t have to pay my bills?”

Sadly, it doesn’t. Later searches held that Australia does, in fact, exist. And if the person who raised the question hasn’t fallen into the sea, it will be taken as proof of the country’s existence, because some people will seize on anything to prove they’re right.

 

And that gives you real confidence in . . .

. . . Sports Illustrated, which published several articles generated by artificial intelligence on its website, complete made-up names for the writers and AI-generated author photos.

Or else the articles weren’t generated by AI. It depends who you want to believe, since we can all believe whatever the hell we want these days. 

As far as I can figure out, Advon Commerce, “an e-commerce company that works with retailers and publishers,” generated the copy, and it told the owners of Sports Illustrated that “the articles in question were written and edited by humans” but that it lets writers use pseudonyms to protect their privacy. 

You know what writers are like. They can be so shy about getting their names out.

The scales have tipped heavily in the direction of the articles being generated by AI, with the weasel-words (you know: might, appears to, that kind of thing) disappearing from articles about it. The company that owns Sports Illustrated has since fired its CEO, not long after having fired three lower-level execs.

Did any of that have to do with the articles?

“We have nothing further to add to the company’s prior statements regarding AI,” a spokesperson said.

Staff at the magazine, along with the union representing them, pitched a fit when the articles first came out–they would’ve anyway, but the magazine’s owners has been cutting staff recently, which didn’t put them in a forgiving mood–saying the articles violated basic journalistic standards.

As we all know, though, cutting staff and using AI to generate articles aren’t related. I only put them next to each other because I’m a rabble-rouser from way back.

 

Your understated headline of the week . . .

. . . comes from the Guardian, a newspaper I have a huge amount of respect for, but that won’t keep me from making fun of it. It’s pretty good at making fun of itself anyway. A November 6 headline reads, “Sellafield nuclear leak could pose safety risk.”  

Yes, I could see where a nuclear leak might do that. 

Full disclosure: the online headline that I linked to is a little different but still not great. The article goes on to say that Sellafield is Europe’s most hazardous nuclear site, with a crumbling building and cracks in the toxic sludge reservoir. Two days before, an article mentioned that Sellafield had been hacked as early as 2015 by groups linked to Russia and China, but that the news is only coming out now. 

So yes. It could, just potentially, post a safety risk, although I’ll admit the headline won’t win any great-headline prizes. If I get to give out the award, I’ll give it to the (sadly, unknown) paper that ran with “Red tape holds up bridge.”

 

Your heartwarming stories for the week

When California’s wildfires ripped through a stand of redwoods in 2020, it got hot enough to defoliate the trees, which normally resist burning. They don’t get to be 2,000 years old by packing it in every time a wildfire comes along. It looked like the end of the ancient trees, but they’re showing signs of life. Drawing on sugars they stored decades before, they’re pouring energy into buds that had been dormant under the bark for centuries and are now sprouting from the blackened trunks.

That has nothing to do with Britain, but what the hell. It’s a nice story. We could do with a dash of hope.

*

Back in Britain, a three-year-old’s stuffed toy–a monkey called Monkey–was lost when he and his mother were on a train, and (reading between the lines here) he had the predictable meltdown. His mother says he was distraught. I expect she was too by the time she reported the loss in Birmingham, where they changed trains.

The monkey was found in Edinburgh–it had continued on to the end of the line–and was sent to Birmingham the same day. It stayed there overnight and someone found it a little Christmas sweater with the British Rail logo in sparkly yarn, then they sent on to Bristol, where mother and son collected it. It had traveled 619 miles, on three train lines. 

No charge. 

*

In St. Paul, Minnesota, someone returned a library book, Famous Composers, that was more than a hundred years overdue. 

The library no longer charges for overdue books, so no charge there either. Which is just as well, because the person who returned it (predictably enough) wasn’t the person who borrowed it. 

Wards and guardians in medieval England

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As a culture (generalization alert here), we sentimentalize medieval England. At least when we’re not talking about its fleas and flies and plagues and dirt, we do. Still, the sentimentalizing outweighs the fleas-and-flies stuff. We like to think there was a time when nobles were noble, or at least when someone was. Shouldn’t someone be pure of heart in this mess of a world?

Of course they should, and it must’ve happened a long time ago, because we don’t have a lot of purity on show right now. Therefore–this is so obvious I hardly need to say it–it must’ve happened in the middle ages. After all, they did leave us some beautiful pictures, and some yarns we can swallow whole if we work at it. 

But medieval England was nothing if not upfront about making a profit, including from that thing we sentimentalize most, childhood. 

Okay, if childhood isn’t what we sentimentalize most, it comes right after kittens and puppies.

Irrelevant photo: Not some knight’s horse but a pony living wild on Dartmoor.

Wardship

Let’s say you’re the heir to one of medieval England’s aristocrats but, oops, your father dies while you’re still a minor–less than 21 if you’re male, less than 16 if you’re female. You’re going to become somebody’s ward and they’re going to be your guardian.

Why am I talking about only your father? Because your mother gets shoved off the chess board as soon as your father dies. 

I should squeeze an extra fact in here: If you’re male, you get to be the one and only heir, but if you’re female and no male is in line ahead of you, you and any sisters you happen to find will divide the inheritance among you. 

Why? 

‘Cause that’s how it works. 

We have most of the pieces in place now. There you are, heir to a big chunk of land–and land is wealth in medieval England–but too young to control it. You might think your mother could be your guardian but no, sorry, your mother’s good enough to take care of whatever children won’t inherit the land, but not of you, kiddo. That right–and we’ll come to why it’s a right more than a responsibility–goes to your late father’s feudal lord. Who’s likely to have their own best interests at heart, not yours. Having a ward is lucrative and wardships are bought and sold like any commodity. If it’s to their advantage, your guardian may hold onto your wardship. If it’s not, or if they need the money, they’re likely to sell it. 

Hold on, though. We shouldn’t talk about wardship as if it’s a single thing. It can be split up, with one person guardianing you, the actual child, and another guardianing–and, entirely legally, profiting from–the land you’ll inherit. And this is right and proper and necessary because as a child you can’t provide military service, and military service is the most important thing feudal lords owe as payment for their land. Whenever the king WhatsApps them, they’re expected to fight, and to bring some set number of armed men with them. 

And since too young to be trusted with a smartphone, the adult controlling your land will take responsibility for all that warrior stuff. And, again, since all the gear soldiers need–horses, weapons, armor, food, alcohol–doesn’t come cheap, profiting from your future estate makes sense, right? 

Well, it does if you can immerse your mind in the assumptions of a feudal world. 

So that’s the land. If the elements of your wardship are divided, though, somebody else will get to decide who raises you. They’ll have the right to arrange your marriage, and since marriage is about connections and land and power, and since you’re a rich heir, the right to arrange your marriage is a game piece worth having. Your guardian might marry you and your riches into their own family. They might marry you into a family they want to build an alliance with. They might sell your marriage.

If all this sounds cold, we haven’t even started. Your custody may not get settled permanently. Your child-self can be taken from one home by armed men and deposited in another. That’s called ravishment. You can then be deposited in some third household because the person who’s taken you isn’t interested in your charming company but in having control of you. You could then be ravished back to the first household, or to a third. 

“No provision for feudal heirs was final,” according to Sue Sheridan Walker, in “Widow and Ward: The Feudal Law of Child Custody in Medieval England.”

All the people involved can also go to court, and often do. What little is known about how this worked (and the tales are hair-raising) comes from court records–which, frustratingly, often end halfway through the story, so we never get to find out what happened. What we can pretty well guess is that they don’t end, “And they all lived happily ever after.” Happiness doesn’t seem to have been an expectation, although to be fair when you can only trace a bit of history only through court records you inherit a built-in bias toward the ugliest stories. When it all works smoothly, no one goes to court.

 

Let’s go back to the mother, though

Mothers get to raise their younger children–who cares about them?–although if the heir dies, the next in line will have to replace him. And an aristocrat’s widow will have the income from her dower lands to support what’s left of her family.

Her what?

Dower lands are generally a third of her husband’s estate, and a widow has a lifetime right to them. When she dies, they revert to the estate–presumably to her son. Since we’re talking about a group of people with a high death rate, both through illness and warfare, a woman might be widowed multiple times, acquiring dower lands as she goes and becoming quite wealthy. So even though she might not have the right to act as her own child’s guardian, as a feudal landlord she might become the guardian of some tenant’s heir, and she might either act as guardian herself or sell the wardship.

When a child’s orphaned, the question people ask isn’t, Who’s the best person to raise this child? It’s, What rules govern the land the child will inherit?  

 

Yes, but…

As an heir, you just might live with your mother if your guardian approves or if your mother buys your wardship, but we can’t assume she’ll think her home is the best place for you. Aristocratic childhoods are short. Children–orphaned or not–are commonly sent to other households at 6 or 7, generally a household that’s a step up the feudal food chain, where they’ll make important connections and get an education. Let’s not go down the rabbit hole of who’s literate and who isn’t. The answer will depend on what part of the medieval period we’re talking about anyway. But whatever book learning he acquires, the most important things an aristocratic boy can learn are warfare and what it takes to be an adult in this stratified society–or as one article put it, he needs to “learn breeding.” So even if you stay with your mother, you can’t expect to stay with her for long, and the household you grow up in might turn out to be your in-laws’. Marriages are arranged early and it isn’t uncommon for a very (very) young betrothed couple to grow up together.

Which leads us to ask why, if she’s going to send you away anyhow, your mother might want to buy your wardship, and one possible answer is, for profit: a child can be sold into marriage. Or she might want to marry you off to fulfill an arrangement the family made before your father’s death, which would strengthen or confirm an alliance. 

She might also want to control whose home you’re raised in. Marriage and fostering were highly charged political moves.

If she’s one of those mothers who ravish their children–that’s stealing them from their guardians, remember–she might not be doing it because she misses your charming companionship and the crayon artwork you left on the castle walls. A marriage made against your legal guardian’s wishes will still be valid.

And as Walker points out, medieval mothers aren’t necessarily involved deeply with their children. As infants, the kids are in the care of wet nurses. They’re sent away while they’re still young. Books on deportment are singularly silent on what a mother’s duties to a child are. 

 

And finally, there’s another form of guardianship

Medieval England has another way an aristocrat might hold land, though: socage. It doesn’t have the prestige of holding land that you pay for in military service. In fact, it moves us closer to the peasant level. You pay for your land either agricultural service (this isn’t for the aristocracy) or in money. But even though there’s less cachet in holding land this way, you can hold one bit of land in socage and another bit by knight-service, so your socage parcel doesn’t move you down the food chain. 

Don’t look for a simple picture.  

If you’re the heir to land held under socage tenure, then guardianship goes not to the feudal lord but to your nearest male relative who isn’t entitled to inherit the land. If you’re female, you can contract a marriage without the lord sticking his long feudal nose into the arrangement. (Yes, the source I’m stealing this from said you could contract a marriage by your very own self. You don’t have to depend on someone else doing it for you.) If you’re male, you may find that being the oldest male doesn’t entitle you to inherit the whole parcel of land; it may be divided. It’ll depend on all sorts of complexity that’s above my pay grade. As far as the topic of wardship goes, though, it sounds like you’re less of a pawn than if you’d inherited high-prestige land.

After 1660, knight-service tenure was wiped out and it all became socage.   

Parliament, the British crown, and the tug-of-war over money

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It wouldn’t be irrational to track English, and then British, history by following the financial wrestling match between the monarch of the moment and the parliament of the moment. 

We won’t do that any kind of justice here, we’ll just ice skate over the top, mostly following the mechanism through which the monarchy’s funded. 

 

The Sovereign Grant

As of 2012, Britain’s ruling king, queen, or what have you–along with what are called the minor royals and what Winnie the Pooh would call all Rabbit’s friends and relations–are funded by the Sovereign Grant. This rolls together three earlier grants and presumably makes everything simpler. For all I know, it may actually do that, although I can’t help remembering that every time the US made income taxes simpler, the forms got harder to fill out. 

Never mind. Different country, so let’s go backward, to the Civil List.

Irrelevant photo: rose hips

The Civil List

The Civil List dates back to 1689 (or 1698, but let’s not quibble; if one of those is a typo, it’s not mine) and to the joint monarchy of William and Mary. Parliament voted them £600,000 to cover civil and royal expenses. 

What’s the difference civil expenses and royal ones? No idea. I’m just parroting what the Britannica says but it covers all those minor royals, staff, palace upkeep, and–I don’t know, maybe polishing the jewelry and the sivlerare.

Before the Civil List, the monarchy relied on its own income (it owned stuff–lots of income-generating stuff and still does) and whatever taxes Parliament approved for its use. When that wasn’t enough (it never was for long, especially when a special occasion came up and someone wanted to throw a war), the monarch had to go back to Parliament and say, “Please, sir, I want some more.”

Parliament could, and sometimes did, keep a monarch underfunded so–

Well, for this to make sense you have to understand that the king or queen could send Parliament to bed without supper, or more to the point, send them home, where they had no power to recall themselves; they had to wait for the monarch to call them back into session. And since Parliament could be a pain in the royal backside, a king or queen might not call them back for a long stretch of time.

Unless they needed money, so we’ve come full circle: it suited Parliament to keep the crown underfunded.

After William and Mary took their her-and-his thrones, power shifted decisively to Parliament. The monarch was now bound to summon Parliament regularly. That was the cost they paid for becoming the kingsy and the queensy, but even so, as one MP said, “when princes have not needed money, they have not needed us.”

So, yeah, keep that monarch short of money and Parliament had a job for life.  

In 1690, Parliament set up the Commission of Public Accounts, which tracked the crown’s spending. It could then earmark money for certain expenses but not for others. So we’re watching Parliament’s control increase.

That says the Civil List didn’t exactly give the crown the keys to the candy store, but it did give them a lot of candy. What did they do with it? The Georges (I, II, and III) were known for using it to buy friends. Here was a sum of money the crown had under its control. 

George III gets a particular mention here for handing some money to supporters in Parliament in the form of secret pensions and assorted other bribes. Parliament struck back in 1762 by supervising the account and in 1780 by banning secret pensions. 

The fun was over. Victoria was allowed to grant pensions to people in the arts and sciences, or who’d served the crown one way or another but only on the advice of her ministers.

How much does a free portrait of the king cost?

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Britain’s government, in its wisdom, has set aside £8 million so that schools, police stations, courts, and any organization run by the state can request a portrait of King Charles. In full regalia, as a government website reminds us, making him sound like an action figure–the kind you’ll find on the shelves of your local toy store–and I won’t post the link for that because this is the first paragraph and posting links in the first paragraph is against my religion.

But this is not only a portrait of the king in full regalia that’s on offer, it’s a free portrait of et cetera. True, you don’t get any extras with it–no surprise gift, no fries, no pickle–but still, free is free. Especially if we don’t count that £8 the government will fork out for however many it sends or the £86.3 million the country pays to support the monarchy itself. 

Irrelevant photo: I think this is a kind of thistle. Anyway a wildflower. Definitely not a king.

The portraits will be particularly welcome in police stations and courts. There’s nothing like getting arrested to make a person grateful for a glimpse of the overdressed face of authority.

 

Hang on. How much does the monarchy really cost?

That £86 point whatever million is only the Sovereign Grant, formerly known as the Civil List–money that funds the monarch’s official duties, which include cutting ribbons, pulling cords that dramatically sweep back itty-bitty miniature curtains to unveil plaques. (Cue applause from thrilled spectators.) Ah, but that’s not all. The royal family’s duties also include dressing in improbable clothing for ceremonies, waving, smiling (not as easy as you think), and entertaining a carefully selected group of interlopers on the grounds of Buckingham Palace. 

The Sovereign Grant also has to cover property maintenance, travel, payroll, and whatever I’ve forgotten.

But that’s not the royal family’s only income. We haven’t counted the money it gets from Cornwall and Lancaster, which are duchies held personally by the prince of Wales (Cornwall; £21 million a year) and the king (Lancaster; £24 million). We also haven’t counted whatever else is included because that info’s private.  

Even without that, I may still be underestimating their cost to the country, because we should add security–possibly only security for special events like the queen’s funeral, but hey, this all gets murky pretty quickly–and I have no idea what else. Republic, an organization trying to establish (you saw this coming, right?) a republic, estimates the total annual spend at £ 345 million.  

So £8 million for a free portrait? Don’t be stingy. It’s a bargain.

 

By way of comparison

In 2012, the Department for Education was prepared to spend £370,000 to send a leather-bound copy of the King James Bible to every school in the country. The government was supposed to cough up the money, but all hell broke loose and the program ended up being funded by–well, the list I glanced through featured a lot of hedge-fund gazillionaires and donors to the parties that were then in power, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.

That didn’t shut up anyone who thought the thing was a waste of money (most schools already had a bible, they said, so what was the point?), but it did let me compare the number of pages in the King James Bible (many) with the number of pages in the king’s portrait (one) and wonder what they’re printing these portraits on. I mean, yes, photographic paper’s expensive, and yes, the King James Bible Project only sent out 24,000 Bibles compared to no-one’s-saying-how-many portraits, but still, on a page-to-page and order-to-order comparison, it does sound pricey.

 

And since we’re talking about that Bible project

The then-education secretary, Michael Gove, was asked if he’d back a similar plan to send around copies of the Quran. 

Um, yeah, sure, he mumbled. The Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Talmud. What the hell. Name a holy book and he was all for it–and all the more so because you can’t say Quran in a positive context unless you buffer if with several other holy books

Oddly enough, that was the last we heard of those follow-up projects.

*

Discussing the bible project with Lord Google raised some interesting issues. People, he reminded me, often ask whether the British crown owns rights to the bible.

Sure, I thought. And it’s got a monopoly on god. 

It turns out the question isn’t as silly as I thought. The King James version is covered by crown copyright, which applies to work made by civil servants, government ministers, and other people you can stuff into related categories. To quote WikiWhatsit, “There is . . . a small class of materials where the Crown claims the right to control reproduction outside normal copyright law due to letters patent issued under the royal prerogative. This material includes the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.”

I don’t usually quote Wikipedia. On an average, it’s as accurate as standard encyclopedias (or was when I was working for a standard encyclopedia and looked it up), but it’s also subject to brief fits of madness, and it changes, making it an awkward beast to cite. But it’s late in the week, I post on Fridays, and I’m short of time. It’ll do.

According to a copyright advice website, “To split hairs a bit, the King James Bible is not subject to copyright in the UK, however because of Letters Patent issued by the Crown, only the Queen’s Printer may print, publish and distribute the KJV Bible within the UK and its Overseas Territories.” 

A grammar advice website (mine will do in a pinch) would tell you to replace the comma before “however” with either a semicolon or a period. You’re welcome. 

But to return to the copyright issue, if you planned to print the King James Bible in the back bedroom and you live in the UK, you’re advised to find a new hobby. If you have other plans for the weekend, this won’t affect you.

Musical chairs, artificial intelligence, and British politics

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The people allegedly leading Britain played musical chairs this week. Suella Braverman, who’d been the head of the Home Office, was the one most noticeably left sitting on the floor when her chair was yanked away. So she goes from Home to home, or at least to Parliament’s humiliating back benches, where she’ll do everything she can to make herself the focal point of the party’s combative right wing. 

Her de-chairification surprises no one. She was a horror show, although that doesn’t disqualify anyone these days. More to the point is that she was too blatent about not following orders. 

I don’t like admitting this, but I find it hard to make fun of her. She drains the humor right out of me, so forgive a lapse or three here.

One of the least horrid things she’s done, and that’s because it didn’t involve any actual consequences, was say that people lived on the street as a lifestyle choice. She’s also tried to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda (the Supreme Court just ruled that illegal) and dog-whistled up a right-wing mob that fought the police and tried to attack London’s ceasefire demonstration.

Irrlevant photo: Grapes, growing above the tables at an outdoor cafe this past summer.

 

Since her chair was pulled out from under her, she smashed it up on her way out (metaphor alert there), sending a letter of resignation that accused the prime minister du jour, Rishi Sunak, of failure, betrayal, magical thinking, and bad breath.  She claims that she made a secret agreement with Sunak when she accepted the post of Home Secretary, which he betrayed.

Would she release the text of it, a reporter asked? 

Um, not today. 

In the meantime, as long as he was moving the furniture, Mr. du Jour moved everyone else around too. The foreign secretary became the home secretary, which is his seventh ministerial position since 2019.  He is, of course, an expert in whatever the hell he was in charge of in all of them. The health secretary became the environment secretary. The chief secretary to the Treasury became the paymaster general.

Hands up anyone who knew the country had a paymaster general.

Me neither.

And to solve a problem I didn’t know we had, he appointed Esther McVey to be a minister without portfolio in charge of the government’s anti-woke agenda. We’ll all be notified that we need to turn in our alarm clocks any day now. 

Okay, she’s also in charge of common sense. I did know we had problems around that.

To replace the foreign minister, Mr. du Jour grabbed someone who’s been sitting home contemplating the obesity of the universe* and made him the new foreign secretary.

Who are we talking about? Why, David Cameron, one of our many former prime ministers. We’re rich in former prime ministers these days. Since Britain’s deindustrialization, producing them is one of our top industries and if you’d like to order a few dozen let me know and I’ll send you a link.

Cameron, what with being the foreign secretary of the moment, isn’t available for export just yet, but let me talk him up anyway. He’s the guy who thought having a referendum on Brexit would mean his party would stop arguing about it, the country would settle down, and we’d stay in the European Union and live happily ever after. So yeah, he’s a bright guy with infallible political instincts.

After he retreated from politics, he got caught with his fingers not quite in the till but close enough that an inquiry scolded him for a “significant lack of judgment” after he lobbied government officials on behalf of a bank he had an interest in, which collapsed not long after. But who cares about that? We’re all so punchy, it looks like the act of an elder statesman. Mr. du Jour’s hoping Cameron comes with a stash of stability and authority that he’ll share with his several-times-removed replacement, and maybe even pass around the table at cabinet meetings. 

As for Mr. du Jour himself, no one yanked his chair away but someone did replace his political persona. Some five weeks ago at the Conservative Party conference, he presented himself as the candidate of change. He wasn’t running yet, but so what? It’s never too early to stake out your position. It makes you look strong. And stable. And several other adjectives. He would be the candidate of change, overturning three decades of political consensus.

Why did he want to overturn thirty years of political consensus? Is political consensus necessarily bad? Who cares? It’s something to run against, and it costs nothing. Or–well, yeah, it costs a lot when the country falls apart, but it doesn’t appear as a line item in the budget so you can always blame someone else for the results. 

Whatever. His party has been in power for thirteen years, making it hard to be the candidate of change, so whatever he came up with was likely to be extreme.

But now Mr. du Jour is positioning himself as the candidate of stability. He’s moving to the center of his party. Which isn’t that close to center, mind you. Cameron’s the guy who introduced austerity, driving a fair swath of the country into poverty and leaving the infrastructure creaking and groaning, but hey, it’s all just politics, right? Don’t take it personally.

Are these people real? 

Possibly not. It turns out that artificial intelligence can now generate pictures that look more real than pictures of real people. Admittedly, it has to stick to the faces of whites to do it. It’s absorbed the structural racism of the society in which it functions. 

As an aside, if Suella Braverman heard me say that, she’d accuse me of being a member of the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati, and she’d be one-third right. I’m not a big fan of tofu and can’t stay up much past nine these days, but the Guardian’s a good paper.  

But back to artificial intelligence. I’m reasonably sure that these people aren’t real–especially Sunak, who’s had more political persona transplants than any flesh-and-blood human could survive.

I mentioned that AI isn’t as convincing at generating non-white faces, though, and Britain’s current government has a significant number of brown-skinned cabinet members, who are doing fuck-all to make the country a more equal place, except possibly for the people at the very top. Or at least for themselves. So they may look slightly less real than the white cabinet members, and–following the logic that says the most real looking people are the ones who aren’t real–you might therefore mistake them for real people. They’re not. They’re a double bluff using AI’s limitations to scam us all. 

We’re being governed by avatars who’ve broken loose from some apocalyptic computer game. Or the next season of Dr. Who.

 

And from the Department of Political Overreach . . .

. . . comes this story: 

The principal of a Texas school introduced a policy that said students could only play theatrical roles that aligned with their sex at birth. His goal was to cut a trans boy out of a starring role in a production of Oklahoma. High school drama departments being what they are though–there are never enough boys–that meant other students couldn’t play the roles they’d landed. 

All hell broke loose and the school said, okay, fine, you perverts can play any role you want but we’re cutting the play so it’s more age appropriate–incidentally cutting the trans kid’s solo. 

What’s age inappropriate in Oklahoma? It was first performed in 1943, when sex hadn’t even been invented yet.

More hell broke loose and the school board reversed the principal’s decision.

We’ll give the last word to the trans kid, Max Hightower: “To know there is a big group out of people who want to help me and help everyone affected, it feels like we’re on even sides now and can actually win this fight.”  

*

And this: The Florida legislature is considering a bill that would ban any discussion of girls’ menstrual cycles in the schools before the sixth grade. Any discussion. So if some kid is bold enough to bring it up, presumably everyone has to run out of the room. Forget the enforced calm of a fire drill. Run, kids, before the sound wave catches you. It’ll destroy your innocence and you’ll never get it back.

How old are kids in the sixth grade? Eleven to twelve. Some kids get their periods at eight. 

*

Not to be outdone, a priest in a Czech village smashed the pumpkins that kids had carved and set out near his church. Twice, since when the original ones were replaced he did it a second time. 

In a letter of apology, he wrote, “Leaving the rectory on Sunday evening, I saw numerous symbols of the satanic feast of ‘Halloween’ placed in front of our sacred grounds. I acted according to my faith and duty to be a father and protector of the children entrusted to me and removed these symbols,” 

He wouldn’t have done that if he’d known they’d been carved by kids, he said,

“But try to remember that my duty as a figure of authority and a priest is to protect children and families from hidden evil.”

Now there’s a guy who knows how to apologize.

 

And finally the Department of Political Irrelevance reports . . . 

. . . that deodorant sales are up 15% since workers have (reluctantly, for the most part) returned to the office after working remotely.

—————-

  • Contemplating the obesity of the universe: I’m indebted for this phrase to a guy who taught philosophy, and to a student of his who wrote in a paper, “When we consider the obesity of the unvierse, we know there must be a god.”