Well hello…
… thank you for stopping by. We meet so few people these days don’t we?
I woke up this morning to a beautiful sunrise and the words ‘It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day’ came to mind. So here I am. Building a website and writing a blog.
I'm not sure what it will be for yet. I can't bring you news of the classes I'm teaching or upcoming events because, of course, there aren't any. This strange year has left me feeling rather adrift, though not always in a bad way. I have found myself making more time for walking and reading. Truthfully, I have spent a great deal of the summer living in the seventeenth century with 'A Guide to Restoration Britain' 'The Anatomy of Melancholy' and, inevitably, 'A Journal of the Plague Year'.
So, after several months of dark stories and introspection, you might be surprised to learn that I am currently making a journey around Britain. It's not a real world journey though. Wandering around the country in the 2020s has so far proved somewhat problematic. I am back with Daniel Defoe and we are travelling in the 1720s.
I’m not sure how we’ll get on. I am interested in history but Daniel is more interested in commerce. Luckily, his commerce is my history. So we might be okay. Want to come along? We are heading east from London, past the huge whale bones on the southern edge of Henault forest. Look at them, they are the ribs of a twenty-eight foot long whale pulled from the Thames the year Oliver Cromwell died. Down by the river, we can see the Dagenham breach where 5,000 acres of land were underwater for nearly ten years. Further downstream we pass the fort at Tilbury and continue along the mouth of the Thames then follow the coast up through Suffolk. It seems so be a great place for oysters but personally, I am hurrying through the ‘unhealthy marshes’ around Malden, as Daniel tells me they are particularly unhealthy for women. It’s not uncommon to find men who have buried more than a dozen wives. He’s not specific about the cause, but I’m going to guess malaria.
From there, we travel north through Harwich and Ipswich where Daniel wants to tell you all about the docks, but I will press on towards Woodbridge. There is wonderful Anglo Saxon treasure buried here, but he doesn’t know that. For him it is a marvellous butter market. But most interesting to me, he says it is the home of England’s worst cheese.
I thought it was a personal opinion, but further research tells me everyone hated it. It’s name is ‘Suffolk Bang’ and people hated it so much they made up poems and songs about it. I understand it was cheap, salty and very, very hard. But it kept well and was given mainly to servants and Navy men. Eventually though, it turned out that even men stuck onboard a ship with a limited food supply would just rather not. So it is no longer with us.
I will leave you for now in Woodbridge. Thanks for reading (I hope you weren’t too bored). It’s getting late and I’m off to make myself a cheese sandwich. Maybe I’ll take a stroll South-West, towards Sutton Hoo. Find a ploughed field. Have a look around. I might get lucky?
