The death of General Franco

 Today, 20 November 2025, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the Spanish dictator, General Francisco Franco.

As a young woman, my mother had worked for a time for an organisation evacuating Basque refugee children from Spain to Scotland, and because of her experience of seeing the trauma of these children she always held the view that there was a special place in hell reserved for Franco.

However, that's not the point of this post.

When Franco died I was at uni and living in a share house about a hundred metres from the rather grander nineteenth century building that housed the Centre for Latin American and Hispanic studies.

 About an hour or so after the newsflash on tv, we were startled to hear someone playing the Republican "A las barricadas" very loudly and Hispanic centre was ablaze with light.

Out of curiosity we walked past and we could see all these elderly and respectable professors and their partners in the hallway embracing each other and clutching bottles of wine.

I didn't join the dots at the time, but of course some of these men and women may have lived through the civil war in Spain and others were the children of exiles who had fled to Latin America and elsewhere...

Almost the end of November ...

 Frightening to say but it's almost the end of November.

The weather is seesawing about, one day cold and wet, the next overcast, then pleasantly warm, then raining again - typical November weather.

The potatoes are up, the beans are podding and the first strawberries are ripening.

I'd been threatening all spring to get my seriously big extending ladder out and earlier this week I actually did.

I propped it up against the house and scrambled up it like a stiff old ape and cleaned the gutters which sorely needed doing due to the build up of elm keys from the street trees - I didn't clean the gutters last year, which was a mistake, and we actually had seedlings growing in the gutter above the front door. Picturesque, but not what you want.

I still have bit more gardening to do, clearing weeds from the path down the side of the house - we never use it so it gets neglected and clearing the weeds from the street side of the fence, and then we should have finally caught up with all the jobs I left undone last year while I was trying to get the documentation of Lake View House finished after the delays due to mould and damp.

With only the Athenaeum, this year is not nearly so hectic, especially as the thing about the guerrilla cataloguing exercise is that there's no timeline, or reporting deadlines.

The guerilla cataloguing exercise continues to throw up surprises with the latest a near illegible 1860s label from Mullens circulating library in Melbourne, in their time as least as significant as Mudie's in England.

At the same time I've been trying to run down some more information about hygenic libraries and precautions to stop the spread of infectious diseases via library books.

I remembered that as a child, the Stirling Burgh library as was had rather a stern sticker inside their books warning that in the event of an infectious disease occurring, the book had to be returned to the Sanitary Officer for disinfection. (Remember that in the early sixties when I was a small child and starting to use the library, vaccinating children against polio had only been routine for five or six years, there was no MMR against measles, and smallpox and tuberculosis were still considered serious threats.)

Stirling Burgh Libraries are long gone, but out of curiosity I emailed their successor organisation and asked them if they still had examples of the label and a record of what the disinfection procedures consisted of.

This obviously piqued their interest, because, not only did they go to the trouble to find a copy of the infectious disease label on a book in their stacks, they promised to have a look and see if they had any records of the disinfection procedures used.

Strangely, Facebook is actually proving very useful with links to various local historical societies, many of whom  to have a static webpage which is never updated but do have an active Facebook page,

I've been deliberately not contacting any of my previous Facebook contacts from the time before I dumped Facebook, along with almost all other social media - I reckon that we will all have moved on and perhaps have less in common than we once did - I reckon that an important part of maintaining contacts is letting go as life changes, but I'm happy to accept friend requests.

I've also joined pixelfed - I found I needed a way of sharing images (old library book labels mainly) by url and pixelfed lets me do this and also means I don't need to rejoin instagram.

As far as playing with hardware, I actually bought myself a second refurbished Acer Travelmate to replace/supplement my old Windows 10 Lenovo Thinkpad.

It came from the refurbisher with an eccentric setup with a completely open local user pre-installed. However my experience rebuilding the other Travelmate came in handy and I managed to rebuild it with my Microsoft account in under three hours, which I reckoned was pretty good going, considering how long it took me last time ...

A chilly start to the week

It was cold this morning, 3, possibly 4C, but nothing ventured I was off on my bike half an hour or so after dawn for my 10km circuit.

Brilliant sunshine, but too too early for there any heat in it, and it made for an enjoyable little ride, even if I did have to stand under a hot shower for longer than usual afterwards to thaw out.

This year I'm not growing any tomatoes or zucchini (possums), and probably, given the temperature this morning that's a good thing, it certainly would have been cold enough to knock off any tomato seedlings.

On the positive side, not only are our potatoes up, our broad beans are beginning to pod nicely. I'm also trying one of these potato grow sacks this year, where every time the seedlings pop their heads up you add an extra few centimetres of compost, the idea being that you can grow a continual crop of new potatoes for a month or so.

If it works we'll have home grown new potatoes for a potato salad at christmas.

Otherwise I've been pressing on with the cataloguing exercise up at the Athenaeum. 

I'm finding that my experience of cataloguing artefacts for the National Trust is paying dividends in helping me look at the books not just simply as books, but as artefacts.

So, both the Mudies Circulating Library sticker and the Treloar's Hygenic library sticker, tell us things about the times they represent - the Mudies sticker shows how the book trade was beginning to globalise, just as a Hayman's Balsam bottle shows the beginnings of a globalised patent medicine industry.

The Treloar's sticker tells us something else - that after the 1919 flu pandemic people were not only more aware of the risks of transmission, and that some people, at least, were worried enough to ensure that items they borrowed did not constitute a risk, especially as there had been a major outbreak of polio in the late 1920s in Melbourne.

The weather in the past week has been cold and at times very wet, so I havn't got as much done in the garden as I'd hoped, but I did spend an afternoon playing with windows user configuration, something that was tedious in the least ...

The recycled workbench in use

 

Back at the start of winter, I put together a recycled workbench in the outside studio.

It's been incredibly valuable, allowing me a place to set up light boxes, photograph artefacts and do a bit of documentation - the only real problem is the transparent tempered glass top - its transparency makes it a bit difficult to photograph items on the bench top - not a problem when I'm using a light box, but a bit of a problem when dealing with larger items, not to mention that mice don't work that well on it and you need to use mousepads.

I actually had to buy a couple of mousepads, I'd finally come to the end of the little stockpile I'd acquired as freebies from various vendors over the years.

However, there's a solution.

I've discovered you can buy what some vendors call 'deskpads', basically  a giant (800x400mm), mousepad, to provide a work area on glass desks.

They are only around twenty bucks, so I've ordered one, which should solve both the problem of photographing larger items and the inevitable proliferation of mice and mousepads...

Rain and windows users

 Yesterday started off better than expected.

Rain had been forecast from around breakfast time, so I was up just after sunrise for a cool early morning bike ride before the weather came in.

I managed my usual ten or so kilometre circuit in around 35 minutes which was about what it was taking me last year, so there's some hope there as regards building fitness levels.

And the rain held off until mid morning allowing me to get a few things done outside, earthing up my potatoes. checking my broad beans, little things like that.

And then the day kind of went downhill.

A couple of weeks ago I'd bought J a refurbished Acer Spin as a lighter weight, less bulky alternative to her 15" HP laptop.

It cost me less than two hundred bucks, but while I was setting it up for her I thought that it, or something similar, would make a decent alternative to my Windows 10 based Thinkpad that I used to document both Dow's and Chiltern, not to mention my using it up at the Athenaeum - after all most of the resources are online and most of the work is done via a browser, so it's not as if I needed anything particularly meaty.

Well, after two weeks with the Spin, J came to the conclusion that it wasn't viable as an alternative to taking her big laptop to the art classes and workshops she runs - the weight wasn't that different, and she wasn't that keen on the spacing of the keys, preferring a wider spaced chiclet style keyboard than the Acer's.

Ok, no great loss, it hadn't cost us that much money, and anyway I could see a use for it, so I decided to change the default user account, as you would do if you were giving the computer to some one else.

On Linux, it's easy, just a brute force wipe and reinstall - with most distros it takes about forty minutes. Yes, you can be a bit more sophisticated, but the brute force approach works well. On a Macs it's easy and relatively straightforward - just follow the bouncing ball and you'll be right, no technical knowledge required.

Windows, well it's windows.

It looks straight forward but it isn't.

Basically what you do is a system reset that wipes the computer and does a vanilla reinstall. Being windows it gives you a choice - use the local recovery partition or download a fresh copy from Microsoft.

Some advice on the web says use the local copy, it's usually faster, others do a fresh download.

So I tossed a coin and went local. It sat for about fifty minutes saying something  like ' preparing files 1%' and then suddenly burst into life, rebooted, started installing windows, bombed out, and restored itself back to the original state with a singularly unhelpful error message.

So I tried again, doing a cloud based reinstall this time.

Despite the fact we have a pretty zippy connection these days, it took a couple of hours. Some of it might have been due to latency on the part of Microsoft's download servers, but most of this seems to be due to Microsoft's reset and reinstall process taking for ever - the messages detailing progress (or not) were as unhelpful as ever, so at one point I actually ran up task manager to see if it had hung, but no, it was rattling away.

Anyway. it eventually rebooted, and then did a reinstall, which again seemed to take forever - I am not by nature a patient person, and this was by now severely trying what little what little patience I do have - but eventually I got a fresh copy of Windows 11 and went through the normal set up dialogue.

Including my false start with a local reinstall it took over four hours to get a working machine.

It didn't help that the messages regarding progress were utterly unhelpful and gnomic - it almost made me long for the verbosity of the old style debian install script.

My advice is that, if you plan on doing this, be prepared to lose most of a day doing it, and if you have the bandwidth go for a cloud based reset - it will download about 4GB of data, and the actual reset process is so slow I don't think the speed of your connection matters overmuch, a standard 50MB/s link should be good enough.

It is however genuinely unattended, meaning that providing you can resist the temptation to take a peek, it could be left going overnight, leaving the actual windows setup to the following morning...

Facebook, cataloguing and dos commands

 After a period of procrastination up at the Athenaeum, I've had a burst of activity. 

Today I finally got started on cataloguing the heritage book collection - I can see that this is going to be a long slow exercise, but one that's definitely going to bring benefits as regards our understanding of the collection.

Mind you not all the procrastination was really procrastination, I would have started on the heritage book collection last week, if it were not for us needing to invent a process for accessioning removable media, not to mention a standard way of describing and recording the contents of the removable media we were accessioning. 

Tedious, uninteresting, but necessary, and hopefully developing these procedures will stand is in good stead when someone next drops a USB stick or a CD on us.

And I've decided to bite the bullet and rejoin Facebook.

I'm not a fan, but given that so many local history groups use Facebook there's really no way of opting out...

More Rosella news

 

Well, the pair of rosellas spent a bit of time working on the hole in one of the elms outside of our house, but now seem to have abandoned it.

Possibly too much disturbance from people walking along the footpath, dogs, not too mention possums and the postie on his moped - still a petrol one, no electric delivery bikes yet.

A bit sad, I was looking forward to seeing the chicks emerge, but we still have our bower bird chirping away and stealing anything blue he can lay his beak on…