Christmas 2025

 Christmas this year was unseasonably cold. 

The temperature might have struggled to the low twenties but with a chilly wind from the south it didn't feel like it.

We were aiming for a relaxed Christmas, just us, no friends or family, or any parties - not quite true, the Athenaeum had lunch in the pub on a stinking hot day the previous Friday, and the theatre people had a windy barbecue a few days earlier, but basically it was just us and the cats.

As always, we cooked our dinner the day before, in the hope of being able to have a leisurely outdoor Christmas dinner on the deck.

But it was not to be.

On Christmas eve we rugged up and sat out with a drink to listen to the Christmas bells from the Anglican church - while neither of us are in the least religious we both enjoy the trappings and theatricality of a traditional Christmas - before retreating inside for our traditional Christmas eve prawns and potato salad.

Christmas day was even colder and again we sat inside, read, listed to jazz, ate more than we should and ended up watching something silly on iView - basically a pretty good, if uneventful Christmas.

Now I'd been silly enough to take advantage of the $500 discount and buy J a Surface Pro for Christmas - basically she needed a tablet like windows device for writing, and with the discount it seemed sensible to go for the base model Pro than an older refurbished device.

So, after watching the start of the Sydney Hobart race on Channel 9 - the only time of the year I ever watch Nine, I went to set it up for her, thinking it would only take twenty minutes, and leave me the afternoon to do something productive.

More fool me. My previous fun with changing windows configurations should have warned me that nothing with Microsoft is ever simple.

It started off well, zipping through the setup screens until it got to a point where the installation script decided to check for updates and download them. Which it did, at the speed of a snail on the aged pension. Given that we have a 500MBit fibre optic connection these days a complete download of windows would only take a few minutes rather than tediously going through each module, checking signatures and deciding which components to download and update.

It then proceeded to install the updates, which involved an hour's worth of gnomic electronic farting about, got to ninety eight percent, where the update failed, the machine restarted several times and then came right - basically about two hours to do what an iPad or decent Android tablet would do in quarter of the time.

Anyway, after numerous invocations of the deity the machine works and I have to say it's a very nice device, just a pity about the appalling installation and update routine...

A busy week

 This week feels as if it's been busy, but equally highly productive - not only did we manage to get hold of a table for the hall after spending quite a bit of time looking for something at the right price and condition but at the same time I had a very productive email discussion with Weymouth Museum about John Pruddah, the owner of the Royal Library, a circulating library in Weymouth in the 1870's, and his  relationship with Mudie's.

Mudie's, through its network of franchisees, and WH Smith, through its railway station bookstalls and circulating library, effectively controlled much of the book trade in late Victorian Britain.

                    W H Smith, Glasgow Central Station by kim traynor

For example Mudie's tried to drive down the price it paid for books including in the 1890's pressuring the publishers of Mary Braddon's Sons of Fire to bring out a cheap single volume yellowback version almost as soon as the triple decker version was published - if you have access to the Irish Times archive you can find a letter (Sept 24, 1895) from ME Braddon in complaining about her publishers being pressured to produce a cheap single volume edition.

Mudie's, and circulating libraries in general also seem to have been a source of second hand books in Australia - I've enough circumstantial evidence to convince me that there were some importers and distributors of second hand books, but I've been unable as yet to track down the company involved.

And in among all of this I managed a decent early morning bike ride - I think I'm getting fitter and probably should start thinking about adding a bit more distance to my circuit round the town...

Facebook, second time around

 About two and a half years ago I quit social media.

All of it, with the exception of mastodon which seemed to be full of people interested in digitisation and trains, which kind of fits with my interests, sad anorak that I am.

Facebook, linkdin, tumblr, twitter (now X),  Instagram, Pinterest etc all went. I reckoned that during the pandemic I'd developed a doomscrolling habit, especially when we were all locked down and the highlight of the day was a walk to the Post Office to collect a package.

Prior to the pandemic, I'd have said I had my use under control, Sure, I was a bit obsessed with twitter, but that was it apart from a little bit of Facebook.

Before I retired, something I used to do was evaluate social media platforms as to their usefulness for learning and communication, but I hardly ever used them - the ultimate was when someone sent me a 'happy birthday' message on Facebook, and when I read it, it was nine months later - I hadn't logged in for nearly a year.

After I retired I started to use Facebook a little more, purely because in a rural area, the local Facebook groups serve as a sort of town hall meeting cum noticeboard.

And as I say, it was all good until the pandemic, when I started spending too much time on the socials - you can only make so many sourdough pizzas, and do so much family history, so locked down, the socials served the important function of reminding me there was still life elsewhere on the planet.

But unfortunately the habit stayed with me, so I ditched the lot and had a clean break, and felt a lot happier for doing so.

So why did I rejoin Facebook?

I could claim it's the Athenaeum's fault, but that would be unfair. A lot of local history groups and local archive services have very active Facebook groups, and Facebook was the way to find out what other groups in  the region were doing.

So, I rejoined.

Purposely I went for a cold restart, no recontacting previous friends, no reviving previous group memberships.

I did feel a bit bad about not recontacting previous friends, but people move on and life changes. I'd walked away and somehow it felt a bit presumptuous to do a 'Hi, I'm back', so I didn't.

So, for nearly a month now I've been back on Facebook.

No friends other than J, and a feed stuffed full of local history groups and regional archive services.

I have a couple of rules - no app on my phone, browser access only, and some set times to check it for updates, basically first thing in the morning and after I've fed the cats in the evening.

And it's been useful.

I'd been having trouble tracking down any information about a circulating library in Ryde in the 1870s.

I'd tried emailing the local museum, but hadn't received an answer, so I tried posting on a local Facebook history group.

And it worked, I got a contact address for the local history group, and some really helpful suggestions based on the census returns and local trade directories, as well as a few silly ones.

But it worked, and I now know there was definitely at least two circulating libraries on Union Street in Ryde in the mid to late nineteenth century.

Which one the book came from, I don't know - the label is too damaged, and the only way is find another label in better condition, but I suspect it might have come from the one  at 33 Union Street run by Mary and Elizabeth Gibbs

excerpt from Ryde Trade directory 1859

A new hall table

 We've finally got ourselves a sensible table in the hall, well a table anyway.

Yesterday had been a horrible sticky day, threatening rain, with gusty wind bringing the threat of bushfires, the sort of day that you sit inside in the air conditioning and hope that a lightning strike doesn't start something ominous.

However we'd had a plan yesterday morning to walk up to the Farmer's Market outside the Anglican church, to see if we could pick up some bits and pieces for Christmas - local organic jam to have with croissants on Christmas morning and the like.

Also, the last market before Christmas is usually a good show with local craftspeople selling things, and the church, which is very high Anglican, usually has the choir outside singing traditional carols for charity.

But it was not to be.

J had been up late the night before - somehow she has become the the local theatre company's go to person for make up, meaning she has to go early to help the actors get ready, and then afterwards, help them clean it off.

So while we set out to the market, we only got as far as the organic grocer for fruit and veg, plus some bread and sourdough pizza bases - and they had stock of local gelati, which given the heat, had to be taken directly home.

On our way back, we passed a guy who we normally say hello to, who was discussing an old sewing machine base with a mate, and who totally unexpectedly, said 'Do you want to buy this?'

Well strangely we'd been looking for something like that.

Most of the sewing machine tables you see for sale, apart from the really expensive restorations, have had the original top replaced with either a bit of plastic stone - the sort used to make kitchen bench tops - or some pressure glued wood.

This one still had the original bench top, the inlaid wood was intact, and while it had obviously been used as bench in someone's shed - there are a few paint spots and a bit of scratching to the surface, it looked like it might clean up nicely with a bit of solvent and wood cleaner.

So we talked back and forth and settled for a hundred bucks in cash. 

Fortunately, and unusually for these cashless days, we actually had a hundred bucks between us without an emergency trip to the cash machine.

Money down, hands shaken, and the guy said he would bring it round on his truck, after all we only live in the next street.

He was as good as his word, almost. For some reason he got it wrong and set off in the direction of Last Street to the wrong house, but it was an honest mistake and five minutes later he was back and helped carry it in.

The actual machine was made by Wertheim, and probably dates from the late nineteenth century.

As I said it needs a bit of a clean with some solvent, and also a fillet of wood to fill in the hole where the machine would have been mounted - rather than try and do any mending our idea is fit a simple MDF fillet and then tile over it with some small mock Victorian tiles.

inlay - detail view

As well as a simple border inlay there is also an inlayed ruler

which is kind of cool, and apparently a feature of older Wertheim machines.

The metal work is in good condition, and while a clean and a lacquer would probably not do it any harm there's no serious corrosion. The treadle and driving wheel are still in place so it looks the business.

I think that for a hundred bucks, we did quite well ...

Another good day's cataloguing

 Had an excellent morning's work cataloguing up at the Athenaeum - another yellowback, this time an edition of Ishmael by Mary Braddon

and proof - in the form a triple decker where each volume came from a separate source - that the Athenaeum was buying books from a second hand book importer.

Incidentally, while a lot of the later books were bought new - or at least appear to have been bought new, they were still buying books second hand well into the 1950s

perhaps most dramatically in the case of the 1936 copy of Sheba Lane, which appears first to have been lent out by the Blue Feather library in St Kilda and then by the newsagent in Yackandandah - newsagents often operated small circulating libraries...

In like a lion, out like a lion

 Tomorrow will officially be the first day of summer.

Typically, the weather is taking no notice at all of human calendars - it's cold, periodically we have squally pelting showers that soak you in an instant, and there's a threat of snow in the mountains.

More or less what you'd expect this time of year. The cats have built themselves a gargantuan nest out of the cushions on the sofa and are refusing to move. For the humans it’s definitely sweaters and socks, and yes we are running the heating, even if a few days ago we were running the cooling.

Despite the on and off weather the garden's doing well. The broad beans have podded and the strawberries are doing well - for some reason the possums have left them alone, and I'm almost wishing I'd planted some tomatoes, but it's too late in the season, even for bought plants.

Otherwise, life is puttering on. A chilly bike ride or two - for my sins I've been getting up just after sunrise to ride my bike round town before the commuter traffic starts, and some decent progress on guerrilla cataloguing up at the Athenaeum.

As I've said elsewhere, taking the approach that books are artefacts in their own right and have stories to tell is useful, and perhaps will come together enough to help tell something about the life of the community...

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...