Just a little warmer

 What a difference a week makes.

It's still definitely late winter rather than early spring, but the overnight frosts seem to have gone for the moment, and in the afternoon some days it has actually felt warm, and in our garden the spring bulbs have come out, jonquils, snow drops, and more on the way.

We had a good afternoon in the garden last Sunday, filling our organics bin with weeds and clippings, and besides that I spent a few hours messing about with Image Magick working out how to make a contact sheet and despite my frustrations with public transport, or the lack of it, went to a genuinely interesting session on e-hive.

I won't be back working with the Trust until September, but I did go up to the Athenaeum on Friday.

In between tying the doors of the still non functioning public toilets shut with hazard tape I spent the time doing some more reading about the Oddfellows in the area.

As well as their annual ball being a significant social event as early as 1862, the local papers contain reports of the local lodges' AGMs and it's quite clear that they were a significant presence locally, employing their own surgeon, funding medical care, and providing both funeral and life insurance in the form of widows' annuities.

I'm sure there's a topic there, I just need to decide what, for example they even had their own cricket team from the 1860s onwards which played local clubs - it might be interesting to trace the players and their rise to prominence...

On a more personal note I've finally been able to track down an Australian mourning cover for my collection of postal ephemera - while I'm by no means a collector, I do have a very small collection of late nineteenth an early postal ephemera that I use to illustrate talks, just as my having some nineteenth century pennies to show people adds a little bit of interest (especially as, since it's nearly sixty years since Australia went decimal, very few people remember pre-decimal currency).

And I spent a bit of time going down an internet rabbit hole about the battle of Poloj during the second world was, and as a result I now more more about Italy's occupation of Albania and fairly disastrous invasion of Greece, than perhaps is necessary, but having been twenty years or so ago to the borderlands of Greece, Albania and the former Yugoslavia, I realise now why various hilltops and passes sported at times grandiloquent memorials to the various battles fought across this countryside of abandoned  monasteries and stone built villages ...