Two steps forward, one back

 At the start of the week you might have thought we were having an early spring.

Warm in the afternoons, warm enough to turn the heating off and open up the house to let some fresh air in. I even cut my grass one afternoon.

Of course it didn't last, we seem to be back to a pale imitation of Ragnarok with squalls of heavy rain interspersed with a near continual mizzle and a leaden sky.

Workwise, not much, I've done a little more work on the Oddfellows and some routine but necessary work checking on the Athenaeum's stock of cataloguing supplies after I found we were out of some stuff while I was accessioning some t-shirts.

I've got some more artefact work coming up - old hessian apple and chestnut sacks - so we do need to get our cataloguing materials organised.

Other than that not so much - I did decommission one of my old tablets and spent a bit more time playing with google lens to try and identify the source of some photographs from the Spanish civil war, such as this one of republican women volunteers

The original photographer is unknown, and the image is available through the Google Art Project, but the actual photograph comes from the collection of the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid.

The young women depicted are dressed haphazardly in uniforms probably originally intended for male conscripts where the pants are too long and the shirts don't really fit, and they are clutching old rifles, but one of them is clearly wearing lipstick, which in Spain at the time would signify that she was an independent and fashionable young woman, even if for the moment her pants are creased and too long ...