Storms, and a nineteenth century hockey playing cult

 Last week began with a massive storm that knocked out our power and internet for a few hours.

That was followed by a few days of pleasant weather when I managed to get a bit of work done in the garden, including pulling out the broad beans, which have been a complete disaster this year, and planting out the zucchini, chillies and squashes, which, unlike last year, seem to have survived the possums so far, even if a couple of the leaves look distinctly nibbled.

The last couple of days have seen 30C plus heat, making it unpleasant to work outside, but the heat seems to have broken for the moment with some gentle but steady rain.

Still the heat let me catch up on my reading, in the course of which I went down a rabbit hole about  the Agapemone, an nineteenth century millenarian cult in England, which as well as open relationships, was also known for playing hockey.

Strangely this rabbit hole brought me to Nunawading and the Fisherite sect, which similarly had a reputation for unconventional sexual behaviour.

In fact, there was no connection between the two, it was more the case that the Agapemone's reputation was used to try and blacken that of the Fisherite sect.

Down at Lake View, I'm still working through the dining room and a lot of nineteenth century pottery, but I did successfully use Google Lens to successfully identify an Edwardian soda siphon.

As well as Lake View I had a fun morning up at the Athenaeum working with a pile of rather tatty bibles and prayer books from deconsecrated churches , which not only let us test our disposal policy on a real world case, but also had the fun aspect of seeing real nineteenth century graffitti which ranged from predictable drawings of genitalia to some quite expert caricatures of members of the congregation, and showing that despite the nineteenth century reputation for moral rectitude, some were as irreverent as we are today.