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A few things happened in British history, on this day.  In 1080 - William Walcher Bishop of Durham & Earl of Northumberland, was murdered. As revenge, William the Conqueror ravaged the area and took the opportunity to invade Scotland and build the castle at Newcastle Upon Tyne. 1727 - Thomas Gainsborough, English painter and founder of the English School of portrait & landscape painting, was born. 1796 - Edward Jenner became the first British physician to carry out a successful vaccination on an 8 year old boy against smallpox. His pioneering work laid the foundation for modern immunology techniques.  1847 - HMS Driver  completed the first circumnavigation of the world by a steamship when it arrived back at Spithead on the Hampshire coast. 1881 - The death of Mary Jane Seacole, a British-Jamaican business woman and nurse who set up the "British Hotel" behind the lines during the Crimean War. She described it as "a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and ...

Storytelling - the Ultimate in Self Preservation What is a story ?  A story or narrative is a connected series of events told through words, in the case of a book, written words. Stories can be told about anything, and the events can be real or imaginary, fiction or non fiction and cover every topic, genre or style imaginable. All things and all times, past, present and future can be described and explained in stories and are therefore  of great value to humans and some of the oldest, most important aspects of life.  Stories are how we learn about each other, our past, and our cultures. Whether they are created for entertainment or to recount a real-life event—new stories are literally being lived, told, and created every second of every day. History of storytelling As modern humans, we have the convenience of information available at our finger tips, and often take for granted a time when communication and access to knowledge was not instantaneous. Knowledge of history, ...

He first went there with his school, long ago.  The teachers had told the classes that the stone work was from Roman times; remnants from hundreds of years back.  It turned out that it wasn’t Roman at all.   It was an old mill first used for smelting lead in the late 1600s and then between around 1760 and 1850 fine paper was produced there to wrap the products of the nearby iron and steel industry - often cutlery and probably the pins, needles and wire made in the local area. All that remained today was the pond which had provided power by supplying a water wheel  and some and some ruinous buildings.  Romantic maybe – but not Roman. When they had met years later, he could not wait to take her to this place, high up on the hillside in the depths of the forest with the stream trickling, then rushing down from the tops. Tawny, hazel, mustard and coral tainted leaves and ferns painted the background for the scene. And she had loved it too.      ...