Our monthly look at what happened 100 years ago.
This day, 11 November 1923 saw …
On this Day in 1923
Category Archives: ramblings
Christmas Stamps
Royal Mail have released this year’s Christmas stamps, and yet again we’ve managed to create a perfectly horrible, ever more nauseatingly religious, set of designs – which isn’t helped by this ubiquitous barcode.
[Click the image for a larger view]
Royal Mail had (at least until recently) a policy of alternating religious and secular themes year-by-year. This seems to have gone by the board as the last five years’ designs have all been religious.
Yes, I know Christmas is supposed to be a religious festival, and this is a nominally Christian country. However it would be really good to (a) have some stamps celebrating the pagan Yule – or Roman Saturnalia which provided much of the Christian festivity – and (b) some decent, simple designs.
We’ve had special Christmas stamps every year since 1966 (thanks to the then Postmaster General, Tony Benn, whose idea it was). But to my mind there have been few really good designs. From all the years, perhaps the one I like best – for their clean simplicity – are the ones from 1980.
With 1969, 1973 and 1993 following on (not necessarily in that order).
As for the rest, they span the range from merely OK to abominably awful.
Not that other countries’ stamps are necessarily any better, although many are.
On this Day in 1923
Our monthly look at what happened 100 years ago.
On this day, 16 October 1923 …
Fediverse Test
I’m testing a way to add this blog to the fediverse, so it becomes visible to services like Mastodon, and can be followed by users from their fediverse server.
If you see this post on a fediverse server, and wish to follow this Zen Mischief blog, then search for @zenmischief.com (to pick up all new posts and pages) or @kcm (to pick up only those posts/pages I create – which is likely to be all of them).
This post is to check if this works; there is no significant content beyond the above.
Here’s an image to see how that works.
That’s all.
Fediverse Test
This is a second test post – really to test how images work.
I’m testing a way to add this blog to the fediverse. See the previous test for a bit more information.
Here’s an image to see how that works.
That’s all.
On this Day in 1923
Our monthly look at what happened 100 years ago.
On this day, 1 September 1923 saw …
On this Day in 1923
Our monthly look at what happened 100 years ago.
On this day, 3 August 1923 …
On this Day in 1923
Our monthly look at what happened 100 years ago.
On this day, 31 July …
Roses (2)
Having written a couple of days ago about our roses, they were the ones in the back garden. What I omitted was the wow display in the front.
Like the back, our front garden is allowed a certain degree of licence. Amongst the understorey there are some Apothecary’s Rose. Officially it is Rosa gallica officinalis. It’s a very old rose – Peter Beales says it dates to before 1200 – with large, semi-double, fuchsia-coloured flowers and a pure Old Rose scent; very free-flowering, creating a mass of colour. It mostly just grows as a mass of single stems, which creep and sucker their way around.
We were given a couple of off-shoots many, many years ago, and it is now rampant around the front garden. It is currently a mass of saucer-sized, shocking fuchsia-pink blooms. Sadly it has only a short season and will pretty much be over by the end of the month, but it is stunning for a few weeks.
On this Day in 1923
Our monthly look at what happened 100 years ago.
This day, 12 June 1923 saw …
