Shed, Paul and Enigmatist

Today, the these three setters have prepared a tribute crossword to the man.  And it is all about him, and lovely.

Farewell

Oh My.
Farewell John Graham, our Araucaria.
Unlike the chaste Lord Archer, never vegetating.
Rest in Peace.

Finnamore Crescent

We weren't going to listen to this (things to do). But the great John Finnamore was on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue.  Wonderful.  Especially his first go at Mornington Cresecent...

Reserve

We won't be commenting upon the Dr Who 50th until we've seen it at least twice more..

Dates

This weekend appears to be the time of anniversaries.
CS Lewis, Huxley, Britten, JFK and Doctor Who.
Chener bookshop window is full of Lewis and the Doctor.
JFK specials on the BBC and in the Guardian.
Britten on R3.
Play about Lewis & Tolkien on R4 (not actually that good).
And wall-to-wall Who.  Documentaries (lovely to see Troughton again - our Doctor), minisode, clips, essays, articles, teasers, even a Dr Who Celebrity Pointless.

The main event starts in under half an hour...

Tour: Which Romans?

As mentioned before, we also went to the Museum of Prehistory in Quinson on this tour.

Which seemed - at least at one point - to position the early Romans as a very late Iron Age tribe. Connecting them back to the broad sweep of prehistory.

We couldn't quite square this with the clever builders of the Pont and the Arena.  They seemed to be 'builders' in a more modern sense.

Perhaps this is more about how we partition up the ages of history (and prehistory) rather than anything else.  Change occurs throughout those periods and they bleed into each other. And different geographies will have different pasts, and can be very different, all at the same (historical) time.

And that we like to approach history as history. As Terry Jones pointed out in Barbarians, most of the time we remember the Romans and other peoples through simplified images and stories.

Tour: Paddling

On the day we went to the Pont and the Camargue, we went paddling in two different places.

Firstly the Gard river, beneath the Pont, is a spot for kayaking and swimming.

But we also went to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, in the Camargue, where we could paddle in the Med:-