The first week of October in 1549 was a tumultuous time in the reign of the young King Edward VI, who was just shy of 12 years old. The Privy Council was trying to un-throne Edward Seymour, the 1st Duke of Somerset and the king’s maternal uncle, from his de facto kingship and Somerset was… Read more Surrender, Somerset!
Netflix has released a new documentary entitled Audrie and Daisy that is an “unflinching account of high-school sexual assault and trial by social media”. This documentary was important to me for several reasons, including because I have written about these young rape victims in my book The Jezebel Effect. In the book I explained that:… Read more Audrie and Daisy and Slut Shaming
Whenever anyone makes the argument that “science” is some sort of untainted, unbiased, monolith of “truth” I want to raise my eyebrow like Spock and say, “Fascinating.” Why? Because while data can be factual, anything interpreted or analyzed by humans is subject to errors or distortions or outright lies … including science. For example, the… Read more Sweet Poison
Anna of Cleves was born on 22 September 1515, and would be Queen of England for 1/2 of 1540 before becoming King Henry VIII’s “sister” until her death on 16 July 1557. Although she was well liked by Henry’s court, she got off on the wrong foot with the king himself. He came in “disguise”… Read more Anna of Cleves, the Six Months Queen
King Jean II of France met Edward, the Black Prince of Wales in battle at Poitiers on 19 September 1356 in one of the most decisive English victories of the Hundred Years’ War. It really sucked to be French during the Hundred Years War, and the decades before and after the Battle of Poitiers were… Read more The Battle of Poitiers
On 16 September 1400 Owain Glyndwr reclaimed his hereditary title of Prince of Powys Fadog and within four years he would be crowned the last Tywysog Cymru – the Prince of Wales – and would lead the Welsh in a final uprising against the English in a bid for national independence. The Welsh were never… Read more The Last Tywysog Cymru
Roald Dahl is one of the most famous authors of children’s stories in the world, and since he was born in Cardiff on 13 September 1916 he is considered a native son of Wales, which the Welsh are justifiably proud of. However, this is cheating a bit; he was the son of two Norwegian… Read more One Century of Roald Dahl
Today is the first day of school and my kids are not going (at least for now) to the schools I had thought they would be attending when I first planted my tuchus in South Wales. This has moved my cheese, and I am trying to adjust … with limited success I must confess. The… Read more School Daze
Most people know a least a little bit about the time God saved France from being owned by the English when He sent a French peasant girl named Joan of Arc to lead the Gallic troops and repel the Anglo aggressors. Fewer people know He had saved France from the English not long before, when… Read more The Death of Henry V
All languages have taboo words (the so-called dirty words for example) and all languages will lose innocent words that sound a little too much like a taboo word. No one uses the worded niggardly any more, even though it simply means “miserly”, because it has a very bad word indeed in it. It has no… Read more Feckful and Feckless