World War Two
Published 1 Apr 2023As the Allies prepare to close in on Germany from all fronts, a shake up of the German military leadership can only achieve so much…
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April 3, 2023
Goodbye Manstein… Hello Model – WW2 – Week 240 – April 1, 1944
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The poison garden of Alnwick
Tom Scott
Published 29 May 2017Inside the beautiful Alnwick Garden, behind a locked gate, there’s the Poison Garden: it contains only poisonous plants. Trevor Jones, head gardener, was kind enough to give a guided tour!
For more information about visiting the Castle, Garden, and poison garden: https://alnwickgarden.com/
(And yes, it’s pronounced “Annick”.)
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QotD: An odd habit of some owners of used books
… the technique was not suitable to the acres of human skin now routinely disfigured as a means of individual self-expression, and those who had inscribed on themselves the name of their beloved, usually on a scroll wrapped around a heart, had to content themselves with a tattooed erasure of that name when it no longer corresponded to that of the current beloved, usually by blue lines. The names of children, by contrast, even when no longer seen or visited, let alone supported financially, were not crossed off or inked out. That would have been cruelty toward them in the same way that having their names tattooed in the first place was undying love for them. One didn’t just wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve; one’s sleeve was one’s heart.
When it comes to erasing from their skin names from the past, however, the tattooed are as nothing compared with some owners of secondhand books. They score through the names of previous owners inscribed on fly-leaves with something approaching vengeance, so that they are no longer legible. They are like Stalin in his desire to expunge a purged person, such as Yagoda, not only from the written record but also from the photographic record. The new owners of secondhand books not only do not want the name of the previous owners to be legible, it is as if they wanted them never to have existed. In the days before black felt-tipped pens, which can erase all trace of a person’s name at a stroke, or in effect throw him into an unmarked grave, the name was often scratched over repeatedly, with a strange assiduity, until no letter of it was legible. I have examples of this peculiar conduct dating back to the 18th century.
What does it mean, this fury against previous owners? I suspect that it indicates an attempted denial of mortality, an assertion that the book has now fallen into the hands of its rightful and final owner, that it will remain his (I think this is an almost exclusively male phenomenon) till the end of time. The evidence of previous ownership is thus a reminder of how futile such a wish is — a reminder that one does not own anything, certainly nothing of any value such as a book that one wishes to preserve, by more than temporary leasehold. We are keepers of our valuables rather than owners of them, at least if we feel it wrong to destroy them.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Tattoo Much”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-06-10.
