Today's stuff

[chickenfeet]

I had this odd thought this morning that I couldn't remember Alan Brooke ever having had much to say about Arnhem. So this morning I checked the diary entries for the back half of September 1944 and discovered that he had gone on a trout fishing holiday with Portal and Cunningham immediately after the Quebec conference. There are later one sentence entries referring to after the fact meetings with Browning and Urquart. I'm often surprised by events that seem momentous in hind sight being largely ignored by key players at the time.

Today I drove past St. John the Baptist, Norway, Anglican Church several times. This must be one of the oddest church names in Toronto and conjures up images of lemmings being baptised from a great height. I did not go near the even more remarkable Saint James Bond United Church. Sadly this has nothing to do with Roger Moore playing both The Saint and James Bond. I think it's the result of St. James Presbyterian Kirrrk merging with the Bond Street Methodists. Rather sad really.

We have finally replaced (or at least arranged to replace) the wonky fridge. A nearly new fridge of strange Chinese provenance will arrive on Friday to replace our defunct 25 year old relic. No more will I dredge through the icetrays looking for something solid enough to cool my preprandial snifter.

Comments

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

New kitchen appliances are always good!

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Isn't the classic missing momentous events diary entry Louis XVI's for 14 July 1789? (as I recall is either v banal comment on the weather, or saying something like 'not much happened today') (Or this may be a Great Historical Canard, since French Revolution is Not Really My Period.)

[(Anonymous)]

Hadn't heard that one but it would be excellent if true.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I've done a bit of digging on this and there are references all over the place to an entry for 14/7/89 that read simply "rien". However, from context it's not clear to me that Louis kept a diary as such and the journal in question appears to have been more in the nature of a game book. Thus the entry may simply refer to an unfruitful day's hunting.

[liadnan]

That sounds suspiciously like George III, who apparently wrote "nothing of importance happened today" in his diary on 4th July 1776: this is often trotted out by people who fail to bear in mind that transatlantic news was not instantaneous in the 18th century..