A whirl of activities and history provides some interesting examples.

What a lovely weekend, London felt like it was more or less back to its busy self. First a lovely lunch in Chinatown, with G, who last time I saw her was even too scared to have a coffee out mid Covid, then I stopped by the V and A fully expecting them to say I had to book ahead, only to find it full of activities including a delightful little dance performance in the pond. Then on Sunday I finally found Hogarth's house, followed by a stop off at Chiswick House Gardens and today I had another meal out in London with another friend.

In between I watched snippets of Middlemarch on a DVD and wondered why I had never seen it before, and prompted by a cousin trawled yet again through family photos. I did not find the photos my cousin wanted but found something even better, something we have been looking for for ages - my grandfather's letters from the front.

I won't show it all but given the bombs raining down, as I type, on Ukraine, his pithy words from the front, are shocking and fresh and relevant. "the fearful mess on the right margin is where I dropped my writing pad in mud so you have some real mud from the British trenches now, Bang that is one of the Huns wretched whizz bangs on top of our parapet no damage done - as usual. Here they come six at a time. ? now indulging in his daily ? of hate while we are ? new dance - "The Dug -out Dive". He ought to know that whizz bangs are no good for trenches life throwing butter at steel, what they want is some 8 " shells they might! shift something. I do wish these beastly rats would shut ? crawling over my feet until I have finished this letter then I may be able to give them all my attention for a ? I think Fritz must have "got the wind up" last night judging by the way he was letting his machine guns fly and rifle fire. By the way " Got the wind up" is an Army term which means " afraid". I love that every time he uses some slang, he puts it in inverted commas. I never knew my granddad that well, having read all the letters, I feel I have a better sense of him and what he went through.

I did not know until I went to the Hogarth House but in 1709, the thousands of refugees apparently coming into England then were from Germany they were known as The German Palatines. The person who lived in Hogarth's House at the time, was a Lutheran priest and he helped the refugees along with a Chaplain for the Prince of Wales through fundraising and by establishing the skills of those arriving. Priti Patel note, I thought. Looking on Wikipedia, the information gleaned is even more, Priti Patel note, for apparently many of the newcomers were "helped" to find a new life in Ireland, where the majority of the refugees failed to settle and so they wandered back to the mainland. Those shipped to America, where many had originally wanted to get to - it was then a British colony - fared slightly better and some went on to intermarry with the indigenous population. Once they had paid for their passage that is!.