Pompeii and circumstance

"On the plus side, it'll help the paint dry quicker..."

Finger firmly on the pulse of what’s happening as always, here’s some important breaking news from 79 AD.

Historians, archaeologists and others of an all-things-ancient leaning have long believed that the Vesuvius eruption, which wiped out nearby Roman city Pompeii, took place on the 24th of August.

Being so specific about something that happened a very long time ago is impressive stuff – they weren’t using our current calendar system at that point, and probably didn’t even have pictures of cats above the months either.

The level of certainty was thanks to swanky lawyer and author Pliny the Younger, who penned (or, probably, quilled) the details in a letter to Roman historian and senator, Tacitus, covering the death his uncle, Pliny the Elder.

PtE bravely sailed towards the erupting volcano to rescue people in danger but never returned, whilst PtY watched the devastation from the safety of the other side of the bay.

It was 20 years before he sent the details, though. And we don’t have the originals, only translations and copies made in the almost-two-centuries since. So... scope for an error there, then.

There’s long been a doubt about the catastrophe in Italy taking place in August, as evidence of autumnal fruits and heating braziers found in the ruins suggested a later date. I never get my brazier out before late September, so that makes sense.

New excavations have now thrown up something rather remarkable. You know when you scrawl something on the wall in your house, on a floorboard, or the back of some plasterboard when doing DIY, then cover it up with your work? Someone did that in Pompeii... on the 17th of October 79 AD.

Clearly, they’d be mightily annoyed to know they only had 16 days before it got buried under tonnes of ash, but hopefully they got to enjoy their decorating during the brief calm before the firestorm.

It would seem that a charcoal scrawl by a workman on a wall has potentially discredited the mighty Pliny. I can sympathise – I recently sent flowers for a 90-year-old Aunt’s birthday, then got a polite phone call to say it was her 89th. I only had my poor grasp of maths and the year she was born to contend with. Pliny had to cope with changes in calendars, mistranslations and having ‘the Younger’ for a surname.

It does make you think though. What if Christmas is actually in February? When exactly is my birthday? And what happened in Hastings in 1067?

This post first appeared as my 'A wry look at the week' column, in The Mail, on Friday the 19th of October 2018. Both the print and the online version on their website re-titled it as "It's time to praise Pliny and his crew". Not sure how they came up with that, but that wasn't really the point of what I wrote!

Some weeks I really struggle to get fired up by anything enough to want to write about it. For some reason, I spotted this news story and an hour later it was written. Just occasionally, it is that easy.

(CD A-Z: Still in the compilations section, this time a tidy 3 CD set - Blank & Jones Present So80s. Bit of Ultravox at the moment. Splendid.)

The Schaf Shuffle

The weather – source of endless fascination, conversation, irritation and (just recently) excess irrigation. And a fidgety weather presenter on the BBC... I’m endlessly fascinated with the weather, and will confess to making sure I catch the BBC’s updates whenever possible. Not the local ones, where half the presenters look like they got dressed in the dark, or ITV, where they seem to know very little about actual weather, but the national forecasts. Delivered by actual Met Office personnel, their job entails a tricky mix of waving your hands about a bit, explaining about warm fronts without smirking, and trying not to look too pleased whilst mentioning gales force winds and torrential rain. Or stand in front of Cornwall. Each has their own presenting style, but there is one who intrigues me above all the others. Step forward, Tomasz Schafernaker, the 37 year old man from the Met who breezed onto our screens in 2001, as the youngest male ever to point out that it was going to r...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

RIP Jenwis Hamilbutton

We are gathered here in this... (looks round a bit) um... blog, to mourn the passing of Jenwis Hamilbutton. His life may have been short and largely irrelevant, but he touched the lives of so many people that... sorry? Oh. Apparently that was someone else... Jenwis Hamilbutton rose briefly to fame on twitter during 2010, when he was retweeted by BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey, having criticised his shirt. A similarly unspectacular claim to fame occurred when a tweet he crafted at 1am on a windy night appeared in F1 Racing magazine. An amalgam of bits of Formula 1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (mostly the hopeless bits), he came into existence via 3 pints of cider, a Creme Egg and the Electric Light Orchestra’s mournful 1986 farewell album “Balance Of Power”, played loudly over headphones. In his short existence, he was followed on twitter by Paul Hardcastle of “19” fame, and a bunch of slightly odd but jolly nice people, whom he was never entirely sure actually exist...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog