Some thoughts

 On Saturday I was at Olympia attending the Destinations show, looking for ideas for my next trips. Afterwards I has some time to kill so went to  Leighton  and Sambourne  Houses. These are well worth visiting if in the area, and a good glimpse into what daily life was like back then and the domestic styles of well-to-do households. The latter is full of political cartoons from Punch and the like (the owner was the artist who created them), you need a good knowledge of the era to get the context!  Here are a few photos I took:' Leighton house: Sambourne house:

 I'm long been of the opinion that Western (particularly European) Civilisation was destroyed by WW1. Driving to and from East London this afternoon reminded me of a particularly vivid visual example. In the first case, we have the Northbound gatehouse of the Blackwall tunnel, opened in 1897: ( image source ) And in contrast, the Southbound entrance to the second tunnel which was built less than a century later and opened in 1967: ( image source ) To me the contrast is clear, we had a culture that valued beauty in public works that were replaced by pure functionality with no regard for aesthetics. The original is ornate with decorative features such as torrents, carvings, and patterned brickwork. The second is just bare concreate with an engraved dedication. It is also telling that the original tunnel was built in 5 years and the second took 7, despite all the progress in technology construction projects take longer and cost far, far more. While things aren't quite as bad now a...

Via this post, an interesting table on where slaves transported from West Africa ended up: A quote from the souce: 'The United States was a minor player in the African Slave Trade — only about 5% of the Africans imported to the New World came to the United States. Of the 10.7 million Africans who survived the ocean voyage, a mere 388,000 were shipped directly to North America. The largest recipients of imported African slaves were Brazil, Cuba. Jamaica, and the other Caribbean colonies. The lifespan of those brought into what is now the United States vastly exceeded those of the other 95%, and the United States was the only purchaser of African slaves where the population grew naturally in slavery – the death rate among the rest was higher than the birth rate' The World Slave Trade The Trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean African slave trade, which began by Arabs as early as the 8th Century AD, dwarfed the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and continued up to the 20th Century. Between the ...

 Link of the day: a long series of essays on  The Origins of World War I (a personal view) .  Some interesting points raised.