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14 Jan, 4 tweets, 1 min read
I finish Bleak House.

I don't know why, but my enjoyment of it was off the scale. I found myself incredibly moved this time round by the melodrama & the more sentimental passages in a way I've never been before. Maybe the effect of the darkness of the times? I don't know...
Or maybe Dickens is just one of those pleasures in life which just keeps getting better and better the older you get...
Now wondering whether to carry on, & read Little Dorrit. Worried that a novel in which the whole of England is portrayed as one giant prison may be a bit much right now.
It feels sometimes like we've all become versions of William Dorrit.

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More from @holland_tom

Tom Holland Profile picture
17 Jan
To the Victoria Embankment, there to take our Government-mandated exercise by following the lines of two waterways, the Bloomsbury Ditch & the #CockAndPye Ditch. These were channels which drained the marshland that surrounded the village of St Giles - current-day Covent Garden.
The walk is one devised by @teabolton in the second volume of his guide to London’s lost rivers, & follows the line of the 2 linked ditches from the Thames at Victoria Embankment Gardens & then back to Cleopatra’s Needle. #CockAndPye Image
"With no known natural watercourses between the Fleet, to the east, and the Tyburn, to the west, Covent Garden and Soho are gaps in the London river map. It is, however, quite possible that the ditches rechannelled small streams that existed before the earliest maps" - @teabolton
Read 12 tweets
Tom Holland Profile picture
16 Jan
“May the Father bless you.
May the + Son of God heal you.
May the Holy Spirit enlighten you,
guard your body, save your soul.”

A prayer from the Sarum Rite, as @SalisburyCath becomes “the UK’s most spectacular and historic vaccination centre”. theguardian.com/world/2021/jan…
So moved by this.
Lichfield as well. The cathedral is dedicated to St Chad, who died in a time of plague (“a mortality,” as Bede puts it, “sent from heaven”), & at whose tomb many miracles of healing were performed.
Read 5 tweets
Tom Holland Profile picture
15 Jan
I’ve bought a loaf of bread that looks like the fossil of a proto-hominid skull... Image
I have successfully trepanned it Image
The joy of Twitter: I get to have Chris Stringer deliver his verdict on my loaf!
Read 4 tweets
Tom Holland Profile picture
14 Jan
By an amazing coincidence, the next episode of @TheRestHistory (out next Monday, folks) is on walls, & attempts to answer this very question!
Hmmm - let me see if I do have any photos of my family enjoying the walk along Hadrian’s Wall that I made them do for their summer holiday.

Let me see...
Image
Read 4 tweets
Tom Holland Profile picture
14 Jan
Any talk by @DrFrancisYoung is bound to be fascinating - & this one tonight will have the added benefit of helping to raise money for the wonderful @WiltshireMuseum at a time when it can make no money from ticket sales
"A sort of Wiltshire conquistador" - @DrFrancisYoung on John Aubrey's appropriation of Avebury from locals, and the stories they told about its origins. Image
And there it is - the first mention of Suffolk!
Read 10 tweets
Tom Holland Profile picture
5 Jan
What better way to celebrate my birthday than to walk across a plague-stricken London to Stepney, there to walk one of the city's more obscure lost rivers? - a river so lost in fact that it is commemorated not as a river at all, but as a sewer: the #BlackDitch
Stepney is first mentioned c. 1000. Stybbanhyð - 'Stybba's landing place' - conjures up romantic images of a Saxon adventurer arriving off whatever Limehouse was called back then, and navigating the river that would one day come to be called the #BlackDitch
In 1913, an antiquarian claimed that the #BlackDitch had originally been called the Barge River, & cites "old records of place names in the parishes and hamlets along the Thames side" as evidence - but if these ever existed, they cannot be found today.
Read 31 tweets

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