Martin Ryan a good friend of mine wrote in his interesting book about William Francis Butler ( Lilliput Press) that the British army mess in Madras in the early 1860s got its ice from Boston.
I don’t know that ice would last that long (I suppose it got a cold boost round Cape Horn if they went that way).
It reminded me of the crazy guy who used to attend Friends of the Earth meetings in Edinburgh recommending that glaciers be towed to the tropics as a source of cold fresh water. So was he really crazy, then? Or just visionary. Yes, I know they are usually the same thing!
As someone recently wrote in a book I was reading about the Ottoman empire, globalisation is nothing new.
By the way, did you ever read a slim volume called the Victorian Internet? He points out that the telegram was in some ways better than the internet / e-mail since anyone could receive or send a telegram at any time using the telegraph boys (such a delight of Oscar Wilde, apparently, as they often had a little sideline, income-generating, activity between messages).
In Sherlock Holmes we see him exchanging several telegrams in a morning with the police, railways stations, country houses etc. No word of the sideline, but he was not married.
Probably the telegram it was more the equivalent of the sms.
He points out that when the telephone was invented it had very slow uptake because no one knew why you would want to talk to someone, and it would be impolite to call without having sent a message first. So in the first years it was the butler who answered and he wrote the message down. (Obviously if you had a telephone, you had a butler).
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This morning, CNN totally devoted to hurricane Ike – no other news at all, (in fact no news since Ike is hardly doing any damage at all) whereas I wanted a weekend of Sarah Palin, my current heroine.
‘Refreshing’ is hackneyed, but she’s great!
After all, a black man who speaks Indonesian*, a white veteran who presumably speaks Vietnamese*, a total nonentity in Biden, all fade into the monochrome background in the presence of an oil-drilling, moose-hunting, messy family life, skirting-on-the-edges of-the law gun-toting lady who comes from Alaska.
And that poor boy who is being forced to wear a suit and marry the daughter. It was probably literally a shotgun marriage/engagement. Mother-in-law actually shoots.
More power to her elbow, but if they win and JMcC drops dead we would be in for many interesting times. Palin v Putin. It kind of rhymes.
Hope all is well with you!
Barry
* Always remember the Manchurian candidate.
