This week, we finally managed to install our new (not new ) item of furniture - a mid-18th Century grandfather clock. It's not bright and shiny like more modern ones, but a dark oak with a warm patina which the beeswax polish is drawing out. In order to set it up, we had to do a certain amount of research - how to hang the pendulum, where the weight went on the endless chain - and it got me thinking... where and when did certain divisions of time come from? The time periods which I have written either had household clocks or didn't, I have not written novels from the time of their invention. Clocks have been around for a long time, and the obsession with measuring time in an ordered fashion dates back to at least the ancient Sumerians. It was they who established a circular reading of time and, I imagine, the sixty seconds/minutes came about as much because it was an easy way to divide a circle as anything else. But it wasn't until much later that the precision of seconds ...
Today's #HistFicThursdays blog is a little bit different. The Horrible Histories songs I've shared so far have all been about specific people. Today, we're looking a little bit broader... Meet the Vikings: I have to say, the song above is my favourite Horrible Histories song! Both the songs in today's blog are my sort of music, even though they're not a lot like each other. But the music matches the theme and - without talking too much about the genius of the musicianship (my day job coming into play here) - these two songs show two very different sides of the Viking impact on Britain. The song above is what we are led to believe all Vikings were like. A couple of years ago, on a return from my sister's book launch in North Lincolnshire, we visited Lindisfarne. It is commercialised now, not a great deal like the Holy Island the monks had established there (although the earliest reference to this name appears to have been some 200 years after the Viking raid). B...