To the English Civil Unpleasantness, which is 380 years past yet which still has an impact on today. Not that Her Majesty Queen Betty needs fear for her neck, no; rather what was done then still affects now.
For one thing, if you were to walk into a pub in Dublin and announce you were collecting for a statue to be erected for Oliver Cromwell, you would be lucky to escape with all your teeth intact. Art?
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| How to scare cats the Crommy way! |
Objectively, this might seem weird: Ol' Crommy was the original Republican and directly responsible for Ol' Chas' head parting company with his body.
Ah, but. Back in the seventeenth century Catholics were regarded with suspicion at best, and murdered out of hand at worst. If you wanted to get away with homicide, you called the victim " a vile malignant and a papist" and that was you home scot free, almost. The Puritans, who ran Parliament, were innately hostile to The Evil Papists.
Most of Ireland = Catholic = Papists = Evil, went the Puritan logic. It didn't help that most of the Catholics in England had sided with the King, out of simple self-preservation. The depth of this antipathy is hard to understand today, unless you compare it to Christian versus Muslim, but back in 1645 it was very real. Art!
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| Contemporary artwork |
There had been a rebellion against the Crown in Ireland in 1641, and thanks to that ongoing unpleasantness in England, it took a good few years for the English to get back to them about it. When Crommy took up the cudgels in Ireland, his first major deed was the siege of Drogheda in 1649. Although condemned afterwards for the killing of the garrison, Crommy was technically within his rights as they stood at the time: the town had refused to surrender when the siege began, which meant no mercy for anyone inside if it fell - which it did. Arguing on a technical interpretation about seventeenth century warfare and it's rules does not go down well in Ireland, then or now. Crommy was also aided in that the Royalist officer in charge at Drogehda, Arthur Aston, was an absolute bottom whom was so unpopular in England that he'd almost been murdered.
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| Sir Art. Beaten to death with his own wooden leg. (I kid you not) |
And as I say, best not travel in Eire as a member of the Oliver Cromwell Fan Club.
More Echoes
No! Not a follow-up to the seminal Pink Floyd track of 1971 vintage, which is epic in case you haven't heard it and was originally about two planets encountering each other in space but had the lyrics changed as they were trying to get away from the Space Rock label -
There we go again, describing what we're not describing. Bad Brain! Naughty Brain! No biscuits for Brain!
I have mentioned gunpowder over the past couple of days in the English Civil Unpleasantness, and a mention in Professor Richard Evan's "Telling Lies About Hitler" brought another usage to mind. Proffy quotes a journalist after the verdict, who states that Irving was "hoist with his own petard", meaning that he'd brought a libel action against Penguin books and author Debs Lipstadt, and lost it. Art?
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| What you may be imagining |
Conrad has mentioned the mighty Petard mortar mounted in the Curchill AVRE tank in past bloggings; it was intended for bunker-busting, and bust bunkers it certainly did. It was named, however, after a device used initially in the ECW, for blowing open gates, portcullises and other defensive works. Art!
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| Thus |
As you can see, it was a charge of gunpowder placed against where one wished to gain access, when the owners were not persuadable. It was detonated by a lit fuse, and herein lies the reason. If the match was too long then the defenders might well nip out and snuff it out before the charge exploded; if it was too short then it would kill the chap placing it before he got to safety as the charge went off.
I know, I know, more like "turned into dogfood by his own petard" than "hoist" but one supposes that these aphorism creators were a little squeamish.
| "Oooops." |
Hello, Marketa, And How Are You Today?
"ANGRY!" replied our favourite Cross Czech. "O SO VERY ANGRY!"
Ah. I see. And what are we angry about today?
"Claim that Czechia is in Eastern Europe"
I quite agree, Marketa, this is patently absurd. You cannot get more Central European than Prague. Art? Map!
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| As they define Western Europe |
There you go. I know they were trying to prove a point, but you can clearly see Czechia isn't in the Balkans, nor does it border the Sinis - sorry, Russia. Persons of an European extraction cannot make that claim without revealing themselves to be idiots of the first water. Us Sceptred Islanders and the South Canadians can be forgiven a little, since we are not part of Europe*.
Finally -
We only need a short item to hit the Compositional Ton, so let's poke fun at a Horror Trope again, and I promise this one will be considerably shorter than The Monster In The Lake one.
<Our heroine is sitting at her desk, intently studying an aged parchment document. Unseen by her, the bedroom door silently swings open>
HEROINE: Gee, it's getting dark early. I guess a storm's coming.
<Behind her, the Evil Vampire Count enters her room**>
HEROINE: I better turn the light on -
<she turns on her ultra-violet desk lamp. The Evil Vampire Count grimaces for an instant before disintegrating>
HEROINE <turning>: Hello? Is there - gee, where did all that dust come from?
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| RIP, Count |
And with that we are done done done!
* DO NOT MENTION BREXIT!
** The cat invited him in, before you ask
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