2011/11/07 22:28
Jeg opdagede rent tilfældigt, at Russerne synger 2005 – også kendt som Russangbogen – ligger på nettet i PDF-format.Jeg sad med fornøjelse og bladede den igennem, mens jeg mindedes gamle dage, da jeg faldt over et eklatant eksempel på historieforfalskning.På side 67 skriver de flg. om Vi har en lang vej hjem: "Denne sang har en fascinerende historie. Teksten blev en...
2011/04/19 22:31
I think I mentioned that we spent last week in Keith with the rest of Phyllis' family. We drove up to our holiday home via Pitlochry, but we returned via Urquhart Castle and Glencoe (see the map on the left).The idea was to have a quick look at Urquhart Castle during our lunch break.However, when we got there, we realised...
2012/03/13 23:12
To what extent is Britain (or the British Isles) the same kind of construct as Scandinavia (or the Nordic countries)?
Both Britain and Scandinavia have a long and complex history, with periods of political unification and others with separate kingdoms and plenty of wars.
Scandinavia’s united period was a long time ago (1397–1523), while Britain only started falling apart when Ireland became independent again less than a century ago. On the other hand, the British Isles are to some extent more heterogenous than Scandinavia – the former is a mixture of Celts, Anglo-Saxons and Norman French, while the latter consists of the descendants of the Vikings with some Finns, Lapps and Germans thrown in.
In both cases in can be hard to pinpoint exactly what Britishness/Scandinavianness means. For instance, John Major’s description of Britishness – “Britain will still be the country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and, as George Orwell said, ‘Old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist’” – is so clearly a description of England that does not apply to Scotland and Ireland. In the same way, it’s very hard to define Scandinavian culture in one sentence. And yet, Scandinavians do recognise the similarities intuitively, and Scandinavians abroad tend to hang out together, for instance at international conferences.
So there are definite similarities. And just as Scandinavia does exist in spite of having been separate countries for half a millennium, Britain will always exist whether Scotland becomes independent in 2014 or not. Actually, Scottish independence might actually lead to a reevaluation of the concept, so that it ceases to be about a political construct and starts being about what actually binds people on these islands together, whether they live in Ireland, Wales, Man, Scotland or England.
2011/10/20 22:51
‘Writing of the European revolutions of 1848, for instance, one historian recently noted: “At the beginning of 1848 no one believed that revolution was imminent.”’ This is from an article in The Independent today, arguing that Western nations are now ripe for revolution.I think it's rather speculative, but as demonstrations inspired by the Arab Spring spread around the world, the idea is not so fanciful as to allow us to ignore the possibility that something dramatic could be happening soon.We...
2011/09/11 13:46
It's now exactly ten years ago that the first plane crashed into the Twin Towers. I was sitting in DAIMI's computer lab at the time, and I found out shortly afterwards from some Internet news source, and I quickly went up to the TV room together with lots of other people, where we watched the second plane crashing into the...
2011/04/04 11:47
Dougie, my father-in-law, has always been a bit of a Scottish nationalist, and England has always seemed a bit of a foreign country to him.However, my genealogical research has now established that his paternal grandmother was English (probably from Ashton-under-Lyne...
2011/04/03 1:29
From time to time I spend a bit of time researching our family trees.As soon as you go back a few generations, you're often in the situation that you know almost nothing about your ancestors. Typically, you'll know their name...
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