212 years ago today, the first soup kitchens were opened for the London poor. Isn't it nice to think that dear old George III's government was so kind to teachers?
In other news ...
Now, I don't mind too much that the Americans beat us at the battle of New Orleans today in 1812. I think they got lucky and they used sneaky tactics like hiding behind cotton bales, trees and so on and they had Charlton Heston to lead them (or is that just in the film The Buccaneer?).
No, what really annoyed me was Lonnie Donegan who had a hit with The Battle of New Orleans in the 1950s. Donegan was an Englishman born in Essex and it would have been nice if he'd recorded something from the English point of view. Just to let my American reader know that you aren't the only one to have had a Benedict Arnold in your midst.
Today being Sunday, we will be enjoying our usual Sunday game of Scrabble, at which I will be trounced by Miss Troubridge, come round specially for the fun. She may be a million years old and as mad as a box of frogs, but my word that woman can play Scrabble! She knows more eight letter words containing an ex, a zed, a queue and a jay than is normal in a woman of her age. She has been keeping a cumulative score for the last twenty years or so and her score now has so many noughts in it we have to use wider paper. She is a lesson to us all - all you have to do to win at Scrabble is to be so old and doddery that no one argues with you when you put pqzxyhgj across both triples, using up all your letters (apparently it is a breed of coelacanth found only in a single tributary of the Amazon).
