Blog

From the Museum of Cambridge website, on the subject of wigs, chamber pots, and the powder room:

..the vogue for powdered wigs started in France and England at the start of the 17th century and.. ..continued in the 17th and 18th centuries and visitors to the White Horse Inn (now the Museum building) would have used the space to store and re-powder their wigs and hair pieces with finely-ground starch and refresh them with essence of lavender or flower water…

Under wigs, hair would be cut very short or even shaved off and it is said that short natural hair decreased the number of head lice in the general population. Wigs were common until the 1770s but when a tax on hair powders was introduced in 1795 the vogue waned. The closets then became a place where the chamber pot was used and stored. We can now understand why ladies in polite society refer to lavatories as ‘powder’ rooms or ask to ‘powder their noses’!

Scrolling through Google news yesterday, I came across an item about a four-year-old girl in Bolton who had brushed against giant hogweed and developed huge blisters on her hand.

Giant hogweed is from the Caucasus, and in ideal conditions it can reach five metres in height. It is recognised by the purple blotches on its stems and flowers that look like cow parsley. The plant was brought to Britain to Kew and distributed as an ornamental plant until its danger was recognised.

The sap of giant hogweed contains furanocoumarins. On contact with human skin which is then exposed to sunlight, these chemicals cause phytophotodermatitis. That is, it causes inflammation because the sap prevents skin from protecting itself from sunlight which then leads to bad sunburn.

Furocoumarins enter the nucleus of epithelial cells and form a bond with the DNA when exposed to UV light, and that kills the cell, and that causes inflammation. The chemical mechanism known as the arachidonic acid cascade involves prostaglandin hormones that are found throughout the body and are involved in many inflammatory processes.

Certain furanocoumarins are toxic to fungi, which is interesting because of the role that fungi play in plant growth of very many other families of plants.

I happened to go to the plant day at the Botanic Garden and spoke with a researcher at the Cambridge University Department of Plant Sciences. She explained how most plant families regulate their intake of nutrients by a relationship with fungi in an around their roots and between plants.

The relationship, known as arbuscular mycorrhiza, is where a fungus penetrates the cells of the roots of a plant leading to a continuous orchestration of signals to benefit both the plant and the fungus.

She explained that some plants – I think she mentioned the carrot family – do not have this relationship, and neither do plants that live in water.

That fits because Giant Hogweed is in the umbelliferae family of celery, carrot, parsley etc. Umbelliferae are easily recognised by the circular flower heads a circle made up of tiny flowers on short stalks around a central stalk.

Somewhere along the line, tI;dr lost its semi-colon. So now we see tl;dr or tidr, or TLDR, and however it is written it stands for “too long; didn’t read.” It has become the way in which to say ‘Here is a summary of what is long and complicated to read and absorb’. Eventually, even this short explanation will be too complicated to spend time on, and we will be reduced to grunts.

The etymology dictionary says that ‘dote’ dates from around the year 1200 and meant to behave irrationally, do foolish things, be or become silly or deranged. That fits with the modern use of ‘dotage’ but in modern English the word ‘dote’ means to give someone a lot of love and attention, to try to satisfy their needs.

‘Hyraceum’, a popular ingredient used in perfume, is fossilized hyrax urine that has collected on rocks (from the Longleat guide)

Reported in The Week, 28 May 2022, page 6.

The number of men and women getting married has fallen to a new low, according to the Office for National Statistics. In 2019, 219,850 couples married in England and Wales, the fewest since 1893. Just one in five couples had a religious ceremony. The average age of the newlyweds reached a record high, of 32.3 years for women and 34.3 for men.