Royal Progress

Henry VIII: Man and Monarch is the summer exhibition at the British Museum.

The problem facing anyone seeking the man is the ubiquitous authorised magnificence of Henry. The approved, carefully symbolic state portraits. There seem to exist no affectionate sketches of him off duty.

So how was the BM going to show me the humanity behind the image?

Well, by bringing together for the first time a stunning collection of manuscript after exquisite manuscript. Many of these are annotated by Henry himself.

Included is his much-handled illuminated prayer roll illustrating Henry’s simple devout faith. Also, sketches for a very early PR exercise - The Field of the Cloth of Gold - show the detailed planning and no-expense spared mentality behind Henry’s well-documented desire to be taken seriously in Europe.

The BM persuaded the Vatican to release a fascinating letter, hand-written by Henry, setting out his intention to marry Anne Boleyn. Amazing artefacts, but nothing we didn’t know.

But then, in a little cabinet is a sample of his mother’s handwriting. Next to it is an example of Henry’s signature which we’ve seen again and again in other displays. The explanatory note states Henry wrote the letter ‘r’ as a ‘z’. This wasn’t typical of the day, and the only other person who seems to have done this is his mother, Elizabeth of York

And so here at last is the sense of a Henry we didn’t know and wouldn’t have suspected. Unlike most royal or aristocratic children, he was taught to read by, and so we can assume, brought up by, not a team of scheming uncles or advisors, but by his own mother. Henry the statesman, Henry the general, Henry the beheader of wives started life as a much-loved little boy at his mother's knee learning to write.

300 words

Yikes!

Argh! Just looking at the class website to follow the new blogs - note to self : must allocate some hours to read everything - click back to Tuesday Writing Class and it's changed in the 5 mins I've been away! I'm even further behind than I thought! At least if I haven't read Saturday's paper by Sunday I don't have to open Sunday's till I have. I've been at my desk for half an hour now, which is half of the time I have allocated to finishing off my 300 word informative piece, and I'm no nearer. Sorry about the exclamation marks - these are stressful times.

Enthusiasts required

I quote Sally...."Think of an interesting event. It might be a celebration, a visit to an art gallery, film, or a hobby show. Write it up in your blog ". And there's the rub. "An interesting event". I'm not one of life's enthusiasts, and enthusiasm makes me slightly uncomfortable. It's probably because I 'm a brummie that my natural way of looking at the world is with a bit of a tut. A hobby show? Have you lost your mind? They're like cat nip to enthusiasts - all trying out the latest developments in balsa wood or testing miniature lighting systems for their dollshouses. I don't mean to say that I don't love some things but I feel it is a bit pushy to be enthusiastic about them. Enthusiasm is only a short rant away from evangelicalism. And then there's the responsibility. It doesn't bother some people, they say, all fired up, "you MUST see this film/read this book/see this exhibition", and, gullible fool that I am, I believe them and off I go. Velazquez at the National a couple of years ago was very good. I really like REM and the Beatles. My favourite film is True Romance. Hmmm..300 words of sustained interest is going to be a struggle.

Scare Stories

I have been half-heartedly scanning news stories to put spin on them since Tuesday's flurry, and had even resorted to The Sun (well, 8 million readers can't be wrong. Or can they?) when I saw this headline: Baby's Miracle Train Escape .

Even seeing the word "Escape" and so knowing the baby survives, it still makes harrowing viewing. I often wonder who stands around filming tragedies with their mobile phone but I guess this comes from CCTV.

I've had to drag my daughter in to watch it, email the link to a few friends and generally waste a bit more time. So still no news spin. Perhaps The Sun was not the best place to look.

I didn't have a clue.

Imagine, the inventors of Cluedo and Buccaneer were next-door neighbours in Kings Heath in the 1940s. See this about the Cluedo Inventor

Spinning around

Further to richyork today. Here are my spin-offs from today's news (after failed attempt to spin anything off Al Martino's demise).

These two stories had a common thread:Man in 80s detained over attack

and Woman, 70, held over PM hate mail . Geriatric crime. My spin on this

would be what is life like behind bars for the elderly first offender? I imagine old old lags are used to the privations and indignities, but what is it like for the newbies? What facilities exist for them? Presumably they don't have massive drug habits, except maybe a hankering for Werthers Originals, and I imagine they are not pestered too much for sex. What helps them make it through the night (or the six to nine months with time off for good behaviour)?

And then there was this 'Healthy' yoghurt banned . The headline is misleading, because of course it's not Actimel that is banned but the advertising strap that says it's good at preventing illness in children. My spin for this would be other outlandish advertising claims. You could go with a serious piece about recent claims for well known modern products such as this this , or hark back to the days when smoking was just about the best thing you could do to remain young and beautiful here .

Hmmm, I quite like both of those. If only I hadn't spent so long with Al Martino and his long-lived contemporaries. Oh well, there's always tomorrow.

Old Crooners Never Die

I flicked through the headlines this morning to see what brilliant ideas they would send sparking around the old synapses. First up, Al Martino's death at the age of 82. Every newspaper mentioned that he was the artist who had the very first UK number one hit when he topped the fledgling NME pop chart in 1952. Here we go, I thought. Who else was in that first chart of 27 years ago, I googled. Well, no one actually. Al made number 1 in November 1952 and stayed there till after Christmas. Ok - let's not nitpick -1953 then. Well, the chartsters of '53 were a roll call from my Dad's record collection...Frankie Laine, Guy Mitchell, Perry Como. And Eddie Fisher - wasn't he married to Liz Taylor and died tragically young? There was my angle...how stars of the fifties had burned out young and how amazing it was that Al Martino was the last to go. So a bit more research revealed that Guy Mitchell died 1999 aged 72, Perry Como died in 2001 aged 79 and Frankie Laine died in 2007 aged 94. These were not the hard living rockers I had hoped to find. Well there was still Eddie Fisher. More googling. More disappointment. Wrong husband. It was Mike Todd who died in the plane crash, Eddie's predecessor in the Taylor nuptuals. Eddie's still alive and well at the age of 81. Wish someone had told me that this morning.

Teatime

This evening, as six-thirty approaches and you lay the table for the family meal, ask yourself this. When did we as a nation stop eating tea and start eating dinner?

Tea is a quick meal, and it usually involves toast. Dinner, on the other hand, takes ages. There is, inevitably, the shopping and cooking, but before that there are hours and hours spent just wondering exactly what to cook. Heaven forbid we should cook the same thing twice in one month. We need variety and excitement on our plates. We no longer eat simply to replenish our fuel supply, dinner has to be an event. A mini dinner party for the family every night. Newspapers provide a daily recipe should inspiration be lacking; magazines extol new twists on old favourites. And television is constantly banging on about cooking. The Channel 4 show, Come Dine With Me in which four people throw dinner parties then award each other scores out of 10 in a bid to win £1,000, was first broadcast to a tiny audience in 2005, but it is now watched by 3.5 million every week and is regularly More4's most watched programme. Pressure to cook new and interesting things is all around us.

Of course, quality family time is essential, and how lovely it is to have everyone together around the table sharing a lovingly prepared meal. But what about those couple of nights each week when having dinner together is just too difficult? One of you is late back from work, another one plays squash, and yet another has had a McDonalds on the way home from school and isn’t hungry anyway. Once again, the mildly spiced Moroccan lamb with apricot couscous, which took you an hour and half to make, is wasted.

These are the evenings when everyone just wants tea. So why not a quick plate of beans on toast? Well for a start, it appears you might not have bought any bread for toasting. A spokeswoman from the British Nutrition Foundation said recently that consumption of all bread and white bread in the UK has been declining since the 1940s. However, at this same time the prevalence of overweight and obesity has been increasing. Yes we’re getting fatter, because we’re sitting down to a great big dinner every night when beans of toast would have done.

Obviously, if we haven’t got the toast, we don’t need the beans either. Beans consumption has fallen by more than 20% since 2000. It's such a crisis that, in an attempt to instil the beans habit into young people, food manufacturer Branston has started a "baked beans student loan scheme". If you e-mail them, they will deliver 24 tins to your door every term for the next three years. And you don't have to pay for them until you start work.

But it’s not just young people that are being reminded of the simple and nutritious pleasure of teatime. In August 2008 the MRC Human Nutrition Research wrote and published an article recommending which foods old people should eat to meet their nutritional needs. Toast with pilchards, sardines, beans, cheese, ravioli, tinned spaghetti or well-cooked eggs featured very near the top of the list. Exactly. Something on toast for tea.

By all means still rustle up a complicated authentic tex-mex banquet on a Monday evening after work if you feel you must, but don’t wait until you’re old to rediscover the delights of sardines on toast or the perfect poached egg. Bring back teatime. Reclaim your evenings.

Homework

This first post is my homework. In fact it is two homeworks for two different classes. Monday's class is required to write an article and Tuesday's class has to create a blog. So here is Tuesday's homework, which provides a convenient place to do Monday's exercise. This will not be the most interesting post you have ever read. I hope it will get better.