General Health Maintenance

Jeune femme des Iles Sandwich dansant,  1822, Jacques Arago (1770 – 1855) Kuini Liliha, this 17 year old hula dancer, an ali’i, a noble woman of O’ahu Island, was depicted by Jacques Arago in 1819 dancing the sitting hula. Hula, of course, was also performed standing – one way…

Lighting Up, Brigitte Bardot (1934 – ) “I gave my beauty and my youth to men. I am going to give my wisdom and experience, the best of me, to animals”, Brigitte Bardot, 1973. Eh bien, alors… *** On Friday 14 June 1940, closely ordered long columns…

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, 1844-1900   As the savvy but occasionally sanctimonious butler Jeeves said of his nitwit master Bertie Wooster’s frightful ex-fiancée Florence – “It was her intention to start you almost immediately upon Nietzsche. You would not like Nietzsche, Sir. He is fundamentally unsound”. Carry on, Jeeves,…

Nu Bleu : Souvenir de Biskra, Henri Matisse, 1907   Pierre and Ferdie were having a long and indulgent boys’ holiday, a pair of blasé boulevardiers escaping their tedious Paris stomping ground. In rather less restrictive Italy, they stumbled on a notorious friend: André had just returned from newly colonised…

Well, we think we have Wegovy as the manufacturer Novo Nordisk announced the release of this semaglutide product to the UK this morning, 4 September. As you probably know from the press, doctors have been forbidden to prescribe the previous semaglutide products, Ozempic and Rybelsus, for weight loss, but are…

Auguste Rodin whimsically dismissed his latest effort with a casual Gallic shrug as “a sculpted knick-knack following the usual formula”. In 1889, when the public had first set eyes on the larger than life marble of the ill-fated Paola and Francesca of Dante’s Inferno, there was a critical furore –…

I am already sick of love, My very gentle Valentine, Since for me, you were born too late, And I for you was born too soon. God forgives him who has estranged Me from you for the whole year. I am already sick…

Teresa Mary O’Shea, our very own “Two Ton Tessie from Tennessee”, was born in Cardiff to the son of Irish emigrants, a gasworks labourer, and his Lancastrian wife, Nellie. In 1919, at the age of six, she appeared on stage as “The Wonder of Wales”, and, at the age of…

As my granny would say, “I have a cold in the nose, dear”. She meant, of course, that she had a runny nose, coryza in medical Latin – in other words, she was discharging clear mucus from the nares, arising from acutely inflamed mucosal epithelium of the respiratory tract! The…

  Le Bon Genre No4, 1801  A CHRISTMASSY SORT OF STORY ABOUT ICE CREAM Nobody sensible in Europe had given a tinker’s cuss about any sort of use for ice. In the English winterland, cold killed. It was difficult for most to eat enough to generate adequate body heat. Children…