My next thing was today - which, of course, was Good Friday, so I didn't have to work. I was thinking film - currently top of my YouTube film list was a documentary entitled Apocalypse: la 1ere Guerre Mondiale. Well, it'd be a chance to practice my French..
During the week, however, 45+ Not Grumpy Old Londoners advertised something for today that I could make, for once (i.e. early in the day, some day I wasn't working)! They're running these regular, virtual cafes, it seems - on Zoom. And today's was right up my alley - a history cafe, on the subject of Henry VIII. A 10-minute introduction, then we were to be split into smaller groups, with various different people guiding the discussions. And we'd just chat about historical topics, the whole thing lasting about an hour. Cool! I signed up.
It worked pretty flawlessly, I have to say - despite my connection freezing a couple of times. And someone else did report an inability to get audio. Never mind - most of us seemed ok, and they had a technical guy on hand to do stuff like split us into smaller groups, then return us to the main group at the end.
I have to say, the talk was a lot more interesting than I anticipated! First thing I learned was the origin of the name of the Isle of Dogs - rather than being so named because he took his hunting dogs there (as many people think), perhaps actually a corruption of the word "dyke", because they instituted major drainage schemes to drain the local, marshy ground.
More interesting still was the theory that the reason for Henry's erratic behaviour in later life might have been the jousting accident he suffered - I'd already gathered that this was the start of the trouble, but had never happened to hear that he was concussed afterwards, and that his contemporaries described him as having a much-changed personality thereafter. Wow.. that really throws a whole new light on things. Of course, they weren't studying brain damage in those days - and this would explain a lot.. I mean, he quite literally went crazy, marrying and disposing of wives willy-nilly, and no-one around him dared to displease him, for fear of losing their lives..
Well, the private discussions took place thereafter.. there were five in my room, and all quite friendly. I had fun, I had a good chat with the host, we found enough interesting to say about the topic in the half hour or so that we had.. I'd be happy to join them again for something. Although I don't think I'll ever really take to chatting to people online - it's not quite the same. And it was as well that we didn't have more time - two of the five were new, and didn't know the others, which didn't help the conversation to flow. Hey-ho. The pity of it is, of course, that it's proving so hard to join Meetups, as all my evenings are taken up, and generally my weekdays, too.. I do hope I can come to another of these.
Still thinking of film for tomorrow. But I decided to expand my film list - and so I checked the myriad of emails I've been getting, advertising things to do. Including film. Came across an interesting website - IdealFound claims to let you stream for free, and has a terrific library! Filtering by highest-rated on that site, I came across the Planet Earth documentary.. but when I had a go at streaming it, as a test, I was made to sign up for an account. Fair enough - except I seemed to have been included, automatically, on a free five-day Premium trial, and you pay for Premium. Unsure whether I'd be automatically signed up for Premium at the end of that, and finding at least Episode 1 of the series on YouTube, I cancelled my account. I might be overreacting - might be back to this site. Hell, with Premium, you can also download!
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