Over far more years than I can count on your fingers and toes and mine, I was compelled to save wise or endearing quotations as I chanced upon them. As it was long before home computers or self-publishing was an option, I had no idea what I was going to do with them. Like the stuff in the attic I just could not bring myself to discard them.
Saint Catherine’s Day is 25 November. It has retained its popularity throughout the centuries. It commemorates the martyrdom of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers. Origins and customs.
In the German-speaking countries, Thanksgiving is an autumn harvest celebration called Erntedank or Erntedankfest (“harvest thanksgiving festival”). The observance usually takes place in September or October, depending on the region. Similar harvest festivals are common in many countries and regions around the globe.
On 17 April 1941, Yugoslavia surrendered to Germany. The nation’s capital Belgrade had been single-handedly taken by Waffen-SS Captain Fritz Klingenberg and a squad of just six men five days earlier.
Once, while at the Royal Spanish Academy in Rome, I tried to give lectures, but one woman constantly blinded me with a camera flash, which prevented me from concentrating on my notes. I said that while I was working, they should stop working, because of the division of labour. The woman turned off her camera but clearly felt pained.
Inside the German Parliament, a tense debate is now taking place, interrupted by protests and boos, on a reform of the Law on Protection against Infections, with which the grand coalition intends to transfer powers to the Government, from the legislature, to address greater restrictions, until now prohibited by the courts.
The coronavirus pandemic has ‘unleashed state corruption on a grand scale’ that is ‘harmful to public health’, a scathing editorial in medical journal the venerated British Medical Journal says.
The cutely named ‘epidemic law’ would have handed the Danish government the power to enact compulsory quarantine measures against anyone they claim infected with a dangerous disease, but it was the part about vaccinations that caused the biggest uproar. Shockingly, a law in Denmark that would have given authorities the power to forcibly inject people with a coronavirus vaccine has been abandoned after nine days of public protests.
Disturbingly, those with present experience of life in the Soviet Union from the 1970s to the collapse of the USSR in 1990 are nostalgic about their life in the former Soviet Bloc.
Every year on November 5th, for reasons lost in antiquity, the villagers of Ottery St Mary, Devon in England’s West Country race through the streets carrying heavy barrels full of flaming tar in one of the quirkiest of British traditions. The West Country has a history of torchlight processions and a tradition of burning barrels and rolling them down the streets, but Ottery is the only village where barrels aren’t rolled but carried above the head. The tradition is believed to have started in the 17th century, possibly when someone decided that rolling barrels were tame and carrying barrels on the shoulders was far more appealing.
Michael Walsh Stories and Books 
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