Tag: family

A Musical Odyssey

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European culture offers a feast of quality music that accompanies the more discerning on a journey from womb to tomb. Perhaps these suggestions will inspire you to explore and enjoy the finest music created by Europe’s most gifted musicians over centuries. Do feel free to YouTube or purchase any of the following titles that will familiarise you with music that will continue to enhance your life. Think of each track as a glass of sublime aphrodisiacal wine. I think you will return again and again.

The Cossack Inferno

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100 years ago, in November 1920, the White Guards evacuated from the Crimea. Off media radar is one of the most horrific holocausts to stigmatise the half-human race. The proud Cossack had long suffered stigmatisation, hate and horror by the Bolsheviks. On November 14, 1920 one of the largest flotillas in European history was moored off the bay at Sevastopol in Crimea. The rescue by armada included 150 ships of every size and type imaginable. Most but not all were ships of Imperial Russia.

OLD AGE IS AN ILLUSION

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The human condition is to segment life; for instance, Shakespeare’s ‘seven ages of man’. Life is a little like the seasons so dress for the season whatever the weather is doing. Or like the ticking clock, ‘if that is the time then tired I must be.’

The Ottery Tar Barrels Burning Festival

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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.