Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. The ancients thought the sun stopped briefly at this point and indeed, it takes a couple of days for us to measure that the days start getting longer, and see that the sun is reborn. On 25 December we can notice the difference – daylight lasts for one minute longer.
A very Happy Christmas to all Battleaxe readers!
This article from the Guardian tells us about the ancient roots of our Christmas celebrations.
Here’s Stonehenge. Philosopher tells me that at dawn on December 21 the sun also shines straight through our house from the front window out the back. Whoa… mystic or what. I’m never up early enough to see it, and anyway, today it was peeing down with rain…
What changes are afoot?
Hastings Battleaxe will soon be reborn with a new identity!
Well, around this time last year I mentioned that Hastings Battleaxe was planning to move from Google Blogger onto a proper, grown-up WordPress site?
After a year of procrastination I have found someone to help, and the migration process will begin anytime now. The difficulty is that the blog is almost seven years old, and there are – wait for it – 404 posts. I want to keep them all – Hastings Battleaxe is an on-line diary of life here in Hastings. This is a big job. I have been warned that I may lose the comments on the posts – they are in something called Google Plus, which is being discontinued this year anyway. Hopefully, in future it will be easier for people to comment – lots of people tell me they try, but Google won’t let them unless they have a Google+ profile.
Google Blogger, which hosts the blog now, is a free service supplied by Google and I have no control over it. They have already disabled the app which I used to use to write/edit posts on my iphone and ipad, and basically they can do what they like – they could impose a size limit or even delete my material. It is also a bit basic and clunky.
Clearly, I’ll give plenty of notice of the change, and a forwarding link will be left on Google Blogger to direct people to the new address. It will mean that I lose viewers for a bit, but will be better in the long run. Watch this space.
This is a short post – am so busy. We have just had Philosopher’s daughter Anna to stay, friend Shaun is coming today to stay for a few days, and because of his work commitments, we are having an early Christmas Day on Sunday 23. Then we are off to Birmingham later next week… then step-son Tom comes for New Year….
What the hell is this?
If anyone knows about Krampus, please let me know – no time to Google right now.
I found it when I was looking for a Christmas message for the top of this post.
If you want to see more creepy and very strange Victorian Christmas cards follow this link.
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