Oil Drum Lane

  This website is simply  a scrolling list of scribblings and musings in no particular order. To see if there is anything that interests you, check the 'Contents' index above; all the posts are linked from there.    It isn't a diary or a diatribe. Rather, it is  a collection of notes from the remote  periphery of everyday relevance,  on offbeat places, real and imagined, and the events and people that shaped them. The content wanders but has a London bias. My gaff, my rules.  It is primarily configured for reading on a phone, but the Blogger software is imperfect, so there will be glitches, and the graphics can wander around the page. I don't have an excuse for the typos and factual errors.  NOW WITH LESS  FEWER TYPOS AND SLIGHTLY IMPROVED GRAMMAR!  Why Oil Drum Lane?  The boomers among you might recall the TV comedy 'Steptoe & Son'.  They were Rag & Bone, living and working in an imagined scrapyard in West London....

  My notes on this site primarily focus on places and histories, topics about which I have some knowledge. Some of them are yoga for the imagination, for example, the attempts to visualise prehistoric landscapes and posts on exoplanets and film sets. By contrast, my aim here is to explore a boundary of what we CAN imagine about reality. Worryingly, it involves physics and maths, so I will be plumbing the depths of my ignorance as well.  The starting point is what science tells us about the reality of our universe, and to try to make sense of it. It is the difference between knowing that E=mc² and knowing that it implies that you can't exceed the speed of light.  Scientists and mathematicians tell us that there might be different realities and different dimensions. If so, what I want is to know what these parallel worlds might be like, and because I cannot understand or articulate the maths, I want a picture, a map or a credible thought experiment.  First, though, I h...

This is a post about the Fairytale King of Bavaria, AKA Mad Ludwig, his glitteringly irresponsible life, and the crazy, colourful, wonderful palaces he built. Europe in the early 1800s was in turmoil, largely due to Napoleon, and Germany as we know it today did not exist. Bavaria had been  an Electorate within the Holy Roman Empire, but in 1806 it emerged from the chaos as a kingdom. Its Elector, Maximillian I, became a constitutional monarch, and they gained a parliament, albeit mainly comprising the elite.  He was succeeded in 1825 by his son Ludwig I, a patron of the arts, who unfortunately fell in with an Irish showgirl and courtesan going by the name of Lola Montez, who irritated enough people to get him deposed in favour of his son, Maximilian II. There is no space here, but Lola deserves a post in her own right.  Lola Max II was a popular, effective and modernising monarch; he preserved Bavaria’s precarious independence and had two sons by his wife, Marie of Prus...