Oil Drum Lane

  This weblog  isn't a diary or a diatribe. Rather, it is  a scrolling collection of notes  on offbeat places, real and imagined, and the events and people that shaped them. The content is never knowingly relevant and wanders, but has a London & South Eastern bias. My gaff, my rules. It is formatted for reading on a phone, so I try to keep the word count in the 2000-3000 range.   To see if there is anything that interests you, check the 'Contents' index above; all the posts are linked from there.      A note on methodology. I read a lot; books, articles and (thanks to the British Library) academic papers.  If there are conflicting theories, I usually go with the most popular or credible one, as the word count does not allow me to explore alternatives.  AI is helpful for quick checks on dates etc. You can tell that I don't use it for much else by the typos! Why Oil Drum Lane?  The boomers among you might recall the TV comedy...

  Tom Coryat  In 1577, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, a Rector in Somerset had a son named Tom. Connections got him an education at Oxford and, later, a position as a wit and joker at the court of the teenage Prince Henry, the son of Elizabeth’s successor, James 1st. Prince Henry   In 1608, he decided to leave this and become England's first backpacker, travelling around Western Europe, driven by curiosity and the possibility of enhancing his reputation by publishing a book about his journey.  Western Europe was well known, not least because the English had popped over the water for a recreational invasion.  Later, he added to that by embarking on a much longer trudge across Asia to India, a remote and mysterious land.    Tom's contribution was the descriptions of his trip, which introduced  the civilisations of the east to the English public.  By all accounts, he was a short, skinny and unprepossessing man, an affable but long-winded odd...

A Preface If you're not a Palaeogeography geek – and odds on you are not – then you probably struggle to make coherent sense of what you know of early Earth.  The story plays out over billions of years and, while geologists have helpfully sliced it into Aeons, Periods, Epochs and Ages, there is constant change within each. Can you place the birth of the moon, snowball Earth, and Jurassic Park within this? Do you want to? It seems to be like a four-dimensional Rubik’s cube, where each little cube represents a slab of the Earth’s crust which can change its position, shape and colour.  There are YouTube videos of the movements, but while pretty, they are often contradictory, confusing or just wrong. Part of the problem is the labelling. Do you need to know that synapsids and sauropsids were on the rise in the Permian, late in the Palaeozoic era of the Phanerozoic aeon? I suspect not.  For my part, I am happy to leave this type of detail to geology’s trainspotters and to peop...