Oil Drum Lane

  Schooled by Catholic nuns and priests, I was fed the full-fat hellfire and damnation diet. Death seemed remote at the time, and damnation was not a worry as long as we observed the rituals of confession and absolution. Nobody suggested that we could ease any residual fears by simply embracing a different religion. To be clear, and so you know where I am coming from here, I now belong to the church of ‘dead means dead’, and accept that my fate is to end up as worm food and reduced to my constituent atoms. Dead is Dead The result was that it never occurred to young me that it was only some Christians who were into this fire and brimstone stuff. So, when I finished researching (yes, I do some) and writing up my posts on the landscapes of hell, I decided to explore both the origins of those ideas and what people thought happened to evil-doers before Christianity emerged. To my surprise, the answer was ‘not much’. Trying to make sense of early British paganism is fraught with a lack o...

The Metropolitan Line was planned to extent into the heart of Buckinghamshire, and for a while it did, all the way of Verney Junction. See the story of Edward Watkin here.  Link Then, and to a lesser extent now, the fabulously rich Rothschild family controlled swathes of the County. They  were a banking dynasty, the  Rockefellers of the Victorian era, who seemed to congregate around t he Aylesbury Vale, which became known as Rothschildshire. Now, the area is littered with their fabulous mansions. This is the story of some of them.  Their origins in the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt  were far from fabulous. It was  a grindingly impoverished hellhole where, i n 1743, Amschel Moses Bower, a goldsmith by trade and aided by his formidable and capable wife Gutle,  expanded into finance as a way to make money when many other avenues were closed to Jews .  The Frankfurt Ghetto, a century later  Houses in the ghetto were not numbered, so he placed a sign...