Went to get my car's warrant of fitness on Monday. I'm going to a new place called Straight Torque (!) in a part of the city that I usually drive through. I had 30 minutes to wait, so went for a walk around the area, an industrial/light industrial part of Christchurch. It's were all the real things get done, full of automotive repairs, plumbers, gasfitters, chandlers, printers, sign writers, glass fitters, and demolition sales yards, with a huge depot for empty containers (the big ones that sail on ships) stacked thirty feet high in the old railway yards. I really enjoyed my walk, very different to the leafy suburb where I usually exercise. Things are ugly and utilitarian, but in a good useful way. Not a place to go at night though. I felt like I'd been in another city, a leaner, meaner one that didn't exist in the tourist promos but interesting all the same.
Just finished reading a life of Katherine Parr. ("Katherine the queen" by Someone-or-other). The question I'm always left with in these biographies of the long-dead is how we can claim to really know what their lives were like, or empathise with them. It was another world, full of extremist religious beliefs and great cruelty, where people's motivations seem quite inexplicable. Fear of eternal hellfire and damnation didn't seem to be a detterent for doing bad things, though. I suppose if you repented on your deathbed and gave your worldly goods to the Church you got out of punishment. This was only really an option for the aristocracy; ordinary people with no money or property just had to burn.
Henry VIII really was a shit. No tolerance for differences of opinion there.
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