It has to be said, I'm a bit of a history nerd, period. It doesn't really matter what sort of history; I'd probably draw the line at something really esoteric like the role of Confucius in ancient China or whatever it was called then, but you get the drift. I like noodling around in the past and trying to imagine what it was really like 'back in the day' to use an oft quoted phrase.
I'm a sucker for a decent history series on the TV and there are some particularly good presenters such as Dan Snow and Lucy Worsley. Bettany Hughes does some excellent stuff as well:
...and great though she is, she does have a couple of outstanding attributes that make it very difficult for a chap to concentrate on the program for any sustained time. Another particular favourite is Professor Mary Beard:
.......who may not be quite so outwardly forthcoming as our Bettany, but this is what Wiki has to say about her:
'Dame Winifred Mary Beard, DBE, FSA, FBA, FRSL is an English classicist specialising in Ancient Rome. She is a trustee of the British Museum and formerly held a personal professorship of classics at the University of Cambridge'.
The Prof. has a very engaging style as she merrily cycles along the ancient Appian Way, stopping her red bike now and again at some obscure Roman tomb to read the Latin text, some 2000 or so years old. The salient point though, in case you missed it, is that she can read the inscriptions and tell us what that long dead Roman is saying to us in the present day.
Strangely, I'm in awe of her ability to decode those old texts; it's something that I would love to be able to do. Some people of my generation yearned to play the guitar and blast out all the Stones and Beatles riffs; I wanted to learn Latin and read the ancient inscriptions in Rome.
What though, (and you're right to wonder) has all this meandering got to do with wood mangling? Most of the time, I scribble all over the work in pencil to mark stuff (face side, edge etc) and it's especially useful to use sticky dots:
...to identify the corners of a drawer say, when cutting dovetail joints, but at some point the dots and pencil scrbblings have to be removed; then you're stuck! A really elegant way to mark which bit goes with what is to use a 3mm chisel:
...to inscribe some ROMANUS NUMERI, remembering that '9' is IX not VIIII as I once did!
I think Professor Beard would approve.
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