Deb that is interesting. Will try and track it down and have a listen (and maybe email to my Mum ). The baking yesterday was a success, and all of the blueberry muffins are gone.
Sybil I think I am the only person I know having some success with a playpen. When I put P in it he has a quick shout, but then sits down and plays with some toys. This is how the vacuuming gets done without P pulling the Dyson over on top of himself.
Essie glad to know you are ok. Good luck with all the book shenanigans. Are you going to have a massive book launch in Waterstones on Piccadilly that we can all get an invite to for our signed copies? That would be a meetup worth travelling from Scotland for.
I enjoyed reading your thoughts on medieval society, especially how differently theft and homicide were viewed. Interesting, as both crimes are forbidden in the Ten Commandments. A very religious society ought to view them as being equally bad. In reality societies adapt their scriptures to meet their needs.
You have got me wondering though about when the concept of "community" as we understand it today came to exist. Possibly in order to have a sense of community an individual must also have a sense of the opposite i.e. that which is private. What you wrote suggests that this was not possible in Medieval Britain. It probably wasn't a reality until the Industrial Revolution. Massive migration to cities meant that everyone no longer knew everyone's business. People beginning to work en mass for cash rather than on the land separated the home from the workplace. This enabled a sense of the public and the private to exist. If you think about the Victorian era this is when philanthropy from a few industrialists begins. Perhaps this is symptomatic of the sense that they had a certain responsibility to look after those who had done less well out of the industrial boom than them. A sense of moral responsibility certainly, and possibly a sense of community/society kicking in too. It is not the Church per se that provides the glue to create a community. However, in the Industrial Age the Church provided a structure that could counteract the break-up of agricultural communities, and an adaptable moral code with which to navigate a brave new world. For example the Temperance movement (abstaining from alcohol) was a Christian movement, and yet in Medieval Times everyone drank like fishes. I seem to recall (Essie correct me if I am wrong) that monks and nuns had huge daily allowances of mead and ale. Basically everyone must have been half cut in Medieval Britain even though it was a deeply religious society. What we can conclude is that Christianity like all religions instead of offering absolutes has adapted through the ages to meet the psychological need for comfort and clarity that we as humans have.
Better stop as I need to cook tea, but there is a whole piece left about where this leaves us today: growing atheism; growing religious extremism; lower levels of happiness amongst people in post-industrial societies etc. I will leave it to someone else to expand upon.