First Post

This is the First Post, which is much better than the Last Post, particularly for a dog walker, but then if you suffer my blog you will find the absurdities, abstruse historical illusions, non-sequiturs and other things I am guilty of, frequently.

Today I learned that the town in which I live, Picton, also has a verb 'to picton', a neologism stemming from 18th century scandal sheets describing the trial of Sir Thomas Picton folowing some rather unsavoury practices while Governor of Trinidad. Specifically he suspended a young girl (13 in one source 14 in another) by one arm, with her foot on a stake (flat from one source, sharpened from the other) a practice which became known as 'Pictonning'.

Picton subsequently lost his hat, and then his head, at Waterloo, but not before he had been given the Bath by Prinny (whose mother gave her name to the stretch of water we see every day) for his successes in the Peninsula Wars. Well he didn't actually lose his head but it was rather a mess and somewhat fatal.

Here endeth the lesson