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On This Day
EVENTS: King Gnog of the Geographically Non-Specific Saxons orders the destruction of Chelmsford (not yet complete), 868; first International Convention of Troubadours triggers first environmental health inquiry into noise pollution, 1170; New Zealand is discovered by Bernartt the Bewildered, who subsequently forgets all about it, 1301; Charles I unveils giant statue of Archbishop Laud in the bath, made entirely from the severed ears of religious maniacs, to a mixed reception, 1639; Dodsley publishes Dr Johnson’s ‘Dictoinary of the Egnlish Languoge’, withdraws it from sale and strangles his chief proof-reader, 1754; ‘steam telescope’ patented by Sir Inigo Ninny, 1811; British troops in Crimea endure terrible suffering when Mary Seacole sings hits from the Bay City Rollers, 1855; Irvine Welsh utters his first swearword, 1961.
BIRTHS: Invidius, inventor of social phobia, 132 AD (returned to womb, 133); Belinda of Carthage, hack writer employed to ‘spice up’ the Confessions of Saint Augustine, 374; Marta Klemvert, illiterate Dutchwoman who styled herself Pope Clement the Eighty-Eighth and lived undetected in the Vatican for thirty years, 1587; Tarquin, Duke of Northallerton, eldest son of Her Majesty The Queen by her as yet undisclosed first marriage to Captain The Honourable Rhett Studd-Trott, 1945.
DEATHS: Gabriel Napper, autocratic leader of the Very Extreme Diggers, a small movement dedicated to the principle of absolute equality, dies of apoplexy after being contradicted, 1663; Brigitte L’Estrapade, avant-garde poet, is suffocated by agents of the Académie Française, 1780; Dame Hysteria Del Monte, diva, bursts, 1934.
REMINDER: British Anomalous Time begins tonight. You should hurl all clocks in your household to the floor and jump on them repeatedly in hobnail boots until they make little pinging noises.
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