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The City of Westminster website is seri­al­ising the diary of a mid-nineteenth century wharf clerk named Nathaniel Bryceson.

Highlights include visits to the gallows to watch exe­cu­tions, the pur­chasing of cheese, and Bryceson’s meetings with his romantic interest Ann Fox (it is noted in the intro­duction that some of these episodes are written in “sur­pris­ingly explicit lan­guage”, though the nearest I’ve found so far is an entry from 2 January 1846 in which he ‘tastes her puddings’).

(Westminster City Council, via The Cat’s Meat Shop)

No causal connection has wealthy beginning

In the middle of 1944, a series of appar­ently innocuous answers in the crossword puzzle of the Daily Telegraph rang alarm bells at MI5. In the space of a few weeks, the words ‘Utah’, ‘Omaha’, ‘Neptune’, ‘mul­berry’ and ‘overlord’ all fea­tured as solu­tions to the crossword. What was sig­ni­ficant was that these were all code­words relating to the soon-to-occur (and sup­posedly secret) Allied invasion of Normandy.

Coincidence? Espionage? Treason? The answer, like the solution to a good cryptic clue, is as appealing as it is obvious.

P. E. Warburton’s culinary tip #1: It can take as long as 36 hours to boil a camel to the point at which it can be devoured in its entirety.

Totally unsur­prised to learn that the first attempt to walk across the Nullarbor Plain was met with a certain amount of difficulty.

Scuttlers

The ‘scut­tlers’ of nine­teenth century Manchester: like our ‘lar­rikins’, but with a more honest name. Author of a just released book on the gangs of nine­teenth century Manchester and London says he was fas­cinated by the “unchanging role of dress and per­sonal appearance as a sign of belonging to a gang”. An example is the ‘donkey fringe’ hair­style, “which required close cropping at the back but an angled fringe at the front, with the hair longer on the right”.