Julia's Sundial

When people pretend that history doesn’t mean anything, that somehow it doesn’t matter, I have to burst out laughing. If there’s one period of history I find it hard to stomach, it’s the 1600s.

It should be the century that appeals to me the most. Shakespeare is still around for a while, and you have a revolution, a great fire, and Christopher Wren. There were some truly magnificent minds kicking around in the old 1600s, great geniuses and philosophers, Robert Hooke, Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal.

But I come from Glasgow, and apart from Northern Ireland there’s nowhere else in the British Isles that still thinks it is in the 1600s sometimes. I don’t need to open a history book to find out all about the Protestant vs Catholic years. I know enough from what I’ve seen after Old Firm matches.

So I do try to read up on Wren and his friends, while ignoring as much as possible all that other stuff. It makes me feel ill just reading about it.