Archive

Popular posts from this blog

Stretch yawn faint

Occasionally I'm overwhelmed with the urge to have a really good stretch, tensing my muscles until they tremble, tipping my head back and unleashing a full on yawn. Lately this is followed by a faint spell - the world goes distant, my vision fades, and everything gets a bit woozy. After a few breaths the world re-intrudes, and normality resumes. It hasn't concerned me, but after a particularly strong episode today my curiosity was peaked, and I typed 'stretch yawn faint' into Google (hallowed be thy results, for thine is the engine, the spider and the crawler) to see what cropped up. It turns out the combo of stretching and tipping the head back starves the brain of oxygen. The stretch lengthens the blood vessels causing a blood pressure drop, whilst it also creates demand for oxygen in the tensing muscles, and finally the head tip constricts an artery in the neck which cuts off the blood to the brain. I'm not sure how common it is in absolute terms, but the f...
Read more

A bleak situation

I'd grown up considering myself half-Geordie, as my dad's family came from County Durham, but while researching the family tree I discovered that two branches of the 'Geordie' family originally came from East Anglia. My ggg grandfather William Rufus Lincoln , born in Saxlingham in 1837, left Norfolk with his wife and two children to go to County Durham in the 1870s, where he worked in the collieries. My ggg grandfather Samuel Littlewood , born in Great Plumstead in 1824, migrated from Norfolk with his wife and their 7 children to County Durham in the 1870s, where he became a miner. The two hundred miles these families moved typifies the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, when hundreds of thousands of people left impoverished agricultural areas to find work in mines, factories and mills. Many families emigrated to Canada, North America, South America and Australia. In the early part of the 1800's there had been an influx of people into Norfolk, as trade a...
Read more

William Boynton Butler

Image
William Boynton Butler was my grandfather's oldest brother, fondly known as Uncle Willie by my branch of the family, and as Uncle Billie by his wife Clara's family. Sadly I never got the chance to meet him as he died before I was born. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for an extremely brave action during the First World War, shielding a passing troop of infantry from a mis-fired mortar round with his own body until they were safely past, risking being blown to pieces. I gather from family chatter that he was an unassuming man, somewhat embarrassed at the subsequent fuss, perhaps because his actions were an instinctive reaction to the situation, or perhaps because all the men who fought in that war risked their lives daily in the trenches, and many didn't survive. I've published a number of newspaper clippings and photographs collated by my aunt, along with his citation, army records, and a brief biography to our Family Tree . William Boynton Butler - Biography ...
Read more