I have just read that Greta Thunberg is going to be on CNN's panel of Covid19 experts. That should be fun.
Greta is smarter than the rest of CNN reporters combined. The NASA scientist's flat tone of voice when she says, "Even a small black hole would suck in our entire universe" cracks me up every time I watch this.
Toilet brush - luxury. We used to used to use carborundum paper and finish of wit' emery cloth - if we were lucky. We had smoothest bums in Yorkshire, our dad used to run micrometer ower them and if they were owt he'd hit us with a fettling 'ammer - but we were 'appy then.
Some cast members survived to appear in further historical farm programmes. "Tales from the Green Valley" "Victorian Farm" "Edwardian Farm" "Wartime Farm" "Tudor Monastery Farm"
We've got a whole living history site dedicated to that and much else early 17th Century, Plymouth Plantation. It's not an era I'd want to live in. Hobbes, who did, was the man who came up with that line about the lives of most men being nasty, brutish, and short.
Triggered. Sorry. Average life expectancy not much different from ours across millennia - once you survive infancy. It's a statistical thing people persistently refer to, (based on what statistics are available - thin), but if you got past the rather higher childbirth & baby mortality rate, where modern interventions have made a massive difference, you had about as good a chance of your three score & ten as now. Not that Hobbes really meant it in the way it's usually quoted. He was suggesting that's what people's lives would automatically be like outside of society's influence. He'd still say it if he were about today - slightly strange man. Though Leviathan has a few themes that might make people go 'hmmm' regarding lockdowns, distancing, & consent to authority. Apologies again. Seriously. Can't help myself. I'll get my cloak. And nobody mention people being physically shorter. Or I might start banning.
I don't mind being corrected, it's always good to learn new stuff. Still, the 17th Century...no modern sanitation, no painless dentistry, so-so literacy rates, limited education, narrow choice of employment, patchy law enforcement, religious bigotry written right into the legal code, occasional outbursts of plague...well, you can have it. I mean, they used pikes and matchlocks, for Pete's sake, what kind of century is that?
Throw in the Reformation and a few famines and you have the motivation for my ancestors to make an ocean cruise.
It was the best possible century available at the time as the events were the sum total of everyone's actions. It was the best of times and the worst of times. The 20th Century may have had more advanced sanitation, health care and widespread education and higher literacy rates, but we also had over 100,000,000 deaths caused by political bigotry, two World Wars, the collapse of at least seven imperial empires followed by the inevitable rush to fill the vacuum, leading to the enslavement of half of Europe and large parts of Asia for over 75 years. The nuclear and biological capacity to wipe out all life and destroy the planet ten times over. Not to mention the acquisition of power and wealth into the hands of ever fewer people to the point that the top 500 wealthiest people practically own the planet. A Spanish Flu epidemic that is estimated to have killed, 50,000,000 people, mass starvation, the destruction of the creatures that we share the planet with, leading to the near mass extinction of all large mammals, fish, birds and insects. But there is nothing to worry about as we have Smart Phones, Netflix, MacDonald's, Love Island, 45 types of coffee in the supermarkets, recreational drugs and a ready supply of alcohol. Bread and circuses, the same as it ever was.
