Seeing Henry 8

At Portsmouth this morning, as I strolled through the entrance ahead of the hordes of school holiday kids, I was surprised to run into a rather corpulent, bearded chap dressed rather extravagantly. He looked very much like this:

As he approached, I doffed my hat and said “Good morning, your majesty,” and he graciously enquired as to my well being. I wondered how hot he was going to get in his Tudor togs. It was a jolly start to my day at the Dockyard this week.

I was back on the boxes of books to be disposed of with the added spice of actually having to search for copies of certain tomes on a big UK database. It’s called Copac and I am amazed I wasn’t told about it when I did my Masters. Unless it’s so new that it wasn’t around then. Anyway, it’s pretty powerful and very, very handy when you’re in the library business…even as a lowly volunteer.

The books were the usual mix of interesting and dull though I did find this lovely postcard in one of them.

The book didn’t seem to have anything to do with the postcard so I’m assuming, like me, the book owner used it as a bookmark because it was to hand. The reverse of the photo is a list of those present.

While it’s clearly in Spain (a place called Denia, to be exact), I have no idea who they are or when (I wish people would date these things!). Given Denia is in Alicante, I can only imagine it was much nicer then. Whatever, it’s all rather mysterious. Mind you, I think Bertram did a grand job with the camera.

So that was my day really. Of course the weather continues ridiculously hot, which I detest, though arriving and leaving by the water is always a few degrees cooler. By the time I reached home though I could have done with a swimming pool.

This week I noticed that the Warrior is having a paint job.

The grey splotches are not the pox but patching ahead of the new coat of black.