… about the quiet day today.

I went out for the baguette at lunchtime, and I had a crash out for an hour or so this afternoon, and that was my lot.

Mind you, I struck it lucky at the supermarket. There were two black plastic crates in the rubbish bins and so I liberated them on the way back. Together with the one that I liberated yesterday about which I forgot to tell you, that’s three this week and I think that I’m going to have to start to move them all down to Caliburn. I’m not going to be short of crates for packing, am I?

Last night was a bad night. There was a lot of noise in the building again – people coming in late and talking, that kind of thing. Of course, I do realise that the problem lies not with my housemates but with my light sleeping. But it’s still unpleasant.

It didn’t stop me being on my travels though. I was in a pub somewhere and talking was the woman who appeared frequently on “Just a Minute”. Not Andrée Melly or Aimi MacDonald but the other one whatever her name was … "Geraldine Jones, you mean" – ed. One of the subjects on the programme was “Rudd” but she talked on the programme saying that it was actually a suburb of Market Drayton and should be pronounced “Reeth” because until 1640-something, that area was part of Wales and it’s a Welsh word. Consequently it should be pronounced in the Welsh way.

Apart from that, I’ve not done very much. There’s been a big group chat on a page on my social network, discussing a pub – the Headless Woman at Duddon – that we used to visit in the mid-70s (long-gone of course) which held memories for me and in respect of which I had many humorous anecdotes to recount.

As well as that, I found another exciting book on the internet. Dating from the 1890s it’s the very famous “The Finding of Wineland the Good – The History of the Icelandic Discovery of North America” by Arthur Middleton Reeves.

It’s basically a translation of several Norse sagas with commentary by the author, and while I haven’t read much of it yet, he sets out his stall very clearly in the opening few paragraphs.

Remember that it’s 20 years before Munn, and 70 years before L’Anse aux Meadows, and he refers to an author of 1837 by the name of Carl Christian Rafn, who was probably the first academic to take the Norse sagas seriously.

Reeves’ comment on Rafn’s work was that “If less effort had been applied to the dissemination and defence of fantastic speculations, and more to the determination of the exact nature of the facts which have been preserved in the Icelandic records, the discovery should not have failed to be accepted …”.

He continues by saying that “it is difficult to account for the disposition American historians have shown to treat the Icelandic discovery as possible …”

You can see why I’m so eager to discover these old works and to see what modern investigation has uncovered in their respect.

I’m quite looking forward to reading this book. But where can I find the book written by Rafn?

And while we’re on the subject, Happy Up Helly Aa to those of you who are celebrating it.