{"id":7439,"date":"2017-01-18T20:45:11","date_gmt":"2017-01-18T20:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=7439"},"modified":"2017-01-18T20:45:11","modified_gmt":"2017-01-18T20:45:11","slug":"wednesday-18th-january-2017-last-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=7439","title":{"rendered":"Wednesday 18th January 2017 &#8211; LAST NIGHT &#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230; was something a bit more like it too.<\/p>\n<p>Although it took me ages to go off to sleep (I was reading Vaino Tanner&#8217;s notes on the Finnish expedition to Labrador until something silly in the morning) I ended up soundly asleep until the Eastern European workmen awoke me at 06:30.  They were actually quite quiet during the night which was very a pleasant surprise.<\/p>\n<p>On my own at breakfast, I came back down here and &#8230; errr &#8230; went back under the bedclothes to keep warm (it was minus 5\u00b0C outside). The next thing that I remembered was that it was 11:10. I&#8217;d slept for 3 hours without any difficulty at all. <\/p>\n<p>Braving the freezing cold I nipped out to the supermarket on the corner for my <em>baguette<\/em> and an apple &#8211; I&#8217;ve run out of fruit in here. But making my butties at lunchtime, I was joined by a Far-Eastern woman and another man whom I don&#8217;t recall having seen before.<\/p>\n<p>I pressed on with my expedition notes this afternoon in between crashing out somewhat. We&#8217;ve hit the anthropological stuff now, and he talks at great length about the Inuit. He&#8217;s tentatively identified a new race of Inuit round about the 15th Century that began to push aside the Thule Inuit, but fails to draw the obvious conclusion from his notes<\/p>\n<p>Although now discredited by almost everyone despite the efforts of James Enterline in his book <a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/2jy6bNw\" target=\"_blank\">Viking America: The Norse Crossings and Their Legacy<\/a>, the obvious conclusion has quite a logical ring to it &#8211; in that with the Little Ice Age descending on Greenland in the mid-14th Century and the Norse settlers being cut off from Iceland by the dramatic deterioration in weather, the only way for the Norse to escape the weather would be to head west and live off the ocean instead of the land. <\/p>\n<p>Like many Europeans since then &#8211; in fact right up until the early 20th century, the quickest way for a new settler to assimilate traditional survival skills in a hostile environment is to take a native spouse who can teach you the necessary skills. Most of the population of Labrador are descendants of mixed unions of European men and Inuit women, and had the Norse assimilated (and there is no reason to suppose that they didn&#8217;t &#8211; they aren&#8217;t likely to have sat around and starved or frozen to death), there would be a completely mixed gene pool within just a couple of generations. And with their better technology and knowledge of iron, they would quickly have overwhelmed the less-developed Thule culture.<\/p>\n<p>And the timescale fits too.  <\/p>\n<p>Liz and I had a good chat on the laptop later and then I went for tea. I was on my own for most of the time except for a young family with a baby (so we have this to deal with tonight).<\/p>\n<p>Now I&#8217;m off for a shower and a change of clothes, and then I&#8217;ll be having an early night.<\/p>\n<div class='watch-action'><div class='watch-position align-left'><div class='action-like'><a class='lbg-style1 like-7439 jlk' href='javascript:void(0)' data-task='like' data-post_id='7439' data-nonce='7c24c8a56a' rel='nofollow'><img class='wti-pixel' src='https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/wp-content\/plugins\/wti-like-post\/images\/pixel.gif' title='Like' \/><span class='lc-7439 lc'>0<\/span><\/a><\/div><div class='action-unlike'><a class='unlbg-style1 unlike-7439 jlk' href='javascript:void(0)' data-task='unlike' data-post_id='7439' data-nonce='7c24c8a56a' rel='nofollow'><img class='wti-pixel' src='https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/wp-content\/plugins\/wti-like-post\/images\/pixel.gif' title='Unlike' \/><span class='unlc-7439 unlc'>0<\/span><\/a><\/div> <\/div> <div class='status-7439 status align-left'><\/div><\/div><div class='wti-clear'><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230; was something a bit more like it too. Although it took me ages to go off to sleep (I was reading Vaino Tanner&#8217;s notes on the Finnish expedition to Labrador until something silly in the morning) I ended up soundly asleep until the Eastern European workmen awoke me at 06:30. They were actually quite [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[162,4507,3371],"tags":[6723,1673,1302,1712,2560,8256,801,7869,8253,230,5918,8257,261,462,8255,8242,8254],"class_list":["post-7439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-belgium","category-eric-hall-2","category-leuven","tag-baguette","tag-belgium-2","tag-crash-out","tag-early-night","tag-eric-hall","tag-greenland","tag-httpwww-amazon-co-uk","tag-inuit","tag-james-enterline","tag-labrador-2","tag-leuven","tag-little-ice-age","tag-liz-terry-messenger","tag-shower","tag-thule","tag-vaino-tanner","tag-viking-america-the-norse-crossings-and-their-legacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7439"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7440,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7439\/revisions\/7440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}