03 January 2009

This is the time of year when I repeat Christina Rossetti’s lines In the bleak mid-winter Frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron Water like a stone. November was as cold as I remember this once-muggy, foggy month. And December even harder. The Met Office says the rest of winter will be severe,

Reading an account by the historian John Waller of the Dancing Plague in Alsace in 1518 recently, I could not help but notice the interesting but perhaps incomplete parallels with our own time. Economic conditions in Strasbourg were dire in 1518 when a woman called Frau Troffea started dancing in public and continued for days