I take my history in novel form.

I wonder who was the twit who saw this pretty plant and said, "Let's call it Pigface." I've planted some along the side of the main veggie patch with the thought of pollination in mind, and I was appalled when Mum said that's what it was called. I suppose if you squint, stand on your head and look sideways at it then the flowers might appear to be pigs' snouts, but honestly I think there'd also have to be a major amount of chemicals running through your system at the same time. I really likes this plant, but now I've gone off it a bit. Maybe this proves that a rose by any other name DOESN"T smell as sweet.

I'll be writing more about books, after a fabulous comment I received on the last post. She reminded me about Jean Plaidy. Every Saturday morning I used to walk up to Highett library with one of those old lady wheely shopping carts filled with books and spend a halcyon hour or so browsing the shelves for my fix for the next week. Jean Plaidy was one of my favourite authors. Prolific! My God the woman could churn them out. She also wrote gothic romantic fiction under the name Victoria Holt and I sampled a few of them, but my true love was for her historical 'faction'. I learned so much history from reading her work, and I'm sure that she's coloured how I regard historical figures even today. Catherine de Medici, for example. The woman was a queen of France and poisoned people left right and centre. Towards the end of her life people got nervous if she looked at them for too long. Yet I regard her with a tinge of fondness. She had it tough when she was a girl....

Am I the only one who learned history through reading fiction? At school the only interesting year of history we did was in Year 7. Egypt, Rome, etc. Then for the next 5 years it was set down that we had to do Australian history. For the first couple of years it wasn't so bad. There's Ned Kelly, the Eureka stockade, explorers trudging off into the deserts and carking it, the gold rushes....
But we've only got about 200 years of history. There's only so much sensational things you can learn about before the mundane and dreary take over. (And yes I know the Aborigines have about 40,000 more, but they didn't write any of it down, and so we poor school kids were forced to learn about squatters and Federation year after year.) In my last year of high school I rebelled and ended up learning European history by correspondence. Yes, that was probably the extent of my teenage rebellion that year. I lived life on the edge, baby...

European history, even by correspondence was more interesting than sheep farmers and explorers dying in the desert (again). It was this subject that introduced me to Renaissance art. I still remember being blown away by the sculpture, the paintings and the absolute attention to detail. But the lesson content was still a bit dry, full of legislation for this and negotiations for that. I wanted Henry the eighth striding down a hallway in Hampton Court with his retinue around him. I wanted colour, movement and passion. In short... I wanted my historical novels.

I'm still a sucker for them.