Sunday 16 January 2022

Diana Was On Late Shift Today,

so we had breakfast together, 


a mug of tea and a bacon sandwich, a great way to start the day,

I had ordered some glass pebbles/nuggets as they are called, from The Crafty Glass Box, in Hampshire,

I had a cunning plan, the Kirk & Sweeney bottle seemed so nice it was a shame to throw it away,

so I thought I would fill it with glass pebbles/nuggets and use it as a candle holder, I have ordered a few more to fill the bottle, all I have to do now is on my next trip to Bromley, call into the hardware shop and buy some candles,

I spent the afternoon watching a few documentaries, in the evening a sherry and a read, 'Cheers!',

for my evening meal a couple of chicken samosas to start,

followed by lamb rogan josh, chicken masala, onion bhajis and pulao rice, I was too full for a dessert, a little later it was time for Diana to return from work, after she had eaten it was feet up for a film we had watched before back in 2015,

 Gangs of New Yorkhere are my comments from then:

 'surprisingly enough based almost more on fact than fiction, there really was a place called the Five Points, the names of the legendary Five Points gangs—the Bowery Boys, the Dead Rabbits, the Plug Uglies, the Short Tails, the Slaughter Houses, the Swamp Angels were all gangs that were there at the time that the film depicts',

Charles Dickens called the Five Points "a world of vice and misery." in 1842, the neighborhood was on the edge of an explosion, spurred on by the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s, waves of threadbare immigrants arrived in New York City with the wherewithal for only the most miserable lodgings—the drooping tenements of Five Points, for the next two decades, the Irish ruled Five Points, overcrowding a roughly five-square-block area centered on the intersection of Cross Street (today's Park Street), Anthony Street (today's Worth), and Orange Street (today's Baxter),

moving on in to the 1890s crusading photographer Jacob Riis's unprecedented images of crowded tenements, child laborers, and places like Bandit's Roost (below), incited a public outcry that led the city to raze Mulberry Bend, Five Points' most notorious block,

'it's heart cut out, the slum was overtaken by neighborhoods to the north—Little Italy and Chinatown, courthouses and factories replaced its southern tenements, today the Five Points intersection is buried largely beneath Chinatown's Columbus Park and a federal courthouse, I think it is great when a film that I thought was pure fiction has a base in fact, a violent but watchable movie set in troubled times long gone', and with the end of the film we were off to bed.


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