It's about time...and me.

It's not me.  It is a doorway head-stop of the church of St Helen & St Giles, Rainham, Essex.
(c) Philip McDonnell, 2018

As the musician Lenny Kravitz once sang:  "I was born long ago, I am the chosen, I'm the one..."  ("Are you gonna go my way", 1993).  Exactly what I've been chosen for I am still waiting to discover.  And the one?  No idea.  At least the long ago bit is true.  That's enough about me...well, not quite, I suppose.

I was born in Rochford, Essex, lived in Leigh-on-Sea until I was 21.  I moved to Kent, got married, got divorced, met someone else, split from her, lived in Kent for 23 years, then met my wife, fellow blogger Debbie in London, to whom I've been married over 7 years.  We live in West Essex (Dagenham to be precise but I'm a snob).  Academically, I achieved a First in History at the University of Kent in 2009 and a Masters with Merit in Medieval History from Birkbeck in 2012.  I have no plans to do a PhD...yet.

I set this blog up years ago but never actually bothered to use it.  I was being too precious about its design and probably pretentious about what I wanted to write about.  I originally intended it to be about architectural, graphic visualisation and historical subjects which really meant old buildings, 3D art of...old buildings...and the history of well...anything including Latin and...old buildings.  Quite boring really.  Then I decided to use WordPress and fiddle-arsed about with that for a year as a prelude to a PhD before putting it to one side because I had more important things to do (professional qualifications).  This year I will park that site, cancel all subscriptions and just be content with this simple Blogger account.

This site, then, has had a revisioning - as the Hollywood types like to espouse before mangling a perfect good oldie with special effects, inappropriate casting and scripts written by the factually ignorant.  This version is like a director's cut done by Freddie Kruger; I've slashed all the original pages and make copious use of meta-tags/ tags or labels to compensate.

As for the title?  Scribo was chosen because it is Latin for "I write" (I told you I could be pretentious).  There was nothing more to it than that.

The header or masthead design is not a photo taken of the parched grass of this year but the parched grass around Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo Anglo-Saxon burial ground from a few years ago.  The pictures inset in that background are of, from left to right, a scene from the Bayeaux Tapestry (taken from David M Wilson, Bayeux Tapestry, Thames & Hudson, 2004 masterly text whilst doing my MA) and two iPhone snaps, the first of Rochester Cathedral's nave entrance and the second of West Stow Anglo-Saxon village in Suffolk.  The main background photo was taken with my Nikon at Fountains Abbey in 2017.

That's it for a first post.  To finish, here's a picture of a squirrel.  No reason.  Just a squirrel with the nickname Danglars le Gros (apologies to Alexander Dumas) because he's fat and dangles upside down to take peanuts from our bird feeder.

Danglars Le Gros.  (c) Philip McDonnell, 2018