Okay, now it's summer

As I write this at 3 pm, the Weather Channel tells me the temperature in London is 28C. Ridiculous! But we'll take it.

I was out for a run this morning with my man, Frederick Douglass. Most of today's passage was about John Brown, the Harpers Ferry martyr, with whom Douglass became acquainted in the late 1840s. (The raid on Harpers Ferry didn't happen until 1859.) They met several times and corresponded. They discussed questions of strategy and in particular the validity of violent resistance. Douglass by this time was advocating and justifying the use of violence to defeat slavery. Brown agreed but, unlike Douglass, would put his beliefs into action.

1856 daguerrotype of John Brown

He certainly sounds a strange dude: extremely religious, passionately committed to abolition, and more than willing to die for the cause. As in the end he did. He was held in awe by his family, despite not being a particularly good bread-winner. He had a ridiculous number of children from two wives: 20, mostly sons. 

He finally decided to fight over the question of whether Kansas, where some of his sons had settled, would enter the union as a slave-holding state. With a small band that included  his sons, he fought a guerilla war against pro-slavery forces. Among the actions he was involved in was a reprisal raid on a pro-slavery (but non-slave-holding) settlement, in which five men were dragged from their homes and brutally murdered at the hands of Brown's men. 

That's where the passage ended. With Blight claiming Brown committed atrocities quite calculatedly to instill fear in pro-slavery forces. This is where The Good Lord Bird, the mini-series on Crave with Ethan Hawke as Brown, starts - not with that particular incident but with other atrocities.

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A good part of the middle of the day was taken up with revising photos from our 2016 winter away. 

I'm sure serious photographers would sneer at the idea of photographing artifacts in an artificial museum setting, but I've always done it and enjoyed the results. And Lisbon has some great museums. One that impressed was the National Museum of Coaches, which had recently re-opened in a newly renovated old warehouse in Belem near the wharves. 

I have noted elsewhere that the last reigning royals (the last monarch abdicated in 1908) had a taste for the opulent. This museum further illustrates the point. Not that all the gaudy carriages here were property of the Portuguese royal family, but most of the gaudiest were.

The other museum I was reliving today was the Casa-Museu Medeiros e Almeida (house and museum of the Medeiros e Almeida family), which houses the fabulous collection of a Lisbon entrepreneur who evidently had a lot of money, but also pretty good taste.

I have long since got (I think) the most out of the rest of the pictures I took at this place, but here are two that I worked on today that were left in the reject pile last time. The fan is part of large collection, many, like this one, from the 18th century.

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By the time I went out for my afternoon walk at about 4, it was warm and partly sunny but blustery so it didn't feel that hot. I didn't think I would take any pictures today - I was anxious to get back and lounge on the balcony - but ended up stopping at St. Peter's Basilica to shoot gargoyles.