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Napoleon the Great

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Just before we left Samothraki, I managed to finish Napoleon the Great by Andrew Roberts. It is a rather long book (935 pages altogether, but a fair bit is taken up with notes and a detailed index). What is unusual about Napoleon the Great ? Well, the most obvious thing is that Roberts nails his colours to the mast, declaring that Napoleon was not another Stalin, Pol Pot or Adolf Hitler. He was much bigger and better than that. He was not just a brilliant general (Wellington famously said that Napoleon’s hat on the battlefield was worth 40,000 men). He was a superb administrator, a reformer and someone who saved France from the worst excesses of the French Revolution and at the same time he preserved what was good in that tumultuous event. He was also a patron of the Arts and a true son of the Enlightenment. Three characteristics of Napoleon make him particularly admirable: his personal charm and ability to communicate with ordinary people and understand their point of view; his p...
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Samothraki Again 3

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Well, you are obviously not interested in our holiday in Greece and you will want to know what has been happening with Napoleon the Great . Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland were crushing victories, but Eylau and Wagram were not. Napoleon was in the habit of producing a lot of "fake news" after his battles, minimizing French losses and exaggerating the number of enemy soldiers killed, wounded and captured. Other indications of a victory were the numbers of guns and standards captured. Napoleon could also be a bit imaginative with those as well. Anyway, he has now divorced Josephine and married Marie-Louise of Austria, He is also preparing for his invasion of Russia in 1812.   Archondissa Beach Hotel is rather lovely. Quite a few of the guests seem to have been here before. As well as Greeks, Bulgarians and Romanians, there are also some French. There is not a lot to do here, apart from swimming, taking Tina for a walk and sunbathing.  After Fonias Gorge, we went to another plac...
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Samothraki Again 2

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Yesterday morning we walked along the road from Archnondissa for about twenty minutes and then we came to the Fonias River.  We walked along the path, marked with large red splodges of paint, but at one point we wandwered away from the river, so we had to come back down. The path was rocky, narrow and uneven in places, but we trudged on for about three-quarters of an hour.  Then we came to the famous pool (well, the first of three) and the waterfall. There was no one else there, so we had the pool to ourselves. The sides of the gorge were steep on three sides and the pool was deep and emerald-green. The water was icy cold! I was really hot and sweaty after the walk, but the coldness of the water was really quite a shock. I am NOT going to include any photos of yours truly having a swim, as I do not want any comments about harpoons, Captain Ahab and the great white whale. Tina is a brave little doggie, so she also had a little swim. Irena also came for a swim, but like me she d...
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Samothraki Again 1

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I do not have any more Perrott Hill photos at the moment and I need to write about something else, so the rest of my P.H.S. memories are going to have to wait for a bit. We are in Samothraki again. This is the second time that we have been to this Greek island, a two-hour ferry journey from Alexandropouli. We drove from Veliko Tarnovo and stayed overnight in Lyubimets. The next morning we left at 4 a.m. in order to catch the 8 a.m. ferry to Samothraki.  Tina came with us on our journey and she was quite a well-behaved little doggie, for once. From the ferry port in Samothraki to Archondissa Beach Hotel is a 40-minute drive. Archondissa is really an “aparthotel”, so we have quite a large and spacious apartment with no less than three balconies. The little kitchen is equipped with just about everything and the Wifi is pretty good.  Best of all, we have a wonderful view of the mountains on one side, where Poseidon is supposed to have watched the Trojan War, and the sea on the...
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Perrott Hill 3

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I cannot recount my days at Perrott Hill School without writing something about my old friend Richard Cottrell, a colleague, fellow wine lover and comrade-in-arms. Richard taught French and he started at P.H.S. at same time as me, so it was natural that we found ourselves in each other’s company rather a lot.  Each evening, after a long day of teaching, afternoon games and boarding supervision, we would have supper together, discuss the highs and lows of a prep schoolmaster’s daily life and drink a glass or two of wine. Usually a cooked meal was left for us in the downstairs kitchen and we would carry our supper up to my room, as Richard's room was right next to the dormitories and so we would have no privacy. During my four years at Perrott, Richard and I became friends and a couple of times I even stayed at his home in Tonbridge. Most of Richard's family worked in the City and were doing rather well for themselves, so it was a matter of some surprise to them that anyone they ...
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Perrott Hill 2

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The Croquet Lawn at Perrott Hill Well, not much is happening in Bulgaria at the moment, so I am going to continue with my memories of Perrott Hill School in Somerset, my first teaching job. September, 1982 was the beginning of my teaching career. Mrs Thatcher’s war in the Falklands was in full swing when I started my first term at P.H.S., a fairly small preparatory school in the South-West. The English Room   For the benefit of my American readers, I ought to explain that an English prep school is rather different to its American namesake. The Brit version is for younger children, aged roughly 8 to 13. There were a few day girls at Perrott Hill, but the clientele was mostly male. One of the main purposes of a prep school is to prepare the children for their senior schools, mostly rather expensive public (i.e. private and fee-paying) schools. Canford, Bryanston and Kings’s Taunton are good “second-division” schools that received quite a few P.H.S. students and occasionally we mi...
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Update

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  Today I went into VT, to take my old Nissan to the garage. The brake pedal was a little bit mushy and I wondered whether there might be something a bit more serious that needed to be fixed. Yes, the mechanic said that there were some really bad problems with the brakes and they could have led to catastrophic brake failure! We are going to be driving to Greece on Friday, so what could have happened is too awful to think about. 150 euros well spent, I reckon. Any other news? My blog is still going. I wrote a view pieces about my Oxford days (I hope you enjoyed the rather splendid black and white photos) and now I have started on a series of blogs about Perrott Hill School down in Somerset, my first teaching job. It seems that there is now a Perrott Hill School in Prague! Amazing!   Starmer is gone. Hooray! And about time too. It looks as though this Andy Burnham character is going to be the next PM. I really do not like him. It is very strange that the Labour party swept i...
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