www.british-history.ac.uk

While cat-vacuuming^W^W researching country house floor plans yesterday, I stumbled into this site: http://www.british-history.ac.uk

It appears to be run by the University of London, and has a large number of digitised historical documents. Some of the content is subscriber-only, but most of it's free. Just the collection of Ordnance Survey maps will be of interest to a number of you, but there's a lot of other lovely research material as well, including gazetteers.

"until I met a man who had no feet"

The last couple of weeks have been a reminder of just how disabled I actually am, because my Dragon headset at work died and it's taken a lot longer than it should to get a replacement. I trundled off to the gym this morning for my regular session trying to rebuild some muscle strength and flexibility (I can shoulder press 5 kg regularly now, yay!), and spent the time on the first machine thinking about my now-urgent need to replace my home computer so it can run Dragon without falling over, and the state of my bank account.

And then on the way to the next machine, thinking about how nice it is to finally be able to regularly walk the length of the gym without hurting, I walked past a guy on one of the cardio machines. It wasn't obvious at first, because it was one with stirrups that cover most of your foot, but then I realised why it looked a little odd. The guy was a blade runner. Double amputee with the running blades we've seen so much of at the last couple of Paralympics.

I'm well aware of just how well off I am compared with some people. But that really does put it into perspective.