JAUME I IN MEDINA MAYURQA: LA FESTA DE L'ESTENDARD

December 31, 1229, Mallorca Island

Today is a special day for The Grandma and she wants to share it with everybody. December, 31 is one of the most important days in Mallorca (Majorca), a place that The Grandma loves with all her heart.

Majorcan people celebrate La Festa de l'Estendard that commemorates the arrival of Jaume I to the island, then named Medina Mayurqa, in 1229. All the island celebrates this important date in its history, a commemoration that begins, at morning, with the ceremonial placing of the Royal Standard in Plaça Cort, followed by a Mass in the Cathedral and follows and, at noon, continues when the poem La Colcada is read in Plaça Cort.

It has been impossible for The Grandma to assist to this important event in Mallorca today, as she has done in the past several times but her heart is today in that wonderful island that is one of the most beautiful Mediterranean places and where The Grandma has an important part of her own history and culture.

La Balanguera is the official anthem of Balearic Island. This song talks about the importance of keeping the traditions and the own culture but being courageous and brave and working for a better future full of hope, respect and chances. This is also the main wish of The Grandma for the New Year. 

Happy New Year for everyone. Tons of hope and trust in our splendorous future that is arriving.

Before remembering Mallorca, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 59).

More information: Making Comparisons 1-Comparative Adjectives

Mallorca or Majorca is the largest island in the Balearic Islands, located in the Mediterranean. The native language, as on the rest of the Balearic Islands, is Catalan, which is co-official with Spanish.

There are two small islands off the coast of Mallorca: Cabrera, southeast of Ciutat de Palma, and Dragonera, west of Ciutat de Palma. The anthem of Mallorca is La Balanguera.

Francinaina, Giant of Ciutat de Palma

The name derives from Classical Latin insula maior, larger island. Later, in Medieval Latin, this became Maiorica, the larger one, in comparison to Menorca, the smaller one.

Little is recorded of the earliest inhabitants of the island. Burial chambers and traces of habitation from the Neolithic period (6000–4000 BC) have been discovered, particularly the prehistoric settlements called talaiots. They raised Bronze Age megaliths as part of their Talaiotic culture.

The Phoenicians, a seafaring people from the Levant, arrived around the eighth century BC and established numerous colonies. The island eventually came under the control of Carthage in North Africa, which had become the principal Phoenician city. After the Second Punic War, Carthage lost all of its overseas possessions and the Romans took over.

The island was occupied by the Romans in 123 BC under Quintus Caecilius Metellus Balearicus. It flourished under Roman rule, during which time the towns of Pollentia (Alcúdia), and Palmaria (Palma) were founded. In addition, the northern town of Bocchoris, dating back to pre-Roman times, was a federated city to Rome. The local economy was largely driven by olive cultivation, viticulture, and salt mining. Majorcan soldiers were valued within the Roman legions for their skill with the sling.

More information: Majorcan Villas

In 427, Gunderic and the Vandals captured the island. Geiseric, son of Gunderic, governed Mallorca and used it as his base to loot and plunder settlements around the Mediterranean, until Roman rule was restored in 465.

In 534, Mallorca was recaptured by the Eastern Roman Empire, led by Apollinarius. Under Roman rule, Christianity thrived and numerous churches were built.

From 707, the island was increasingly attacked by Muslim raiders from North Africa. Recurrent invasions led the islanders to ask Charlemagne for help.

In 902, Issam al-Khawlani, in Arabic عصام الخولاني‎, conquered the Balearic Islands, ushering in a new period of prosperity under the Emirate of Córdoba.  

Miquela Lladó in La Festa de l'Estendard

The town of Palma was reshaped and expanded, and became known as Medina Mayurqa. Later on, with the Caliphate of Córdoba at its height, the Moors improved agriculture with irrigation and developed local industries.

The caliphate was dismembered in 1015. Majorca came under rule by the Taifa of Dénia, and from 1087 to 1114, was an independent Taifa. During that period, the island was visited by Ibn Hazm.

However, an expedition of Pisans and Catalans in 1114–15, led by Ramon Berenguer III, Count of Barcelona, overran the island, laying siege to Palma for eight months. After the city fell, the invaders retreated due to problems in their own lands. They were replaced by the Almoravides from North Africa, who ruled until 1176. The Almoravides were replaced by the Almohad dynasty until 1229. Abú Yahya was the last Moorish leader of Mallorca.

More information: Booking Mallorca

In the ensuing confusion and unrest, King Jaume I, also known as James the Conqueror, launched an invasion which landed at Santa Ponça, Majorca, on 8–9 September 1229 with 15,000 men and 1,500 horses. His forces entered the city of Medina Mayurqa on 31 December 1229. In 1230 he annexed the island to his Crown of Aragon under the name Regnum Maioricae.

The capital of Mallorca, Ciutat de Palma, was founded as a Roman camp called Palmaria upon the remains of a Talaiotic settlement. The turbulent history of the city had it subject to several Vandal sackings during the fall of the Western Roman Empire. It was later reconquered by the Byzantines, established by the Moors, who called it Medina Mayurqa, and finally occupied by Jaume I.

More information: October, 9 1238-Jaume I & The Kingdom of València

 De tradicions i d'esperances tix la senyera pel jovent,
com qui fa un vel de nuviances amb cabelleres d'or i argent.

De la infantesa qui s'enfila, de la vellura qui se'n va...
La balanguera fila, fila. La balanguera filarà...

From traditions and from hopes, she weaves the flag for the youth
as one who prepares a wedding veil, with hairs of gold and silver.
For childhood that grews up, for old age who goes away.
The Balanguera spins, spins. The Balanguera will spin.

La Balanguera

PATRICIA LEE 'PATTI' SMITH: 'PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER'

Patti Smith

Today, The Grandma is preparing to close another year. Tomorrow, 2018 is going to end and she is summing up the present year, full of good and bad things, as always.

Every time that you lose a loved person, you cannot consider that that year has been a good one but you must have enough force to continue with your own life because living is the best present that you can offer to all those people who have said us goodbye.

It has been a difficult year for The Grandma but she is a person who grows up with difficulties and she always looks at the future with passion, trust and hope. Yes. She is an optimistic person and she thinks that the best is always coming.

Prepare you for this New Year. It will be a year full of new emotions and hard moments, but it will be the beginning of a new age of freedom because as Patti Smith says, People have the Power, and we are going to use it to work for a better society with a fair justice and hope for the hopeless.

December, 30 is the anniversary of one of the most amazing singers and activist, Patti Smith, an artist who was born on a day like today in 1946 and who The Grandma admires a lot. She wants to talk about her, her music, her activism and her interest in Catalan Literature.

Before talking about Patti Smith, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 58).

More information: Order of Adjectives-Adjectives with -ed or -ing

Patricia Lee Smith, born December 30, 1946, is an American singer-songwriter, poet, and visual artist who became an influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses.

Called the punk poet laureate, Smith fused rock and poetry in her work. Her most widely known song is Because the Night, which was co-written with Bruce Springsteen. It reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1978 and number five in the UK.

Patti Smith & Bruce Springsteen

On November 17, 2010, Smith won the National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids. The book fulfilled a promise she had made to her former long-time roommate and partner, Robert Mapplethorpe.

Patricia Lee Smith was born in Chicago to Beverly Smith, a jazz singer turned waitress, and Grant Smith, who worked as a machinist at a Honeywell plant. The family was of part-Irish ancestry and Patti was the eldest of four children. At the age of 4, Smith's family moved from Chicago to the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, before her family moved to Pitman, New Jersey and later to The Woodbury Gardens section of Deptford Township, New Jersey.

At this early age Smith was exposed to her first records, including Shrimp Boats by Harry Belafonte, Patience and Prudence's The Money Tree, and Another Side of Bob Dylan, which her mother gave to her. Smith graduated from Deptford Township High School in 1964 and went to work in a factory. She gave birth to her first child, a daughter, on April 26, 1967, and chose to place her for adoption.

More information: Patti Smith

In 1967, she left Glassboro State College, now Rowan University, and moved to Manhattan. She met photographer Robert Mapplethorpe there while working at a bookstore with friend and poet Janet Hamill. She and Mapplethorpe had an intense romantic relationship.

By 1974, Patti Smith was performing rock music, initially with guitarist, bassist and rock archivist Lenny Kaye, and later with a full band comprising Kaye, Ivan Kral on guitar and bass, Jay Dee Daugherty on drums and Richard Sohl on piano.

Patti Smith Group produced two further albums before the end of the 1970s. Easter (1978) was her most commercially successful record, containing the single Because the Night co-written with Bruce Springsteen. Wave (1979) was less successful, although the songs Frederick and Dancing Barefoot both received commercial airplay.

Through most of the 1980s Smith was in semi-retirement from music, living with her family north of Detroit in St. Clair Shores, Michigan. In June 1988, she released the album Dream of Life, which included the song People Have the Power.
 

Patti Smith & Joan Baez

In 1993, Smith contributed Memorial Tribute (Live) to the AIDS-Benefit Album No Alternative produced by the Red Hot Organization.

In 1996, Smith worked with her long-time colleagues to record Gone Again, featuring About a Boy, a tribute to Kurt Cobain. That same year she collaborated with Stipe on E-Bow the Letter, a song on R.E.M.'s New Adventures in Hi-Fi, which she has also performed live with the band.

After the release of Gone Again, Patti Smith recorded two new albums: Peace and Noise in 1997, with the single 1959, about the invasion of Tibet, and Gung Ho in 2000, with songs about Ho Chi Minh and Smith's late father. Songs 1959 and Glitter in Their Eyes were nominated for Grammy Award for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance.

On July 10, 2005, Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. In addition to Smith's influence on rock music, the Minister also noted her appreciation of Arthur Rimbaud. In August 2005, Smith gave a literary lecture about the poems of Arthur Rimbaud and William Blake.

More information: Poetry Foundation

Smith is the subject of a 2008 documentary film by Steven Sebring titled Patti Smith: Dream of Life. A live album by Patti Smith and Kevin Shields, The Coral Sea was released in July 2008.

On September 10, 2009, after a week of smaller events and exhibitions in the city, Smith played an open-air concert in Florence's Piazza Santa Croce, commemorating her performance in the same city 30 years earlier. In the meantime, she contributed with a special introduction to Jessica Lange's book 50 Photographs (2009).

Patti Smith was one of the winners of the 2011 Polar Music Prize. She made her television acting debut at the age of 64 on the TV series Law & Order: Criminal Intent, appearing in an episode called Icarus. In 2011 Smith is working on a crime novel set in London. I've been working on a detective story that starts at the St Giles in the Fields church in London for the last two years, she told NME adding that she loved detective stories having been a fan of British fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.

More information: Faena

In 2016 Smith performed People Have the Power at Riverside Church, Manhattan, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Democracy Now. She was joined by Michael Stipe. On December 10, 2016, Smith attended the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm on behalf of Bob Dylan, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Furthermore, Smith has been a supporter of the Green Party and backed Ralph Nader in the 2000 United States presidential election.

Smith, Reed & Anderson in Made in Catalunya

She led the crowd singing Over the Rainbow and People Have the Power at the campaign's rallies, and also performed at several of Nader's subsequent Democracy Rising events. 

Bruce Springsteen continued performing her People Have the Power at Vote for Change campaign events. In the winter of 2004/2005, Smith toured again with Nader in a series of rallies against the Iraq War and called for the impeachment of George W. Bush.

Smith premiered two new protest songs in London in September 2006. Louise Jury, writing in The Independent, characterized them as an emotional indictment of American and Israeli foreign policy. The song Qana was about the Israeli airstrike on the Lebanese village of Qana. Without Chains is about Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen who was born and raised in Germany, held at Guantanamo Bay detainment camp for four years.

In 2007, Smith participated with Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson in Made in Catalunya a cultural Catalan festival in New York City where she read some fragments of Catalan poetry written by the most admired Catalan poets.

More information: Institut Ramon Llull

In 2015, Smith appeared with Ralph Nader, spoke and performed the songs Wing and People Have the Power during the American Museum of Tort Law convocation ceremony in Winsted, Connecticut. She performed Wing again in 2016 in homage to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks during the First they came for Assange... event at Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, to mark the 4th year of Julian Assange's attempt to avoid prosecution by taking refuge at the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

Smith was raised a Jehovah's Witness and had a strong religious upbringing and a Bible education. She left organized religion as a teenager because she felt it was too confining. In response to this experience, she wrote the line Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine in her cover version of Gloria by Them.

She has described having an avid interest in Tibetan Buddhism around the age of eleven or twelve, saying I fell in love with Tibet because their essential mission was to keep a continual stream of prayer, but that as an adult she sees clear parallels between different forms of religion, and has come to the conclusion that religious dogmas are ...man-made laws that you can either decide to abide by or not.

More information: Patti Smith Interview-Advice to the Young

It was always my belief that rock and roll belonged 

in the hands of the people, not rock stars.

Patti Smith

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN BY J. JOYCE

James Joyce

Today, The Grandma has received a present. Claire Fontaine has offered her one of the oldest editions of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which was issued on a day like today in 1916.  

The Grandma is a big fan of Irish literature in general and James Joyce in particular. Joyce lived in a convulsed age for Ireland and his novels are a clear reflex of those years.

A writer is not only a person who creates new realities, but also a person who can explain the current history using the tools that literature offers. Before Claire arrived, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 57).

More information: Adjectives

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel of Irish writer James Joyce. A Künstlerroman in a modernist style, it traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, a fictional alter ego of Joyce and an allusion to Daedalus, the consummate craftsman of Greek mythology. Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions under which he has grown, culminating in his self-exile from Ireland to Europe. The work uses techniques that Joyce developed more fully in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).

A Portrait began life in 1904 as Stephen Hero -a projected 63-chapter autobiographical novel in a realistic style. After 25 chapters, Joyce abandoned Stephen Hero in 1907 and set to reworking its themes and protagonist into a condensed five-chapter novel, dispensing with strict realism and making extensive use of free indirect speech that allows the reader to peer into Stephen's developing consciousness.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

American modernist poet Ezra Pound had the novel serialised in the English literary magazine The Egoist in 1914 and 1915, and published as a book in 1916 by B. W. Huebsch of New York. The publication of A Portrait and the short story collection Dubliners (1914) earned Joyce a place at the forefront of literary modernism.

Born into a middle-class family in Dublin, Ireland, James Joyce (1882–1941) excelled as a student, graduating from University College, Dublin, in 1902. He moved to Paris to study medicine, but soon gave it up.

He returned to Ireland at his family's request as his mother was dying of cancer. Despite her pleas, the impious Joyce and his brother Stanislaus refused to make confession or take communion, and when she passed into a coma they refused to kneel and pray for her. After a stretch of failed attempts to get published and launch his own newspaper, Joyce then took jobs teaching, singing and reviewing books.

Joyce made his first attempt at a novel, Stephen Hero, in early 1904. That June he saw Nora Barnacle for the first time walking along Nassau Street. Their first date was on June 16, the same date that his novel Ulysses takes place. Almost immediately, Joyce and Nora were infatuated with each other and they bonded over their shared disapproval of Ireland and the Church.

More information: James Joyce. From Dubliners to Ulysses

Nora and Joyce went to continental Europe, first staying in Zürich before settling for ten years in Trieste, then in Austria-Hungary, where he taught English.

In March 1905, Joyce was transferred to the Berlitz School In Trieste, presumably because of threats of spies in Austria. There Nora gave birth to their children, George in 1905 and Lucia in 1907, and Joyce wrote fiction, signing some of his early essays and stories Stephen Daedalus. The short stories he wrote made up the collection Dubliners (1914), which took about eight years to be published due to its controversial nature.

James Joyce & Nora Barnacle

While waiting on Dubliners to be published, Joyce reworked the core themes of the novel Stephen Hero he had begun in Ireland in 1904 and abandoned in 1907 into A Portrait, published in 1916, a year after he had moved back to Zürich in the midst of the First World War.

At the request of its editors, Joyce submitted a work of philosophical fiction entitled A Portrait of the Artist to the Irish literary magazine Dana on 7 January 1904. Dana's editor, W. K. Magee, rejected it, telling Joyce, I can't print what I can't understand.

On his 22nd birthday, 2 February 1904, Joyce began a realist autobiographical novel, Stephen Hero, which incorporated aspects of the aesthetic philosophy expounded in A Portrait. He worked on the book until mid-1905 and brought the manuscript with him when he moved to Trieste that year. Though his main attention turned to the stories that made up Dubliners, Joyce continued work on Stephen Hero. At 914 manuscript pages, Joyce considered the book about half-finished, having completed 25 of its 63 intended chapters.

In September 1907, however, he abandoned this work, and began a complete revision of the text and its structure, producing what became A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. By 1909 the work had taken shape and Joyce showed some of the draft chapters to Ettore Schmitz, one of his language students, as an exercise. Schmitz, himself a respected writer, was impressed and with his encouragement Joyce continued work on the book.

More information: Joyce Museo Trieste

In 1911 Joyce flew into a fit of rage over the continued refusals by publishers to print Dubliners and threw the manuscript of Portrait into the fire. It was saved by a family fire brigade including his sister Eileen. Chamber Music, a book of Joyce's poems, was published in 1907.

Joyce showed, in his own words, a scrupulous meanness in his use of materials for the novel. He recycled the two earlier attempts at explaining his aesthetics and youth, A Portrait of the Artist and Stephen Hero, as well as his notebooks from Trieste concerning the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas; they all came together in five carefully paced chapters.

James Joyce

Stephen Hero is written from the point of view of an omniscient third-person narrator, but in Portrait Joyce adopts the free indirect style, a change that reflects the moving of the narrative centre of consciousness firmly and uniquely onto Stephen. Persons and events take their significance from Stephen, and are perceived from his point of view. Characters and places are no longer mentioned simply because the young Joyce had known them. Salient details are carefully chosen and fitted into the aesthetic pattern of the novel.

In 1913 the Irish poet W. B. Yeats recommended Joyce's work to the avant-garde American poet Ezra Pound, who was assembling an anthology of verse. Pound wrote to Joyce, and in 1914 Joyce submitted the first chapter of the unfinished Portrait to Pound, who was so taken with it that he pressed to have the work serialised in the London literary magazine The Egoist. Joyce hurried to complete the novel, and it appeared in The Egoist in twenty-five installments from 2 February 1914 to 1 September 1915.

There was difficulty finding a British publisher for the finished novel, so Pound arranged for its publication by an American publishing house, B. W. Huebsch, which issued it on 29 December 1916. The Egoist Press republished it in the United Kingdom on 12 February 1917 and Jonathan Cape took over its publication in 1924. In 1964 Viking Press issued a corrected version overseen by Chester Anderson. Garland released a copy text edition by Hans Walter Gabler in 1993.

More information: The James Joyce Centre

The novel mixes third-person narrative with free indirect speech, which allows both identification with and distance from Stephen. The narrator refrains from judgement. The omniscient narrator of the earlier Stephen Hero informs the reader as Stephen sets out to write some pages of sorry verse, while Portrait gives only Stephen's attempts, leaving the evaluation to the reader.

The novel is written primarily as a third-person narrative with minimal dialogue until the final chapter. This chapter includes dialogue-intensive scenes alternately involving Stephen, Davin and Cranly. An example of such a scene is the one in which Stephen posits his complex Thomist aesthetic theory in an extended dialogue. Joyce employs first-person narration for Stephen's diary entries in the concluding pages of the novel, perhaps to suggest that Stephen has finally found his own voice and no longer needs to absorb the stories of others.

James Joyce

Joyce fully employs the free indirect style to demonstrate Stephen's intellectual development from his childhood, through his education, to his increasing independence and ultimate exile from Ireland as a young man.

The style of the work progresses through each of its five chapters, as the complexity of language and Stephen's ability to comprehend the world around him both gradually increase. The book's opening pages communicate Stephen's first stirrings of consciousness when he is a child. Throughout the work language is used to describe indirectly the state of mind of the protagonist and the subjective effect of the events of his life.

The writing style is notable also for Joyce's omission of quotation marks: he indicates dialogue by beginning a paragraph with a dash, as is commonly used in French, Spanish or Russian publications.

Towards the beginning of the novel, Joyce depicts the young Stephen's growing consciousness, which is said to be a condensed version of the arc of Dedalus' entire life, as he continues to grow and form his identity. Stephen's growth as an individual character is important because through him Joyce laments Irish society's tendency to force individuals to conform to types, which some say marks Stephen as a modernist character. Themes that run through Joyce's later novels find expression there.

More information: The British Library

As Stephen transitions into adulthood, he leaves behind his Catholic religious identity, which is closely tied to the national identity of Ireland. His rejection of this dual identity is also a rejection of constraint and an embrace of freedom in identity. Furthermore, the references to Dr Faustus throughout the novel conjure up something demonic in Stephen renouncing his Catholic faith. When Stephen stoutly refuses to serve his Easter duty later in the novel, his tone mirrors characters like Faust and Lucifer in its rebelliousness.

The myth of Daedalus and Icarus has parallels in the structure of the novel, and gives Stephen his surname, as well as the epigraph containing a quote from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Stephen's surname being connected to Daedalus may also call to mind the theme of going against the status quo, as Daedalus defies the King of Crete.

Stephen’s struggle to find identity in the novel parallels the Irish struggle for independence during the early twentieth century. He rejects any outright nationalism, and is often prejudiced toward those that use Hiberno-English, which was the marked speech patterns of the Irish rural and lower-class. However, he is also heavily concerned with his country’s future and understands himself as an Irishman, which then leads him to question how much of his identity is tied up in said nationalism.

Download A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture 

ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. 

The English reading public explains the reason why. 

James Joyce

CHURCH OF ST PETER AT WESTMINSTER IS CONSECRATED

The Grandma at Westminster Abbey

Today, The Grandma is putting in order her room. She has found some beautiful photos of her last trips to London.

The Grandma loves this city and she tries to visit it as times as she could. English culture is amazing and you cannot lose the opportunity of discover London and know new things about it. The Grandma has been seeing her photos in Westminster Abbey, one of the most incredible sites in London that was consecrated on a day like today in 1065.

The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 56).

More information: Possession 2

Westminster Abbey, formally titled the Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster, is a large, mainly Gothic abbey church in the City of Westminster, London, England, just to the west of the Palace of Westminster.

It is one of the United Kingdom's most notable religious buildings and the traditional place of coronation and burial site for English and, later, British monarchs. The building itself was a Benedictine monastic church until the monastery was dissolved in 1539. Between 1540 and 1556, the abbey had the status of a cathedral. Since 1560, the building is no longer an abbey or a cathedral, having instead the status of a Church of England Royal Peculiar -a church responsible directly to the sovereign.

Visiting the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Galleries

According to a tradition first reported by Sulcard in about 1080, a church was founded at the site, then known as Thorn Ey in the seventh century, at the time of Mellitus, a Bishop of London.

Construction of the present church began in 1245, on the orders of King Henry III. Since the coronation of William the Conqueror in 1066, all coronations of English and British monarchs have been in Westminster Abbey. There have been 16 royal weddings at the abbey since 1100.

A late tradition claims that Aldrich, a young fisherman on the River Thames, had a vision of Saint Peter near the site. This seems to have been quoted as the origin of the salmon that Thames fishermen offered to the abbey in later years -a custom still observed annually by the Fishmongers' Company. The recorded origins of the Abbey date to the 960s or early 970s, when Saint Dunstan and King Edgar installed a community of Benedictine monks on the site.

More information: Westminster Abbey

Between 1042 and 1052, King Edward the Confessor began rebuilding St Peter's Abbey to provide himself with a royal burial church. It was the first church in England built in the Romanesque style. The building was completed around 1060 and was consecrated on 28 December 1065, only a week before Edward's death on 5 January 1066. A week later, he was buried in the church; and, nine years later, his wife Edith was buried alongside him. His successor, Harold II, was probably crowned in the abbey, although the first documented coronation is that of William the Conqueror later the same year.

The only extant depiction of Edward's abbey, together with the adjacent Palace of Westminster, is in the Bayeux Tapestry. Some of the lower parts of the monastic dormitory, an extension of the South Transept, survive in the Norman Undercroft of the Great School, including a door said to come from the previous Saxon abbey. Increased endowments supported a community increased from a dozen monks in Dunstan's original foundation, up to a maximum about eighty monks.

The Grandma in Westminster Abbey

The abbey became the coronation site of Norman kings. None were buried there until Henry III, intensely devoted to the cult of the Confessor, rebuilt the abbey in Anglo-French Gothic style as a shrine to venerate King Edward the Confessor and as a suitably regal setting for Henry's own tomb, under the highest Gothic nave in England. The Confessor's shrine subsequently played a great part in his canonization.

Henry VIII assumed direct royal control in 1539 and granted the abbey the status of a cathedral by charter in 1540, simultaneously issuing letters patent establishing the Diocese of Westminster. By granting the abbey cathedral status, Henry VIII gained an excuse to spare it from the destruction or dissolution which he inflicted on most English abbeys during this period.

More information: @wabbey

Westminster diocese was dissolved in 1550, but the abbey was recognised, in 1552, retroactively to 1550, as a second cathedral of the Diocese of London until 1556. The already-old expression robbing Peter to pay Paul may have been given a new lease of life when money meant for the abbey, which is dedicated to Saint Peter, was diverted to the treasury of St Paul's Cathedral.

The abbey was restored to the Benedictines under the Catholic Mary I of England, but they were again ejected under Elizabeth I in 1559. In 1560, Elizabeth re-established Westminster as a Royal Peculiar -a church of the Church of England responsible directly to the Sovereign, rather than to a diocesan bishop- and made it the Collegiate Church of St Peter, that is, a non-cathedral church with an attached chapter of canons, headed by a dean.

The Grandma in Westminster Abbey

Westminster suffered minor damage during the Blitz on 15 November 1940. Then on May 10/11 1941, the Westminster Abbey precincts and roof were hit by incendiary bombs. All the bombs were extinguished by ARP wardens, except for one bomb which ignited out of reach among the wooden beams and plaster vault of the lantern roof of 1802 over the North Transept. Flames rapidly spread and burning beams and molten lead began to fall on the wooden stalls, pews and other ecclesiastical fixtures 130 feet below.

Despite the falling debris, the staff dragged away as much furniture as possible before withdrawing. Finally the Lantern roof crashed down into the crossing, preventing the fires from spreading further.

More information: Britannica

Westminster Abbey is a collegiate church governed by the Dean and Chapter of Westminster, as established by Royal charter of Queen Elizabeth I dated 21 May 1560, which created it as the Collegiate Church of St Peter Westminster, a Royal Peculiar under the personal jurisdiction of the Sovereign. 

The members of the Chapter are the Dean and four canons residentiary; they are assisted by the Receiver General and Chapter Clerk. One of the canons is also Rector of St Margaret's Church, Westminster, and often also holds the post of Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons. In addition to the Dean and canons, there are at present three full-time minor canons: the precentor, the sacrist and the chaplain. A series of Priests Vicar assist the minor canons.

More information: The Guardian

I mean, you can't walk down the aisle in Westminster Abbey 

in a strapless dress, it just won't happen -it has to suit 

the grandeur of that aisle, it's enormous.

Bruce Oldfield

HARIS ALEXIOU: THE MOST MAGNIFICENT GREEK VOICE

Χάρις Αλεξίου

Christmas days have gone and The Grandma has returned to her normal life. Today, she has gone to the library to borrow a Konstandinos Kavafis' book, one of her favourite authors.

The Grandma loves Greece since she studied classic Greek at school when she was a teenager. She loves classic languages and Latin and Greek are her favourite ones. She has decided to choose this book because today is Haris Alexiou's birthday and she wants to homage this wonderful singer reading some poems in her natural language.

The Grandma admires Haris a lot and she has got all her songs in different ways, cassettes, LP's, CD's and MP3's. She remembers with a lot of emotion the first time, and the last one, that Haris visited Barcelona. It was in 2008 when she offered an unforgettable concert in the Palau de la Música.

After reading Kavafis and listening to Haris, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 55).

More information: Possession 1

Haris Alexiou, in Greek Χάρις Αλεξίου, born 27 December 1950 in Thebes, Greece as Hariklia Roupaka, in Greek, Χαρίκλεια Ρουπάκα, is a Greek singer. She is considered one of the most popular singers in Greece and has been commercially successful since the 1970s.

She has worked with important Greek songwriters and composers, has performed at top musical theatres all over the world, and has received several awards. She has recorded over thirty albums and has been featured on albums of other musicians.

Χάρις Αλεξίου

On 14 March 2010 Alpha TV ranked Alexiou as the first top-certified female artist in Greece in the phonographic era, since 1960, Chart Show: Your Countdown and the Number 3 overall ranking with regards to the sale of the personal albums certified Gold or Platinum in Greek discography since 1970, behind the male singers George Dalaras and Yiannis Parios.

Eight of her personal albums released between 1977 and 2003 have surpassed 1.5 million sales, the only Greek female singer to do so.

She also has an audience in Turkey and her various songs were sung in Turkish. She has lived in Athens since 1958, when she and her family moved there from Thebes. Her grandmother's family migrated to Thebes in 1924 from Seydiköy, İzmir. Her name was given to a street in Gaziemir.

Haris Alexiou appeared in the Greek music scene in the early 1970s. Her charismatic voice, combined with a unique way of performing and a strong scenic presence, very soon led her to the top.

More information: Haris Alexiou

Today she is still at the top, always working hard, always seeking new ways of expression and always giving prestige and value to the contemporary light and popular Greek music. She has worked with the most important Greek songwriters, has performed at the greatest musical theatres in all five continents and has received several important awards.

She has had over thirty of her own albums recorded, has participated in albums of other artists, either renowned or young and promising, being always open to new ways in music.

The first important step in her career was her participation with George Dalaras in the album Mikra Asia written by Apostolos Kaldaras and Pythagoras Papastamatiou in 1972. A historic album, the biggest hit of the '70s and included in Minos-EMI's 100 Greatest Hits of the Century.

Χάρις Αλεξίου

The 1980s start with two enormous hits: Fevgo and Ximeroni. Songs of Yesterday, her album with Dimitra Galani includes ballads which fascinate the public. At the same time she records traditional and folk songs, rebetika and laika, and gives concerts both in Greece and abroad.

1990 begins with her second collaboration with Thanos Mikroutsikos. The album is entitled This Cologne Lingers on for Years with lyrics by Lina Nikolakopoulou.

In October of the same year, she participates in the most important concert of the decade in Peace and Friendship Stadium of Athens. In this festive concert, called Our Own Night, all the big names of the Greek show business are present. Yiannis Parios, Thanos Mikroutsikos, Dimitra Galani, Chris Nikolopoulos, Alkistis Protopsalti, George Sarris, George Zambetas, Lakis Lazopoulos and the legendary Melina Mercouri.

In September 2000, the album Whispers is released. It includes her favourite songs performed by her and a piano only. In October, she presents these songs in Music Palace of Athens and in the ancient Epidaurus Odeon accompanied by a small musical ensemble. The same year, she founds her own record company, Estia, in order to produce all her future ventures in discography.

From Greece to Australia, from Russia to Africa, from America to Japan, Haris Alexiou travels around and shows the world the feeling of the Greek song. 

She firmly believes that the Greek song, through its poets and composers, made her love and better understand the history and the culture of her country.

More information: Haaretz

After the Greek economic crisis,

we don’t really know what tomorrow will bring. 

These changes are happening too swiftly for us to establish 

as artists how to interpret this into our music.

An artist has to find light in the darkness and at this moment,

we have to wait to see the light.

 Χάρις Αλεξίου/Haris Alexiou

MARIE & PIERRE CURIE: THE ISOLATIUM OF RADIUM

Radium

Today, The Grandma has been resting after the Christmas dinner. She has decided to read a little about two important scientists who she admires a lot, Marie and Pierre Curie.

The Curies announced their discovery to the French Academy of Sciences on a day like today in 1898. Before reading about The Curies, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 54 & Checkpoint 9). 

More information: Pronouns 2

Radium is a chemical element with symbol Ra and atomic number 88. It is the sixth element in group 2 of the periodic table, also known as the alkaline earth metals. Pure radium is silvery-white, but it readily reacts with nitrogen, rather than oxygen, on exposure to air, forming a black surface layer of radium nitride (Ra3N2). All isotopes of radium are highly radioactive, with the most stable isotope being radium-226, which has a half-life of 1600 years and decays into radon gas, specifically the isotope radon-222. When radium decays, ionizing radiation is a product, which can excite fluorescent chemicals and cause radioluminescence.

Radium, in the form of radium chloride, was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898. They extracted the radium compound from uraninite and published the discovery at the French Academy of Sciences five days later. Radium was isolated in its metallic state by Marie Curie and André-Louis Debierne through the electrolysis of radium chloride in 1911.

Pierre Curie

In nature, radium is found in uranium and, to a lesser extent, thorium ores in trace amounts as small as a seventh of a gram per ton of uraninite. Radium is not necessary for living organisms, and adverse health effects are likely when it is incorporated into biochemical processes because of its radioactivity and chemical reactivity.

Currently, other than its use in nuclear medicine, radium has no commercial applications; formerly, it was used as a radioactive source for radioluminescent devices and also in radioactive quackery for its supposed curative powers. Today, these former applications are no longer in vogue because radium's toxicity has since become known, and less dangerous isotopes are used instead in radioluminescent devices.

Radium is the heaviest known alkaline earth metal and is the only radioactive member of its group. Its physical and chemical properties most closely resemble its lighter congener barium.

More information: American Physical Society

Pure radium is a volatile silvery-white metal, although its lighter congeners calcium, strontium, and barium have a slight yellow tint. Its color rapidly vanishes in air, yielding a black layer of radium nitride (Ra3N2). Its melting point is either 700 °C or 960 °C and its boiling point is 1,737 °C. Both of these values are slightly lower than those of barium, confirming periodic trends down the group 2 elements. Like barium and the alkali metals, radium crystallizes in the body-centered cubic structure at standard temperature and pressure: the radium–radium bond distance is 514.8 picometers.

Radium has a density of 5.5 g/cm3, higher than that of barium, again confirming periodic trends; the radium-barium density ratio is comparable to the radium-barium atomic mass ratio, due to the two elements' similar crystal structures.

Marie Curie

Radium was discovered by Marie Sklodowska-Curie and her husband Pierre Curie on 21 December 1898, in a uraninite, pitchblende, sample. While studying the mineral earlier, the Curies removed uranium from it and found that the remaining material was still radioactive.

They separated out an element similar to bismuth from pitchblende in July 1898, which turned out to be polonium. They then separated out a radioactive mixture consisting mostly of two components: compounds of barium, which gave a brilliant green flame color, and unknown radioactive compounds which gave carmine spectral lines that had never been documented before.

The Curies found the radioactive compounds to be very similar to the barium compounds, except that they were more insoluble. This made it possible for the Curies to separate out the radioactive compounds and discover a new element in them. The Curies announced their discovery to the French Academy of Sciences on 26 December 1898. The naming of radium dates to about 1899, from the French word radium, formed in Modern Latin from radius (ray): this was in recognition of radium's power of emitting energy in the form of rays.

More information: Nobel Prize

On September 1910, Marie Curie and André-Louis Debierne announced that they had isolated radium as a pure metal through the electrolysis of a pure radium chloride (RaCl2) solution using a mercury cathode, producing a radium–mercury amalgam. This amalgam was then heated in an atmosphere of hydrogen gas to remove the mercury, leaving pure radium metal. Later that same year, E. Eoler isolated radium by thermal decomposition of its azide, Ra(N3)2.

Radium metal was first industrially produced in the beginning of the 20th century by Biraco, a subsidiary company of Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK) in its Olen plant in Belgium.

Pierre & Marie Curie

The common historical unit for radioactivity, the curie, is based on the radioactivity of 226Ra.

Some of the few practical uses of radium are derived from its radioactive properties. More recently discovered radioisotopes, such as cobalt-60 and caesium-137, are replacing radium in even these limited uses because several of these isotopes are more powerful emitters, safer to handle, and available in more concentrated form.

The isotope 223Ra, under the trade name Xofigo, was approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration in 2013 for use in medicine as a cancer treatment of bone metastasis. The main indication of treatment with Xofigo is the therapy of bony metastases from castration-resistant prostate cancer due to the favourable characteristics of this alpha-emitter radiopharmaceutical. 225Ra has also been used in experiments concerning therapeutic irradiation, as it is the only reasonably long-lived radium isotope which does not have radon as one of its daughters.

More information: Factinate

Radium is still used today as a radiation source in some industrial radiography devices to check for flawed metallic parts, similarly to X-ray imaging. When mixed with beryllium, radium acts as a neutron source.

Radium-beryllium neutron sources are still sometimes used even today, but other materials such as polonium are now more common: about 1500 polonium-beryllium neutron sources, with an individual activity of 1,850 Ci (68 TBq), have been used annually in Russia. These RaBeF4-based (α, n) neutron sources have been deprecated despite the high number of neutrons they emit, 1.84×106 neutrons per second, in favour of 241Am–Be sources. Today, the isotope 226Ra is mainly used to form 227Ac by neutron irradiation in a nuclear reactor.

Download The Laboratory Notebooks of Pierre and Marie Curie and the Discovering of Polonium and Radium

When radium was discovered, no one knew that it would prove 

useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. 

And this is a proof that scientific work must not be 

considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. 

Marie Curie