About

I love the past; I love its peoples, languages, religion, culture and traditions. I do not approach the past, as is increasingly done these days, by evaluating it against the standards of today. There are a lot of statue toppling and trigger warnings if we go down this path. I like to take a rose-tinted view of the past, and because I’m an old-fashioned sort of chap, I’ll do it through a monocle rather than spectacles if you please, hence the name of this website.

I would like to think had I lived in the past, I would cut a rather dapper figure, a man of letters, smoking my pipe and twiddling my fancy-mans moustache. This serene lifestyle, of course, was not the reality of any of my ancestors living in the 19th century, one of my forebears having the misfortune of being born in the Workhouse and then shipped off to Flanders. He died in middle age of lung complications, most likely originating from being gassed in the trenches a few decades earlier.

So I’m aware that life in the past was hard, often short, and that attitudes were different and perhaps not as enlightened as they are today. Still, I refuse to let this realisation dampen my fascination and wonder or allow it to hobble my imagination of the past.

I write on this website to increase my own knowledge of the subjects I love to read about, hopefully, to entertain, but primarily because I love to write. I am not an expert in any particular field, and I am certainly open to correction if I have made errors in what I write about; in fact, I would welcome it.