Well, I've been conspicuous by my absence again, and I'm even about to flee the country for seven weeks.  So before I go a few more curtiosities, and because I am off to Britain, a theme occurred to me, a theme inspired by tales brought back by those slightly older than me of what they encountered in post-war Britain.

The Poms might snigger about convicts, but we could always laugh at their baths, which according to legend, were used to store the coal in.  For all that, they must have cared about them, if Jane Austen is to be relied on.

Oh!  who can ever be tired of Bath?
  — Jane Austen (1775 - 1817), Northanger Abbey, chapter 10.

Watching television, you'd think we lived at bay, in total jeopardy, surrounded on all sides by human-seeking germs, shielded against infection and death only by a chemical technology that enables us to keep killing them off.
  — Lewis Thomas, 'Germs' in The Lives of a Cell, Penguin, 1973.

Gather ye soap-suds while ye may
The smuts are still a-flying:
And this same hair so bright today
Tomorrow may need dyeing.

The glorious Lamp of Oil, the wick,
The higher he's a-getting
The sooner will the smuts fly quick
And on your hair be setting.

That hair is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer
But being spoilt, the worse, and worst
Hairs will succeed the former.

 Then be not mean, good soap go buy;
And with it be not chary:
For having lost its bloom, you'll sigh,
'My hair for ever tarry.'
  — Archibald Stoddart-Walker

On a framework of three sticks, meeting at the top, they stretch pieces of woollen cloth, taking care to get the joins as perfect as they can, and inside this little tent they put a dish with red-hot stones in it.  Then they take some hemp seed, creep into the tent, and throw the seed onto the hot stones.  At once it begins to smoke, giving off a vapour unsurpassed by any vapour-bath one could find in Greece.  The Scythians enjoy it so much that they howl with pleasure.  This is their substitute for an ordinary bath in water, which they never use.
  — Herodotus (c. 480 BC - 425 BC), The Histories, Book 4, Penguin Classics, p. 295.

Within a few years isotopes will turn up in many more expected or unexpected places — perhaps the slogan 'Gamma Washes Whiter', will become quite familiar to us when our ultra-sonic washing machines are equipped with some gamma source to sterilize shirts and socks and napkins.
  — Egon Larsen, Atomic Energy, Pan Books, 1958, p. 136-7.

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Personally, if anybody makes any comments about convicts to me in England, I shall simply say what my grandmother used to say.

"England must be a terrible place: it's where the convicts came from."