New Year's Eve.....

I've got to the point in life where spending New Year's Eve out partying has no attraction at all. Expensive drinks in over crowded bars and no chance of a taxi home afterwards? I think not.

Instead I'm going to stay at home, open a bottle of wine and read one of my Christmas books. Before Christmas I watched a BBC series called 'The Last Kingdom.' It centred on a character called Uhtred, the son of the Saxon King of Northumbria. He gets captured as a child by the Danes so he's not sure if he's Dane or Saxon. He ends up at the court of Alfred the Great at Winchester, then the capital of Wessex. Wessex is about to be overrun by the Danes, hence the last kingdom. But Alfred turns it around with Uhtred's help of course.

Uhtred is a fiction of course but the historical background is true. It's the period in our history where England as we know it comes into being and it was touch and go that it actually happened. I learned a lot of history from the programme. It's a history we don't know much about and we really should.

The BBC production was, IMO, very good. It went out on Thursday night but I thought it was good enough a drama for a Saturday night. It certainly would have been an improvement on the dreadful Dr Who that they like to inflict on us in the weeks up to Christmas. Maybe it was a bit bloody and there was a bit of post watershed rumpy pumpy as well so maybe not a mid evening thing after all. The Danes were all ugly, the aristocratic Saxons were stupid and vain. But Uhtred looked, for all the world, like a well groomed Northern Quarter hipster on his way to a costume party. And he had a couple of 'Poldark' moments which won't have done the ratings any harm at all. It did sufficiently well for the BBC to commission another series.

This is a follow up book based around Uhtred who has moved to Chester where he is in charge of the defence of the north of the Kingdom of Mercia. As far as I can work out Manchester changed hands several times between Mercia and Northumbria in those days. And it was invaded by the Danes at one point, an event commemorated in the murals in the Great Hall of the Town Hall of course. A lot of the action in the book takes place in this part of the world. I'm only on page 46 and the Vikings have burned Birkenhead and sailed a fleet up the Mersey. They are now sitting in an ancient hill fort at Eddisbury, just south of Delamere Forest plotting to burn Chester. While that may not have happened as set out in the book, it's still based in historical fact. I can recommend it.