Elisha Hunt Rhodes - Charles Dickens - Napoleon Bonaparte - Virginia Woolf - Flanders & Swann - Misha Glenny - Brian Clough - Gordon Taylor - Sacred Places TV -
January 31 1862: Mud. Mud. Mud. Elisha Hunt Rhodes
We can fight rebels, but not in the mud. Elisha Hunt Rhodes
LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. Charles Dickens, Bleak House
I made all my generals out of mud. Napoleon Bonaparte
My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring, roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for? Virginia Woolf
Mud, mud, glorious mud
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood. Flanders & Swann, The Hippopotamus Song
Astride the great Ural river, the city of Atyrau is distinguished by the non-porous soil that lies beneath it, blocking all natural drainage. In winter, the river water rises, covering the paved roads and sidewalks in mud. Misha Glenny, McMafia
I like my women to be feminine, not sliding into tackles and covered in mud. Brian Clough
People will look at Bowyer and Woodgate and say, ‘Well, there’s no mud without flames’. Gordon Taylor
The great mosque of Djenne in Mali … vast timber-framed buildings with walls up to two feet thick made of mud … A mosque has stood on this site since the thirteenth century. It is the largest mud building on Earth … Unless the mosque is given a new covering of mud every year, it will simply crumble to dust. Sacred Wonders s1e2: Djennes, Great Mosque in Mali, BBC 2019