Sometimes there's a chance thing that I stumble upon - like today, when I was checking social media, when I found a picture of a curious bridge, with the explanation that this was a special kind of towpath bridge. The design allowed the horse to change sides without unhitching the towline.

The bridge looks really beautiful: 

It's on the Macclesfield Canal in Britain. If you'd like to read more about roving bridges, there's a Wikipedia article about it, and there's a few more images of the bridge, towing horses, and general information about boat towing here at exploringgb.co.uk.

If you like silly "Day of Whatever" days, today should be one that delights you - after all, it won't get much sillier than "Talk like a Pirate Day". Arr.  There's even a website about it - and I just discovered that it has a section about German pirate (or, more generally, marine) language, explaining it to English speakers. 

The most pirate-y that I've gotten yet was probably paddling holidays...

 ... which isn't very close. But it's also far less dangerous! 

In case you're looking for somewhere to go and something to do for the weekend, maybe the Textilmarkt Benediktbeuren is the thing for you? It's an annual market, and there will be at least some handweavers there.  

It definitely looks like a very full and varied portfolio, so if you're in the Munich area and interested in textiles, there's probably something there for you...

(This post was supposed to go out yesterday, but there was some hiccup in the blog, apparently, so it never finished publishing....)

Travel will educate you, or that's how a German saying goes. You can certainly discover a lot of new things - for example, I was delighted to see this bit of stone and mortar when I was in Ingelheim: 

This is a small part of a water pipeline from the end of the 8th century, built to bring good drinking water into the palatinate palace of Charlemagne. The canal was about 6.8 km long, following the principles of how Roman water lines were built.

It was not strictly necessary to build this to get water to the palace, as there was plenty of water around the place - but it provided much more high-quality, fresh drinking water in the palace, and the water was also used to feed wells. The 

I am delighted to be part of a textile winter school in Padua coming January: 

The Winter School will be a workshop to introduce participants to all kinds of practical stuff regarding archaeological textiles - not just how to handle the textiles, but also some of their production process. Such as splicing and spinning, weaving and tablet weaving. 

If you'd like to know more about the programme, please go to the website, where you can find out more about the programme and application process. And if you know somebody who might be interested, please spread the word!

English has its share of quirks, and one of them is the many collective nouns. I've learned about them mostly because of their use for groups of animals - a herd of horses is rather tame, but what about a pride of lions or a murder of crows? 

If you'd like to amuse yourself with some light reading about collective nouns, you can find an article about them here.  And a list of many different collective nouns for diverse animals here. And now please excuse me - even though our household clowder of cats only consist of one single dame, I am getting admonished that it's time for a snack and a cuddle...

Well, Finland is (at least in my mind) quite good when it comes to Delightfully Weird things. Their praliné-filled real chicken egg shells for Easter come to mind. The air-guitar championships. And now I've discovered that they also have the World Championships in Hobby Horsing: 

That is really delightfully weird - and well, I could imagine sort of getting through a dressage session, but I'd definitely be out in the show jumping. Full respect for those who manage to hop across those obstacles!