No, I do not have a glamorous life sailing around the world, enjoying stunningly beautiful blue water, but like them today is an anniversary.
For me it is blogging, for 6 years ago today the first post went live. If I were 6 now I would be out there banging on doors demanding free chocolate, for today is Halloween!!
Being a little bit older I'll be connecting some appropriately spooky dots, and going back to the painter John Martin. As well as a career in art and a side line in designing London's sewage system he had time to raise not just 6 of his own children but also take under his wing a young woman called Jane Webb.
Jane Webb went on to write The Mummy (above) and the ever connected John Martin could also claim to know William Goldwin whose daughter wrote Frankenstein. It might not have been a coincidence then that one of Martin's own daughters married an Egyptologist.
Indeed there sometimes seems no limit to the connections John Martin made. He shared lodgings with the future King of Belgium (who became godfather to one of Martin's children) and at his dinner parties you could meet Dickens, Michael Faraday, Turner and John Tenniel, the illustrator of Lewis Carroll's books.
One amazing story has him on the footplate of a steam train with none other than Isambard Kingdom Brunel thundering along at 90 mph as they proved conclusively that a train could go faster than a horse.
What a great life!
