Around 3pm we thought about taking our daily stroll. Strictly for exercise, of course!

It is another beautiful warm day today. I wore a light jacket and Tigger wore no coat at all.

Following the advice of the WHO, though this is slightly ambiguous, we decided against wearing masks. We did however, agree to steer well clear of any other people we might meet on the way.

The walk was pleasant but we had to dodge a number of individuals who seemed ignorant or uncaring of the advice to maintain a proper distance between themselves and others. This involved us, once or twice, in crossing to the other side of the street or walking down the carriageway.

Myddelton’s Delicatessen

This is Myddelton’s Deli where we called in for our treat – takeaway coffee! – before returning home. This pleasant little shop is named after Hugh Myddelton who, in 1608-13, constructed the New River to bring much needed water to London. That river terminates near here in the local waterworks.

Amwell Street

The deli is on the corner of Lloyd Baker Street and Amwell Street. Amwell Street used to feel very much like a village high street but most of the shops have become “open by appointment only” in recent years. As you can see, though the street is quiet, there are still a few people about.

St Mark’s Church

We returned home via Myddelton Square where St Mark’s Church was bright with sunshine. If you look carefully near the bottom right corner of the photo you can make out a dog in the park. Many parks have been closed to discourage thoughtless people who have been congregating in them but this one apparently remains open.

We made it safely home, dodging a few more of the thoughtless fraternity on the way, to enjoy our coffee, remembering of course the advice to Wash your hands as soon as you come in!

In the heyday of my old blog I used to write all my posts in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the universal coding language of the Web. This gave me complete control over the formatting, including fints, text size, the placement of photos on the page, etc. HTML is a fairly complex language or notation which may seen hard to master for the beginner. It is, however, a perfectly logical system and is easier to learn than you might think. For the purposes of writing a blog, though, a fairly small subset of codes will usuallly suffice.

HTML consists of a set of “tags”, indicated by enclosing them in a pair of angle-brackets “<” and “>”. In most (but not all) cases, you need a pair of such tags, the first to “switch on” the effect and the second to “switch it off” again. For example, if I want to make a word bold I would write the HTML code thus: <strong>bold</strong>. (Note the forward slash in the end-tag.

In the first line of this post, I included a link, that is, a phrase that when you click on it, sends your browser to the webpage in question, though the actual URL (the “Web address”) is discretely hidden. To write that in HTML is a little bit complicated. It would be:

Example 1: <a href=”https://tigergrowl.wordpress.com”>old blog</a>

If that seems a little bit messy, then you probably do not want to know what the code looks like for including an image, sizing it and positioning it on the page! (If you really want to know what that looks like, you should probably consult one of the many excellent online HTML tutorials!)

When I started this blog, my intention was to write all my posts on my iPhone. Writing HTML would have been possible on the mobile but rather awkward. So I had either to give up the idea of formatting my text or of find another way to do it. Happily, there is another way. It is a system called Markdown.

What attracted me to Markdown? For one thing, the coding is simpler and easier to understand and use than HTML. The only problem is that you cannot use it direcly in the WordPress editor but there is an easy work around. If you want to write using Markdown on your phone, you can install a free Markdown editor app such as Pretext.

Once you have composed your post in Pretext’s editor, you click on the up-arrow symbol at top right, then on “Share Document” and when a list of your apps appears, select the WordPress app. The text will appear in the proper place and it you have indicated the title of the piece (by prefixing it with the # symbol), it will appear in the title space.

If you sometimes want to write your posts on the PC, then you can find a number of specialized Markdown editors but I haven’t bothered with them. Instead I looked at programmers’ editors, some of which can also handle Markdown. A good example is one of the online community’s favourite programmers’ editors, called Notepad++. Not only is this an excellent editor for writing anything from plain text to programming code but it also exists both as an installed application and as a portable app. As if that were not enough recommendation, it is free!

The best way I have found to use Notepad++ for writing posts in Markdown is to write a few words of text and then save to a file with a .md extension. From then on, anything you write in Markdown will appear as the code indicates but will also show the coding symbols. (Specialized Markdown editors often have two displays, one showing the marked-up text and the other showing how it will appear when published. I prefer to see it all on one display.) Once you publish the text, by copy-pasting into to your WordPress blog editor, the coding will disappear and only the effects will remain. Let me give you an example of Markdown coding. Consider the following sentence:

Example 2: We can easily include words in italics and in bold.

To achieve that with Markdown code, you write:

Example 3: We can easily include words in *italics* and in **bold**.

Enclosing words or phrase in a pair of single asterisks puts them in italics while a pair of double asterisks makes them bold. I think you will agree that that is simpler than the HTML equivalent with tags in angle-brackets. In Notepad++, you see the asterisks as well as their effect but once you copy and paste the text into the WordPress editor, the asterisks disappear, as you see in Example 2.

What about including links in your text? That too is delightfully simple, compared with HTML. Referring again to the link in the first line of the post, what I wrote in the editor was this:

Example 4: [old blog](https://tigergrowl.wordpress.com)

The square brackets indicate the text that remains visible and the round brackets contain the actual URL which will remain invisible but be used redirect the browser.

There is a lot more that you can do than this, of course, though Markdown is by no means as complete as HTML. The latter is still needed for “serious” projects, but you can go a long way with Markdown and it is probably sufficient for writing most blog posts.

Where can you find out what the codes are? There are many Markdown references and cheat sheets available online. A couple of handy ones are the WordPress Markdown quick reference cheat sheet and CommonMark’s Quick Reference.

To end with, here is a little puzzle. If you copy-paste HTML code into the WordPress editor, the angle-brackets disappear and the code is enacted. How then did I manage to write and keep visible the HTML code in the sentence I have labelled Example 1? By all means leave a comment if you think you know the answer 🙂

After lunch today we went out for our daily exercise walk. We recently took delivery of a consignment of face masks and decided we had better play the game and wear them.

Natty gents’ wear – 2020 style

Thus accoutred, off we went for a quick tour of the local backstreets. Not so much a bal masqué as a promenade masquée!

We met a number of people on the way round: none of them wore masks themselves but neither did they give us a second look.

On the way home we called in at the delicatessen for takeaway coffee – it’s the little treats that help keep you sane at times like this. Also it’s pleasant to be able to interact, even briefly, with another human being.

That’s our outing for today over and done with but there’s always tomorrow…

The word philosophy first appeared in English some time around AD 1300, borrowed from the Norman French filosofie. Norman scholars had taken it from the Latin philosophia and the Latins from the Greek f???s?f?a (“philosophia”). The original meaning is usually rendered as something like “love of wisdom”.

Since the 14th century to the modern day, the word philosophy has been made to mean many different things and today its meanings range from the popular, as when we talk about someone being “philosophical” about his problems, to the formal, as when it names a discipline of study and research. Even in academic fields, the word, by itself, can stand for a variety of meanings, depending on the direction taken by the particular studies performed under its aegis. I think, though, that most people have at least an intuitive sense of what is involved in the word and will be familiar with the names of some of its most distinguished practitioners, from Socrates and Plato to Descartes and our own Bertrand Russell.

As an academic discipline, philosophy is as challenging as any other field of knowledge and we non-specialists must approach it with caution, knowing that we can at best acquire a general understanding of the subject which, moreover, continually changes, advances and breaks new ground. That is not to say that we must give up and “leave it to the experts”. Not at all. The curious mind can find plenty to interest and intrigue it in philosophy and can perhaps learn some valuable truths about life in the process.

It is in this sense that I have dabbled in philosophy over the years though not in any consistent way, I must admit. More recently, deciding that I needed to have a better idea of the whole field of philosophy within which to situate my readings of idividual philosophers, I looked for a history of philosophy. In my very first enquiries I struck gold. This rich seam has an author and a title. These are, respectively, Anthony Kenny and A New History of Western Philosophy.

The version I have is a paperback (Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-965649-3, £16.99). The work was originally published in several volumes, all of which are incorporated into a single paperback volume. You can imagine, then, that it is of substantial size. The main text (excluding the General Introduction) starts on page 7 and concludes on page 996, ten pages short of a round thousand.

Sir Anthony John Patrick Kenny is an eminent schiolar of philosophy as you can easily discover by looking him up online. He is also a first-class writer with a gift for elucidating complex arguments and bringing clarity to theories whose subtlties might overwhelm the non-expert.

Reading A New History of Western Philosophy is of course a challenge because of its size alone and I have found it easiest to set aside a certain time each day to read what you might call a digestible amount. So far I have reached page 335 – about a third of the way through – and remain as keen to continue as when I started. Reading it is not a task to be undertaken lightly but if you have an enquiring mind or wish to receive an authoritative overview of philosophy from the Ancient Greeks to the present day, then I can heartily recommend this book to you.