Food, Glorious Food...

[endlessrarities]

It's Thursday evening.  I should've taken the bike into work for my 15 mile train/bike commute, but when I woke up at 4.50, the rain was hammering down, so I set the alarm for the regular time and had a lie-in (comparatively speaking) instead.  This meant I had to do a workout when I came home instead - I'm now up to 30 minutes, and once you add the 25 minutes of pilates onto this, it's getting serious.  And I'm feeling the results already.  Okay, so I don't think I'm losing any weight, but I'm definitely fitter and more healthy than I was.

And we still haven't finished editing that wretched paper...

I have a horrible feeling that I didn't feature 'Castle of the Month' in June, so I apologise for the ommission.  I'll take refuge in some pretty Roman stuff instead, by giving you a guided tour of the fast food joints of Herculaneum.  Which are, strangely enough, quite similar to the fast food joints of Pompeii - a bunch of large pots set into a long strip counter which fronted onto the street frontage:-

Once again, they did a lot of window dressing to make their particular shop stand out from the crowd. 

But what really caught my eye was this exposed pot, which had a stamp visible upon its fabric:

A serial number?  A delivery instruction?  Who knows....

And lastly, I've included a view of one of the town bakeries.  According to one of my books, the small mills were powered by donkeys, but I can't really see how a donkey could fit within this small space.  I'll bet some poor sap of a slave was employed to move the grindstones instead.  As monotonous and soul-destroying jobs go, this must be near the top of the list, close to the lad who turned the spit in the medieval period:-

Bread and circuses indeed...