Unknown Catastrophes

My daughter is in the middle of a huge poem about the characters from What Katy Did. I remember writing really long poems though I was far older than my daughter is. Mine were rubbish in the style of The Wasteland but without any academic background to make them mean anything. She recited Death by Emily Dickinson for me last night from her Daring Book For Girls. I have to say that I think that this is better than The Dangerous Book For Boys - more measured and intellectual but with a few breathtakingly alarming sections - daughter is currently trying to equip a toolkit which includes power tools - I won't buy a replacement for my lost Swiss Army Knife in case it is seen as an offensive weapon. And is Fahrenheit 451 really a book to be recommending to teenage girls?

I'm still on the Pilate book at the moment, lost in the details of how Judea was Governed. It is nice to see that Michael Palin is mentioned in the summing up of various depictions of Pilate over the years, having a serious point when we all thought it was just funny. I think that most depictions of both the Temple in Jerusalem and the Governor's palace, have shown them as rough, dark places, almost unfinished when they were probably light, airy stretches of shining and polished marble. It just seems wrong to us that architecture 2000 years ago could be as clean and smooth as our own edifices.