Glupinious moaning, mates worldwide. I greet you well.

As there's nothing in today's British news that doesn't cause me to want to descend upon London with a pitchfork in one hand and a good length of hanging rope in the other, I shall refrain from inflicting it upon you. You have your own problems.

Instead, I'll bring you, in a number of postings, some black and white pictures as taken by Daily Mail photographers in the first half of the 20th century.

The Mail has put up quite a large number of them today, and unfortunately has paywalled the page. But never fear...

Here we go (my commentary) ...

1 - Christmas turkeys and chickens on display at a London butcher's shop, 1929. Turkey and Christmas didn't become a thing in the UK until well into the 1960s. A once a year treat, and an expensive one, before poultry was moved into sheds and fed on chemicals it actually tasted of something. I remember as a boy smelling the Easter Sunday chicken roasting from quite a distance from our house. Now, when Her Indoors roasts one in the kitchen a few feet away, I can hardly smell a thing.

2 - Tuberculic children being "aired", Clapham Common, 1920. Before vaccines and anti-biotics there was little to be done for tuberculosis sufferers other than what had been done for centuries. In England and Wales tuberculic children were often sent to special schools-cum-hospitals, as this at Springwell House School.

3 - Iconic image of St. Paul's Cathedral, standing virtually undamaged following a German air raid. The image was captured in the early hours of the 30th of December 1940, by Herbert Mason, chief photographer of the Daily Mail. By this time what we know as the "London Blitz" was largely over as the Luftwaffe went to work on other cities and towns.

4 - A spiv at work, Lambeth, 1940. Also known - then and now - as "wide-boys" (because they gave the police a wide berth), the spiv is a recognisable type. If you wanted it, the spiv could get it. Also known for their fast-talking cockney "patter", you might encounter the spiv in a pub or, as here, on the street. His wares always "fell of the back of a lorry" or were rescued from a "ship that sank". This spiv is flogging otherwise unobtainable silk stockings to a very interested audience of working-class women. Off-camera, the spiv would have had lookouts watching for the Old Bill (still a universal English term for "police", along with "Plod" ). People were mostly happy to ignore the hooky origins of the goods spivs sold because they knew that the rich could still have almost anything they wanted - silk stockings included - while they were subject to strict rationing and perpetual shortage.

5 - The summer of 1945. The war in Europe is over, many beaches have been cleared of mines, barbed-wire and other defensive measures, and for the first time since 1939 the British can visit previously off-limits coastal towns and actually swim in the sea. Never were the beaches so crowded as in that summer of 1945. The joy and relief in this picture, taken at Brighton, are palpable.

More later.