I can’t necessarily offer an answer here, but I can give you a bound at least. I was able to find this 1703 geography of the Kingdom of Naples that explicitly calls Italy a boot, so “some time before 1703” can be said for sure

Forma una Penisola, à guisa di uno Stivale, fi come l’Italia tutta fù meditata da Strabone, e da altri Geografi di rigo

Machine translated:

It forms a peninsula, like a boot, just as all of Italy was studied by Strabo and other renowned geographers.

I’m fairly sure the Strabo bit means “we’ve known it was this shape since Strabo” rather than “Strabo said it was boot-shaped”

To speculate a little more, I think the style of boot that Italy looks like started off as riding shoes developed in 10th century Iran (heels are good for staying in stirrups, apparently). If that is correct then it can’t be earlier than the 10th century since there weren’t boots that Italy looked like

I appreciate the recommendation! Unfortunately the keyboard I’ve got is very old and does not have a MIDI output. I don’t mind learning the old fashioned way though! It got me through the other instruments

Ask and ye shall receive

Although apparently my cat is laying claim to it today

Blues and rock are my comfort zones, and I can happily get along with most genres of jazz and metal that aren’t ultra-technical. I can do some passable funk

Guitar is what I’m best at, I’m decent on bass, and I’m complete dogshit on keyboard but working to change that situation. I technically also own a little reed flute that I bought from a whittler at a winter solstice festival that I know how to play the Shrek theme and Darude’s Sandstorm on

If you play guitar, bass, or piano/keyboard, we’re having a jam session. Otherwise, board games! Flashpoint is a cool one, it’s easy to pick up and it’s cooperative

Most of the Nordic countries do not have those. Norway has a lot, Denmark has a little, the others have nothing significant

Anecdotally I would say that London specifically, rather than the UK as a whole, has either an unusually high population of foxes or a unusually bold one. I’ve never seen so many out in the open as there

Thank you for adventuring responsibly! I’m glad you had a good time here

I know, I’m saying that the UK gets the same colours at the same time of year. It should not have been weird to that audience

Anecdotally, UK wildlife does generally seem to be quite quiet compared to other countries. We’ve got talktative birds and the odd cricket and such, but that’s about it. Everything else is in stealth mode

Wait hang on, the UK has heaps of trees that go that colour every year

To be fair it’s very pretty. I get that one

OP, I want you to know that you are not alone, I am also a Brit who loves seeing all the wee reptiles scooting about when he visits places that have them. We barely have any here and they’re fun tiny little dinosaurs!

Edit: actually I do have a proper answer too. I’m in Scotland, which has different trespassing laws to the rest of the UK. In Scotland you have a right to roam under which you can enter any outdoor land, other than that with crops and the immediate surroundings of houses, provided you do so responsibly. There are other reasonable exceptions but the point is that you don’t generally need to check for access here. The rest of the UK is far more restrictive and I have found that visitors find it incredibly weird to walk through a field of grazing sheep or similar when trying to get somewhere

Folkrace is the most reasonable way to get into it actually, that’s fair. It’s not much of a thing where I am so I forgot about it as a format

Motorsports absolutely is not a chill one. Besides the significant cost in most formats, it’s actually quite physically demanding to do basically anything except the slowest go-karts. Obviously not everyone has to do full on neck strength workouts like the F1 drivers, but still

Putting soy sauce on my houmous and washing it down with coffee just to beanmax

Well you do have a whole New Scotland over there

I am Scottish, I own a kilt, and I love haggis and whisky. I have eaten the odd deep fried mars bar. I also like the sound of bagpipes (I have to concede that the Irish uilleann pipes are a much more versatile instrument BUT THEY’RE NOT AS POWERFUL)

I suppose I sort of fit the one about calling myself Scottish before I call myself British, though I don’t consider the two incompatible if Scotland is part of the UK. I am both. Mostly I am just left in a terrible dilemma of whether to make fun of the French or the English more when the opportunity arises

Art

Also I’m fairly sure he’s one of the guys from Rubberbandits

The common traditional view is what’s callled the “quantity theory of money”. It basically says that the amount of money in the system relative to the amount of stuff people are trying to buy with that money is what determines the value of the money. When governments add more money to the system faster than more stuff is being bought, the value of each unit of money goes down because you’ve got more money per stuff overall.

This quantity theory is not universally accepted. Central banks nowadays tend not to try to add specific amounts of money to the system, they just tell other entities in the economy (like the government or other banks) what it’ll cost them to take a loan from the central bank (which effectively makes new money and adds it to the system). If you borrow £1,000 from the bank at a 5% interest rate, the bank does not need to get that £1,000 from anywhere, it can just say “we’ll back this up as money that you have when you try to spend it, and people trust our backing so they’ll take the money”. This means that there’s a new £1,000 in the system that can now be spent when there wasn’t before. As you pay the loan back that money is effectively deleted (barring stuff like the value of the interest or defaulting on the loan).

Central banks nowadays basically pick an inflation rate that they want to aim for and adjust interest rates up and down until the inflation rate gets close to that target. If interest rates are high, taking a loan is a worse deal and fewer people do it, so less new money is added to the system. If they’re low, the opposite. This gives the central bank a fairly powerful tool to affect the inflation rate.

The reason central banks want inflation is to discourage the hoarding of cash. If your money will always be worth a little bit less tomorrow, the sensible thing to do is buy things that you want to buy sooner rather than later. If there is deflation, where the money becomes worth more instead, suddenly the sensible thing to do is hold off from buying things for as long as possible. All of a sudden everyone that could be buying things is doing their best not to and there’s way less economic activity going on. However, you also don’t want too much inflation because ordinary people rapidly become unable to afford things and eventually everyone loses faith in your currency. If that trust is lost, the whole point of the currency is lost and it becomes worthless. See the Zimbabwean dollar for a notorious example of this happening.

Sometimes countries also want their currency to be worth more or less for the purposes of getting better deals in international trade. If your currency becomes worth less compared to other currencies, it becomes a good deal for other countries to buy things from you. It also becomes a worse deal for you to buy things from other countries for the same reason, so you need to figure out what you’re buying and selling where.

Other stuff can throw a spanner in the works, of course. During covid, for example, we were suddenly producing a lot less of a lot of stuff that we still wanted the same amounts of. Everyone initially had about as much money as before but there was less stuff to spend it on, so sellers were suddenly able to charge a lot more for each unit of stuff because they might as well just sell to the buyers that will pay the higher price if they only have a limited stock of stuff. This is basically the quantity theory coming back again in a sense, but unintentionally. The interest rate adjustments sometimes cannot manage to cover these effects; see, for example, Russia’s current sky-high interest rates as they try to compensate for the effects of the enormous amount of military spending they’re doing.