bunn

 This fort up the road from where I live is for sale. https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/126820367#/?channel=RES_NEW

It's such a cool place! I wish someone would buy it and do something remarkable with it.  Not sure what that would be, but I guess that is why it is so vast and so (relatively) cheap. 

 

I have bought a Tile for Theo. It's a Bluetooth device that hangs from his collar and allows me to use an app to track him by showing him on a map. In theory, it's also supposed to send me an alert if he goes too far from the phone, but so far the only time this has happened has been the time I went out in the car without him. It seems that the range of the alerts is several miles, which is annoying, because it clearly shows on the phone when he's out of Bluetooth connection range. But you have to be looking at it to see that.

Still, it has allowed me to keep an eye on him in the garden while not standing right over him, and I think my ability to suddenly pop out and call him back just as he was making the decision to leave is having some impact.

VE day yesterday, and coincidentally, also my mother's birthday. I popped over for the first time in almost 2 months to take a card & present (at a suitable distance). As an official Old Person Of The Village, she had been given a VE day cupcake, a drawing of a rainbow to show in her window, and a VE day button. This seemed to amuse her.

In our village, I don't think we had cupcakes for the elderly, but we did have a scarecrow competition. This was slightly eyebrow-raising, since it was impromptu, and everyone had to use stuff already in their house. Several people chose to make soldiers, but since they had no uniform, the effect was often somewhat... terroristic. But other people did more peaceful scarecrows, like the one of a woman welcoming her lover home, and the pub (closed, of course), which rather mysteriously decided to put up an effigy of the landlord celebrating VE day, which of course he was not.

We wandered up to have a look at the efforts late in the evening, and while we were doing that, someone let off what was apparently a genuine WWII air raid siren. It made a very strange and eery sound echoing up the river valley, with almost no other sound to be heard and the scent of blossom on the air, and almost no moving people, but still scarecrows all around. Then, even more surreal, it segued into the oddly-familiar crackly sound of Vera Lynn singing 'We'll meet again'. What a strange time this is.

So that's what the repost function does no LJ.  Doesnt' seem much point if you can't at least leave a note saying why you reposted it...

Still, I really liked that xkcd cartoon.  I think most people who don't read much history tend to forget just how MUCH of it there is.  Then they get shouty if something is left out, forgetting that inevitably, lots of things MUST be left out and every reading is a partial one. 

I am not sure if this is really a good moment for yet another second world war movie... but youtube informs me that there is a Dunkirk movie coming up next year.    And I am a total sucker for the Little Ships of Dunkirk story, so I definitely want to see it.

 Apparently some of the original Little Ships took part in the filming!  So that is a reason to want to see it on its own.  There are probably actors and people in it, but I want to see the little ships. :-D

And while I am blethering, I thought I would link the history of the Tamar Barge Lynher here - she did not go to Dunkirk, being occupied as a barrage balloon platform at the time, but she is still an interesting elderly old boat, dating from 1896.  The photos are worth a glance: - quite a spectacular restoration story because she looks a complete mess having been hulked under the mud.  I will look forward to spotting her on the river next year!

I'd hate to own a wooden sailing boat - soooooo much work - but the sight of them always cheers me up. 

I was just reading this interesting blog about possible origins of the place name Teversham, and came across this quote from Eilert Ekwall:

This book came with a recommendation by Ursula Le Guin on the cover  "If Le Carré scares you, read Jo Walton"  it said.    So, here is a quote from one of my very favouritist authors, referencing one of my other very favouritist authors?  Ooo!

( Not that simple, alas. )

When thinking about England*'s Hour of Greatest Need, I started considering previous Hours of Apparently Insufficient Need.  It must be admitted though, that my knowledge of anything that happened during the period between about 1485 and 1900 is pretty appalling, so I thought I'd ask for suggestions.

I thought of :
- The Viking Invasions
- The Norman Conquest
- Stephen v Matilda
-  The Wars of the Roses
- The Spanish Armada (but then dismissed that as a scary thing that basically just got blown away)
- The English Civil War
- 1916 (although if you argued that this is a lot more than England's, Britain's, or even the UK's Hour, I'd have to concede the point)
- Dunkirk

Then it occurred to me that we actually have a gadget that is supposed to specifically indicate Hours of Need just down the road at Buckland Abbey, so I looked up Drake's Drum to see what times of national emergency it had seen fit to signal.  But it seems to be a most erratic indicator, drumming for things like Lord Nelson being given the Freedom of  Plymouth, which doesn't really seem like an emergency, even in Plymouth.

Incidentally, there's an excellent list on Wikipedia of Sleeping Kings** In Mountains.   I knew there were quite a few of them, but I hadn't previously realised quite what a superb range of sleeping heroes was available in the event of emergency.

* I'm not being too picky about national definitions here, although I think 'Albion's Hour of Greatest Need' definitely has more of a ring to it than 'United Kingdom Maximum Necessity Moment' or similar.

**Although not all of them are kings.

I observe that the children of people that I know, if judged entirely on photography, would appear to be all stunningly attractive. Photographs that I own of people that I know from their own teen and childhood years, and photos of members of my own family suggest that by comparison, humanity up to about 20 years ago was largely composed of odd-looking, grumpy-faced or mad-looking and somewhat furtive trolls.

Either some sort of alien intervention has taken place unnoticed, or nowadays, people get photographed so often, and get to see the results so instantly, they have on the whole, got a lot better at being in photographs.

I expect Future Historians to come up with a complicated theory about nutrition and dentistry. Or to go with the alien intervention thing.

Particularly when coupled to the word 'wreck'.