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<title>Ian Vince article feed</title><link>http://www.ianvince.co.uk/index.html</link><description>Bits and bobs of writing</description><dc:language>en</dc:language><dc:creator>ianvince@mac.com</dc:creator><dc:rights>Copyright 2008 Ian Vince</dc:rights><dc:date>2013-05-08T11:22:47+01:00</dc:date><admin:generatorAgent rdf:resource="http://www.realmacsoftware.com/" />
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<lastBuildDate>Tue, 11 Nov 2008 14:59:58 +0000</lastBuildDate><item><title>Reading the Landscape: Beside the Seaside</title><dc:creator>ianvince@mac.com</dc:creator><category>Countryfile</category><category>Reading the Landscape</category><dc:date>2013-05-08T11:22:47+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/4adc766e187a27ee004a915e2f8c233a-19.php#unique-entry-id-19</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/4adc766e187a27ee004a915e2f8c233a-19.php#unique-entry-id-19</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[While the rest of this special edition of the magazine takes to the canals and rivers of Britain, we couldn&rsquo;t let the month pass without a look at the landforms that are found next to Britain&rsquo;s most important waterway &ndash; one that you&rsquo;re famously never more than 70 miles or so from in the UK &ndash; the sea.   At nearly 20,000 miles long and formed from countless permutations of geology and topography, there&rsquo;s a variety of features to see along the coastline of Britain.


Having said that, there are parts of Scotland that appear to have borrowed Nordic landforms &ndash; its north and west coast are punctuated by steep glacier-gouged fjords; each U-shaped valley terminating in sea lochs like Loch Broom by Ullapool or the glorious Loch Etive a few miles north of Oban.   Although not as forbidding as their Norwegian counterparts, Scottish fjords share a heritage with the mountains of Scandinavia that goes beyond their glacial origins; they are part of the same mountain range &ndash; eroded to a fifth of its former height and torn apart by the same tectonic processes that opened up the Atlantic Ocean, while the rest of the range forms the Appalachians of the eastern USA.


At the other end of Britain, the drowned valleys or &lsquo;rias&rsquo; of Cornwall and Devon are stunning examples of what happened when the glaciers melted.   The rise in sea level &ndash; between 100-120 metres &ndash; inundated coastal valleys from Milford Haven in Wales around the coast to Southampton Water and the Solent.   Among them, the Carrick Roads at Falmouth is the third deepest natural harbour in the world (after Sydney and Rio de Janeiro, since you ask), while five miles upstream and to all intents and purposes in the middle of the countryside, the channel is still deep enough to mothball container ships next to the chain-link King Harry Ferry.   Despite the incongruity, like other rias &ndash; the Helford, the Fowey, the Tavy, Tamar and Dart, sylvan valleys with woods to the water&rsquo;s edge and the odd bottomless boat slowly melting back into the river &ndash; the Fal maintains an air of tranquility.


Further east, Dorset&rsquo;s Jurassic Coast displays a stunning set of landforms made by differential erosion; headlands of harder rock than the bays they frame, arches, sea-stacks and coves, but its most striking feature is Chesil Bank, an 18-mile long barrier beach that sweeps into the base of the Isle of Portland.   It was originally described as Britain&rsquo;s largest tombolo &ndash; a spit formed by refraction of currents around an island &ndash; but geomorphologists have changed their minds about that and say it only looks like one, transferring the honour further north among Shetland&rsquo;s fjords &ndash; or voes &ndash; to the sandy tombolo that connects St Ninian&rsquo;s Isle to the Mainland.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reading the Landscape: Grim&#x2019;s Dykes</title><dc:creator>ianvince@mac.com</dc:creator><category>Countryfile</category><category>Reading the Landscape</category><dc:date>2013-03-01T00:00:05+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/grims-dykes.php#unique-entry-id-18</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/grims-dykes.php#unique-entry-id-18</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[March may be the official start of spring, a little warmer and with promises to keep, but it also hides a dark secret, for the month has martial connections. ...  Those campaigns, and many more before and since, have left obvious marks on the countryside; battlefields, motte and baileys and castle keeps we would all recognise the names of, from Hadrian&rsquo;s Wall to the half-mile-long magnificence of Maiden Castle in Dorset, with medieval and Tudor strongholds the length of the country between.   The ubiquity of battle and war in every corner of Britain is evidence of the part that conflict has played in our history, but for every famous hillfort, castle and Roman wall, there are dozens of military connections hiding quietly in our countryside.


Among them, the miles of Iron Age Grim&rsquo;s Dykes or Ditches that are common in Wessex and are believed to be territorial markers.   Though not of a sufficient scale for military use &ndash; where they can still be tracked on the ground they tend to be of the scale of a modest railway embankment &ndash; the ditches have an etymological cousin in Graham&rsquo;s Dyke, a local name for the Roman&rsquo;s short-lived Antonine Wall across the Central Lowlands of Scotland.   Grim was the Old English name for the Anglo-Saxon god of war, Woden, and other Grim&rsquo;s Ditches, particularly the one at Colton, east of Leeds, may have been substantial enough to have a defensive use.


...The eponymous creation of the eighth-century King of Mercia, Offa&rsquo;s Dyke marks the English-Welsh border (running along Marches of a different kind) and is a potent symbol of tension throughout history.   The dyke is built to have commanding views of Powys to the west, with the bank on the Mercian side and the ditch in front to deter any hapless invaders from Wales. 


Seven-hundred years before Offa, at Wales&rsquo; northwestern horn, advancing Roman legions were confounded by both the treacherous Menai Straits and the Celtic tribes of Ynys M&ocirc;n (Anglesey) on the other side.   Roman Governor Agricola inflicted a punishing and conclusive triumph over them in 78 AD, and Ynys M&ocirc;n was taken for good, but the memory of his brutal campaign is allegedly preserved in the names of fields; close to Brynsiencyn on the island, one howls its name as Cae-oer-waedd or the &lsquo;Field of Bitter Lamentation&rsquo;, another is simply &ldquo;The Field of the Long Battle&rdquo;.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reading the Landscape: Ridges and Bumps</title><dc:creator>ianvince@mac.com</dc:creator><category>Countryfile</category><category>Reading the Landscape</category><dc:date>2013-02-01T00:00:04+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/54d5cd913c86b4369fc2925345c37180-17.php#unique-entry-id-17</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/54d5cd913c86b4369fc2925345c37180-17.php#unique-entry-id-17</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[As January passes into February, halfway from winter solstice to spring but still the coldest part of the year, it often feels as if it is a distinct season of its own.   With low grass in the fields, a touch of frost or a light dusting of snow can reveal a swarm of slumbering lumps, bumps and hummocks of every form, suddenly apparent in a landscape sculpted by the long shadows of the low sun. 


Despite appearances, many of these undulations, earthen ripples and waves across the landscape, are not defensive earthworks, ramparts or relics of long-forgotten battles, but evidence of our ancestors&rsquo; struggle with the land itself &ndash; the remains of various ancient methods of farming &ndash; while some are the outcome of nothing more violent than the gradual creep of soil down a hill, occasionally exacerbated by the frolicking trot of sheep.


The most marked features are those shown on Ordnance Survey maps as &lsquo;Strip Lynchets&rsquo;, the consequence of ploughing along the contours of slopes to create a flat area for crops, as practised in medieval and, occasionally, even earlier times.   Dorset and Wiltshire have the best examples &ndash; below the Ridgeway near Bishopstone in North Wiltshire and near the village of Loders near Bridport, where giant stair-flights climb the slope; it&rsquo;s not for nothing that &lsquo;risers&rsquo; and &lsquo;treads&rsquo; have crept into the terminology of strip lynchets to describe the relevant parts.   Further north, at Conistone in Upper Wharfedale and Hall Garth, near Great Musgrave in Cumbria, the effect is gentler, but just as striking.


...Working clockwise around their strip, their ploughs turned the sod inward, building up a shallow ridge at the centre of their strip and leaving furrows along the long edges.   Hauled by a team of eight oxen, the turning circle in the headland was difficult to achieve without curving slightly to the left at the end of each furlong and a shallow reverse-S or C form to the ridge can often be detected.


...Thin bands known as terracettes &ndash; but sometimes called catsteps or sheep tracks &ndash; are formed by soil creeping down steep slopes over the years, a result of repeated saturation and drying.   Where bare sedimentary rock is exposed, a light fall of snow might pick out its bedding planes, revealing a succession of sea beds over millions of years or even, on red sandstones, the swash of a desert dune &ndash; a geological comfort for the middle of winter.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reading the Landscape: Snow Business</title><dc:creator>ianvince@mac.com</dc:creator><category>Countryfile</category><category>Reading the Landscape</category><dc:date>2013-01-01T00:00:03+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/0f525d7e335270abdb88737dc10f259d-16.php#unique-entry-id-16</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/0f525d7e335270abdb88737dc10f259d-16.php#unique-entry-id-16</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[As the mid-winter celebratory twink and glitter passes by and the season threatens to throw its worst at us in the shape of a cold snap or two, it&rsquo;s a good time to consider how our landscape has been shaped by ice and snow over our long history.   Most of us will be familiar with the U-shaped valleys of the Lake District, Snowdonia and the Scottish Highlands, gouged out by glaciers during the last ice age and hammered into our consciousness by geography lessons since time immemorial, but they are not the only effect of glaciation which, like love, changes everything.


...When glaciers tower to 800 metres, as they did during their most recent appearance between 10 and 20,000 years ago, it should come as no surprise that the features they shape are of a similarly colossal scale, but even a periglacial climate creates huge features in the landscape and their effect upon our countryside is all around us, no matter how far north or south we are. 


At 100 metres deep, the Devil&rsquo;s Dyke, just north of Brighton is the deepest dry valley in the world and its creation was a consequence of what tundra does to porous rock.   Situated on chalk, a rock that usually has the porosity of a sponge but which became frozen and impermeable during the last ice age, the area would nevertheless have enjoyed the briefest of Arctic summers.   Warm enough, perhaps, to thaw the chalk nearest the surface, which would be sludged away by the meltwater from the snowfields, leaving frozen, impermeable chalk to be eroded by a great meltwater river.


Further north, at the boundary between the ice and tundra, huge mounds called moraines were left at the snouts of glaciers and the most impressive of these forms the Cromer Ridge in North Norfolk, a nine-mile line of hills over 300 foot-high made from clay and boulders bulldozed up from the floor of the North Sea. 


But what of the land that was ground down to be eventually deposited as irregular blobs on a landscape hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away? ...  Rounded hills with &lsquo;blunt&rsquo; ends that face the origin of the glacier and a long tapered tail on the lee side, drumlins  often occur in swarms and form what is termed, rather descriptively, a &lsquo;basket of eggs topography&rsquo;.   There&rsquo;s an excellent set of them in Ribbleshead in Yorkshire, but since there are 8350 of them in Britain, it might be worth a trudge out in the snow to find your own. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reading the Landscape: Park Pale</title><dc:creator>ianvince@mac.com</dc:creator><category>Countryfile</category><category>Reading the Landscape</category><dc:date>2012-12-01T00:00:02+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/4c46593b46fd2913f5a80d071770e839-15.php#unique-entry-id-15</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/4c46593b46fd2913f5a80d071770e839-15.php#unique-entry-id-15</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[A familiar label, a &lsquo;park pale&rsquo; &ndash; as rendered in Old English blackletter on Ordnance Survey maps &ndash;  marks the ditch and bank that formed the boundary of a medieval deer park.   On the ground they might still define an area of woodland pasture, while banks several metres wide, once surmounted by a palisade or, perhaps, still carrying a stone wall, can be substantial even after centuries. 

...It&rsquo;s a fitting feature to investigate during the season of high octane food, not least because in the low-fat, calorie-counted, gastronomically-tightfisted twenty-first century, Christmas dinner is the closest most of us get to a proper medieval banquet &ndash; a seasonal version of which was likely to include venison, while the most kindly of lords might give their servants deer offal &ndash; or numbles &ndash; for baking into a numble pie. 


The model on which the ornamental parks of the eighteenth century were based, the medieval deer park is a landscape tradition whose roots extend back to the Norman conquest.   William the Conqueror, who was crowned as an English monarch on Christmas Day, 1066, famously created 36 Royal Forests in the twenty-one years of his reign, reflecting his enthusiasm for the chase.   At first, keeping and hunting deer was exclusively the reserve of royalty, but licenses from the King gave members of the aristocracy and senior churchmen the right to hunt on their own lands and a mania for creating deer parks took hold.   The remains of one such park &ndash; first recorded in 1291, but almost certainly older &ndash; can be seen on the eastern side of Lyndhurst in the New Forest, where the pale is 9 metres wide and its bank over a metre high.   Another park pale is associated with Kenilworth Castle and Pleasance &ndash; Henry V&rsquo;s manor house in Warwickshire &ndash; while the most outstanding example in Scotland is at Fettercairn in Aberdeenshire, where eight miles of pale around the King&rsquo;s Deer Park may even pre-date the Norman conquest of England.


The frequent occurrence of the park pale on modern maps is a reflection of their ubiquity in medieval landscapes; deer parks covered as much as 2% of England at the start of the fourteenth century and had a political importance to match.   While there was no shortage of deer parks, there were shortages of deer because noble huntsmen were rather good at killing their trapped quarry, quicker than they could be re-stocked by hapless deer bounding over the pale. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reading the Landscape: Lych Gate</title><dc:creator>ianvince@mac.com</dc:creator><category>Countryfile</category><category>Reading the Landscape</category><dc:date>2012-11-01T00:00:01+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/42efd9b903210a6102b4aa82f334ef79-14.php#unique-entry-id-14</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/42efd9b903210a6102b4aa82f334ef79-14.php#unique-entry-id-14</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[In a month that starts with All Hallows and All Souls, two opening feast days of November that sift and grade the dearly departed for salvation &ndash; first the saints and then the aints &ndash; it&rsquo;s natural to look at the earthly, temporal end of the process.   After all, before anybody gets to pray for your soul, there&rsquo;s the matter of getting into the churchyard in the first place.


Lych gates, which acquired their name from the Saxon word for corpse, stand at the threshold of all thresholds, the entrance to God&rsquo;s acre.   Although many were built before 1549 &ndash; Beckenham and Boughton Monchelsea in Kent are dated to the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, respectively &ndash; it became a requirement of the Book of Common Prayer that priests &ldquo;metyng the corpse at the church style&rdquo; should commence the service there and that only encouraged construction of lych gates to keep everybody (and every body) dry. 


As if hiding their true and gruesome purpose, lych-gates often have a charming gingerbread cottage-cum-chocolate box appeal.   They are commonly built from stout timbers and capped by a pleasing and petite doll&rsquo;s house roof, but the gate at Long Compton church in Warwickshire surpasses all of that to find itself at the peak of picturesque &ndash; an entire seventeenth century thatched cottage, minus most of its ground floor, the last surviving of an old row demolished in the 1920s, functions as the churchyard&rsquo;s gate.


Other designs are grander, the gate at St Peter&rsquo;s Church, Carmarthen is a vaulted Victorian gothic creation in red sandstone which competes for attention with the lime-rendered tower of Wales&rsquo; largest parish church.   Sometimes, as at the church of St Germanus, Rame in southeast Cornwall, the gate appears to be a funereal dual carriageway complete with a six-foot long central reservation, the bier or lych stone, to park the deceased on, while benches on either side were provided for the pallbearers, who may have had to walk long distances to church.


...In Derbyshire, before Coton-in-the-Elms had its own church, bodies were carried a mile and a half along Procession Way to Lullington for burial. ...  In Devon, a long-distance footpath &ndash; the &ldquo;Lich Way&rdquo; &ndash; follows a twelve-mile long corpse road over the moor to the church at Lydford and, this being Dartmoor, there are tales of spectral monks walking the trail on moonlit nights.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Moon Marketing Board</title><dc:creator>ianvince@mac.com</dc:creator><category>Articles</category><dc:date>2012-08-17T12:11:42+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/a2b4d793e2e22104499e68b269d11384-13.php#unique-entry-id-13</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/a2b4d793e2e22104499e68b269d11384-13.php#unique-entry-id-13</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[It looms out at us from advertising hoardings, is sung and spoken of with great affection in every language on earth, has cameo appearances in films and on television and its progress and daily movements are endlessly followed &ndash; as if the moon was a star &ndash; by daily newspaper columns around the world.   It makes its way, several times a day, into every nook and crevice of our life; it is almost as if the unseen hand of the Moon Marketing Board is at work to fill our lives with lunacy.


Maybe that&rsquo;s why we all feel that we have a passing familiarity with the moon and its appearance, in the same way that we say hello to newsreaders we spot in the wild from time to time, even though they haven&rsquo;t the faintest idea who we are. ...  The limited views we have of the edges of the far side are caused by eccentricities in the moon&rsquo;s orbit and axis which, with a sprinkling of parallax, add up to an apparent wobble that astronomers call libration; over time, an observer on earth sees around 59% of the moon&rsquo;s surface.


...The side that we see, with its pattern of blotches suggestive of the man in the moon, a rabbit, a dragon, somebody carrying sticks or whatever else your cultural conditioning dictates, differs wildly from the b-side &ndash; an evenly pock-marked disc that looks like a cartoon planet from a children&rsquo;s television programme. 

...On the near side, the blotches were once thought to be expanses of water and were consequently named as maria, the plural of mare, the Latin for sea, by early astronomers, while the areas of the moon that appear brighter are the highlands or terrae, from the Latin for earth. 

...The first moments of a planet formed in a swirling cloud of dust, rocks, asteroids and planetesimals, is as precarious as it sounds and, indeed, the earth was perhaps only as young as 23 million years old &ndash; a mere moment in geological time &ndash; when it is believed that it was hit by a planet the size of Mars. ...  Smashed into countless pieces, it lost most of its iron core to the earth but then formed an orbiting ring of dust and rock which gradually reassembled what remained of itself from millions of fragments and began to orbit the earth as the moon. 

...Depending on your emotional peccadilloes, you might find a long, cold stare at the moon, while not being in possession of a poorly-expressed yearning for something or other, rather difficult &ndash; all of which brings us to the question of why that might be so. 

...Indeed, our fascination with our constant companion has blessed the moon with more-or-less equal billing to the sun in mythology, in folklore and nature worship &ndash; a cooler, reflective, evening analogue to Sol, a yin to the yang of the sun. 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Toybox: No great shakes</title><dc:creator>ianvince@mac.com</dc:creator><category>Toybox</category><category>TV</category><dc:date>2010-04-16T10:58:23+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/5f60a632ef238e0b6dae80d4b1ce82cb-12.php#unique-entry-id-12</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/5f60a632ef238e0b6dae80d4b1ce82cb-12.php#unique-entry-id-12</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Here&rsquo;s a message to all fans of Five&rsquo;s FlashForward: take any strand of toddler&rsquo;s TV and, like it or not, you are dreaming of the future, but it&rsquo;s a future that is not necessarily yours.   Despite the mawkish sentiments expressed by the likes of Whitney Houston, children are not our future but their own and the fascinating set of booby prizes we are lining up for them grows longer every day: our pensions; the national debt; nuclear waste; ecosystem melt-down and the crowning glory; the aftermath of wall-to-wall children&rsquo;s TV presentation.


Presenters channel an avuncular television personality that would have real nephews and nieces stare straight through it like the perspex windshield of the plastic bus to Insincere World


I refer not to the programmes themselves - which can be anything on the scale from delightful to a sack full of turds of the size surely deposited by Clifford the Big Red Dog - but about the spaces in between, the painful interstices occupied by simpering, moon-faced continuity announcers.   Day in, day out, these hapless graduates from drama school are charged with filling up the schedule with tiresome puzzles, one minute games or doggerel verse and are generally required to ooze with charm when there is clearly none on offer.   The best are very good, but others seem to channel an avuncular television personality that would have real nephews and nieces stare straight through it like the perspex windshield of the plastic bus to Insincere World.


Children can naturally see through disingenuity and I fear that repeated exposure to it will somehow inoculate them against their own magical powers, leading to a generation of credulous buffoons that accept at face value everything that the door-to-door N-Power salesman tells them.


At first, it seems that Milkshake! - the Channel Five morning toddler strand - is ploughing a different course and our children&rsquo;s ability to make rational decisions about their energy supplier will not be compromised.   Leaving aside the wholly unnecessary exclamation mark - the typographical equivalent of a squirt of bleach in your eye as well as the product of an enfeebled mind - the strand is rather good and avoids the impulse to fill continuity with trite by leaving its cheery personnel safely behind a desk. 

...The self-obsession of the show reaches its pinnacle in an awful claymation feature called the Little Lodgers - where the thumbed out splodges of plasticine all turn out to be ghastly caricatures of, who else, but the presenters themselves.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Toybox: Coining Words</title><dc:creator>ianvince@mac.com</dc:creator><category>Toybox</category><category>TV</category><dc:date>2010-04-12T14:32:37+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/c9b367c89dcff811116c7ae1d97fc423-11.php#unique-entry-id-11</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/c9b367c89dcff811116c7ae1d97fc423-11.php#unique-entry-id-11</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[It seems it was only yesterday that we were all learning the names of Iggle Piggle, Upsy Daisy and Makka Pakka, along with their respective character traits of Dead-Eyed Hippy Goon, Little Miss Attention Whore and Victim of a Crippling OCD Affliction. 

...Waybuloo is a computer-generated/live action mash-up that features four animated plush toys - the piplings - and a consciously diverse group of children who, for some reason, are known as the cheebies.   The piplings live in a magical world called Nara - which looks like an oriental garden halfway up the Brecon Beacons - while the cheebies live somewhere unspecified in the valley, but most probably a village called Fear.   It would be hard to find out with any degree of precision as the children generally don't say much, their entire thespian output being confined to jumping up and down on the spot like trainee Big Brother contestants, haring around like a lynch-mob in a Zen garden, shouting 'over there' and lots and lots of pointing.   After all the running around, a bit of hide and seek and some more pointing, pipling-directed sessions of 'yogo' break out, yogo being a simplified version of yoga that was, according to the plaff, specially developed for the programme. 

...Just as happiness is 'buloo' and yoga-light is 'yogo', the show always seems ready to coin a new noun, making pointlessly distinctive and, one fears, trademark-able versions of perfectly ordinary words. 

...The stated aim of the show is to 'help the audience learn how to relate to friends and the world around them', clearly a noble intention but, in this case, one framed in terms of New Age piety.   Leaving aside the sticky issue of whether or not Waybuloo touts enlightenment through Eastern mysticism - and I can safely leave that aside because it clearly does - the worse thing about buloo is not the casual proselytising of faith, but the utter sanctimony of it all.


In every episode the children are called to yogo by the chimes of a kind of magical crystal clock - a device that should set the alternative spirituality alarm bells clanging like a box of saucepans thrown down the stairs.  

...Like a New Age' life coach who guffs and prattles on about holistic approaches while selling you all kinds of mauve and spangly tat, Waybuloo extolls the virtues of happiness and love as if they were something that children don't already have a natural affinity with. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Two birds and a bag full of stones</title><dc:creator>ianvince@mac.com</dc:creator><category>Strange Days</category><category>Articles</category><dc:date>2009-11-02T11:03:38+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/cf5b19d38355d09f95a5370c7c7207d3-10.php#unique-entry-id-10</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/cf5b19d38355d09f95a5370c7c7207d3-10.php#unique-entry-id-10</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[It had been a long walk through the Shropshire hills in search of fossils and, with a good morning&rsquo;s work completed and a bag full of rocks, I came down through the contours to Ludlow in search of a pub lunch. 


...To fill the miles I decided to do a spot of birdwatching on my way down and was looking forward to a light hike along it in search of Cinclus cinclus - the Dipper - a small brown bird that looks somewhat like a stunted, barrel-chested Blackbird with a white bib. ...  They feed by diving and swimming - even walking - underwater to catch aquatic invertebrates; at least, that&rsquo;s what I&rsquo;ve surmised from the bird books because, in all my years of watching, I&rsquo;ve never actually seen one.


...Despite what the field guides may tell you, the most common appearance of a Dipper is as a line drawing on a &lsquo;context board&rsquo; erected by the river&rsquo;s edge - those mounted information panels that feature paintings of bucolic loveliness, of habitats teeming with biodiversity, the preferred modern term for &lsquo;life&rsquo;.   The boards are usually installed after a programme of works to dredge the last few shopping trolleys out of a river and present an optimistic vision of a habitat created by a partnership of organisations - organisations with striking logos designed to fit along the bottom of a context board.   This particular panel was illustrated with an artist&rsquo;s impression of what it would look like if all the interesting organisms from thirty miles around were condensed into a 300 yard stretch of river. 

...It wasn&rsquo;t long before I realised that I was talking to someone I now regard to be not only the world&rsquo;s most unsuccessful birdwatcher, but - on account of his slightly swivel-eyed comportment - possibly its most drunken one as well. 


...After about five minutes wishing I was anywhere else but there, my ears had at last started to become accustomed to the drawl of drunken expletives and general ill-will towards the world in general and winged creatures in particular: &ldquo;Them ducks, frawghhhar, gnmmph vicious bastards, you harrrrunt to look out for them.&rdquo;


It had started to rain by this point, but the inebriated aviphobe was in full bird hating mode; it turned out that he recoiled from blackbirds, swallows and wagtails also - their specific crimes were not spoken of, but he despised them all the same. 

...I pulled myself away, leaving him on the river bank, wandering away as nonchalantly as I could - at one point, I had fantasized about throwing some of my fossils at him and legging it down the path. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Twitchers get their bird</title><dc:creator>ianvince@mac.com</dc:creator><category>Strange Days</category><category>Everything</category><dc:date>2009-03-12T08:45:01+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/67f75268db659a7f204360f409945071-8.php#unique-entry-id-8</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/67f75268db659a7f204360f409945071-8.php#unique-entry-id-8</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I&rsquo;ve not long arrived in East Coker, two miles south west of Yeovil in Somerset &ndash; and have only managed to raise my binoculars for the fourth time &ndash; when a man in his mid-thirties marches as briskly from his car as his arsenal of optical equipment allows and asks me, &ldquo;Is it showing?&rdquo;


&ldquo;It&rsquo;s showing well,&rdquo; I offer, in the manner of a Cold War era exchange of code words in the vicinity of an East German dead letterbox, but he hardly needs to be told because all of us, to a man, are staring so hard at a shed roof I fear we may burn a hole in the felt.


...&ldquo;It's nipping in and out of that Leylandii&rdquo;, I tell him and after an appreciative nod, I lose him to the lure of a small slate-grey bird hopping about a shed roof.


...Dedicated to ticking off as many species as their leisure hours permit, they have evolved an efficient shorthand that sums up the facts in short order and, in this case, the facts are that there are half dozen of us standing on a driveway in a leafy village close and we are all here staring at a Dark-Eyed Junco &ndash; a mega-rarity, in birding parlance &ndash; which has found its way from North America to the roof of a garden shed in Somerset.


The shed&rsquo;s custodian for the day is Stephen Tervit, who is looking after his parents&rsquo; home while birders, who have come from as far afield as Leicester and Shropshire, come and go all day. 

...Tervit appears briefly at the door to tell us the form for the day &ndash; it seems as though we&rsquo;ll all get a chance to do some armchair birdwatching sooner or later.   A life-long birder himself, he happened to notice the Dark-Eyed Junco after filling the bird feeders in his parents&rsquo; garden and recognised it instantly, having seen the species on a holiday in the States, where they are abundant.   A neighbour, another birder, put out the news on the twitching grapevine &ndash; until the 1990s an informal collection of public telephones in pubs near twitching hotspots, but now a 21st century network of web sites, text messaging and pager services. ...  At least as many arrived the next day and now, on the third, I&rsquo;ve seen around twenty birders in the hour or so I&rsquo;ve been here.


&ldquo;There was one earlier this year in Dungeness, so a lot of the more serious twitchers who saw it might not make the journey for another&rdquo;, says Tervit but notes with pride that, &ldquo;this one&rsquo;s showing better, according to some folk&rdquo;.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Short&#x2c; Fat Man of Wilmington</title><dc:creator>ianvince@mac.com</dc:creator><category>Strange Days</category><category>Everything</category><dc:date>2009-01-08T13:31:11+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/bc282dcd753b3d6ffe720a6dc6b9a373-7.php#unique-entry-id-7</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/bc282dcd753b3d6ffe720a6dc6b9a373-7.php#unique-entry-id-7</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I&rsquo;m hiding behind a long wall in an East Sussex car park trying to keep dry in the face of a blustery squall, but it&rsquo;s not working. 

...Eventually, I discover how to avoid the worst of it by lying down on a low bank that faces the Long Man of Wilmington &ndash; the fabulous, 230 foot-high hill figure on the South Downs and the reason why both the car park and I are here in the first place. 


I become the damp and dumpy simulacrum of the giant on the hill - the Short, Fat Man of Wilmington (Car Park) - and just lie there for half an hour, gazing up at my brother on the aptly named Windover Hill, his head in the low clouds that lumber over the South Downs. 


...Around forty-five people gather in the car park and begin to make their way up the hill, among them Dave and Cerri, the facilitators of the druid group that is holding today&rsquo;s open ritual - Anderida Gorsedd.   The number of people here is a tribute to the group who have been holding open rituals here, no matter what the weather, since Spring 2000 - this being the 76th such gathering.  

...&ldquo;People have lost their jobs before, after being identified in the local papers as pagans or druids&rdquo;, he says and, indeed, it&rsquo;s not the first time that I&rsquo;ve heard this, &ldquo;so we&rsquo;re not seeking publicity.&rdquo;


As I chat with Cerri - a jovial soul in a jumper emblazoned with a huge sun motif - Dave wanders off to greet some old friends but is soon back with a relaxed smile on his face and hurtles towards me with arms outstretched. 


...The forty-five of us gather halfway up the hill on a wide, round, flat-topped hummock - which looks suspiciously as though it was built for this very purpose - just below the feet of the Long Man. 

...They like to improvise, throw in some bardic ad-libs or riff a little on poetry, so there&rsquo;s no set pattern to rituals beyond opening and closing the circle, calling the elements and the hail and farewells. 

...Finally, we all face east and thank the gods of air, who respond by ripping the final hail and farewell from our mouths with a remarkable gust of wind. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Baptist&#x2019;s Bonfire</title><dc:creator>ianvince@mac.com</dc:creator><category>Strange Days</category><category>Everything</category><dc:date>2008-10-21T10:30:45+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/a2de1131ba19d974805160121cc5d2bd-6.php#unique-entry-id-6</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/a2de1131ba19d974805160121cc5d2bd-6.php#unique-entry-id-6</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[And, along with the promise of witnessing an event that, though once widespread, only occurs now in Cornwall, it is this remoteness that brings me here. 


&ldquo;Here&rdquo; turns out to be somewhere between Penzance and Zennor in a field near the hamlet of Boswarthen which is, itself, to be found just off an isolated road north of Madron. 

...I&rsquo;m here for a bonfire, specifically a midsummer&rsquo;s eve bonfire on top of a hill overlooking Mounts Bay &ndash; one of at least half a dozen such events arranged by local Old Cornwall Societies up and down the county.   The guiding principle of these societies is to hold on to the old customs and keep them alive for the next generation &ndash; a process of &lsquo;gathering the fragments&rsquo; of Cornish culture, language and traditions which has steadily grown in popularity over the years. 

...&ldquo;Health and safety would probably want us to put up a barrier around that&rdquo;, says Roy Matthews, Honorary Chairman of the Madron Old Cornwall Society, waving in the general direction of a 12 foot high pyramid of old pallets and fertiliser bags. 

...The air is thick with the smell of the horse box burgers, dozens of conversations have coalesced into a soft murmur, at which point we are handed our photocopied song sheets &ndash; along with a steely warning to return them later. 

...At first I mouth the words, like a self-conscious schoolboy in morning assembly, as I don&rsquo;t wish to appear impolite, but I am eventually swept up in it all - the beautiful location, the camaraderie and the life-affirming spirit of a sing-along at 700 feet.   Undaunted by my lack of vocal talent, I join in with Hail to the Homeland and Going Up Camborne Hill, Coming Down and my mind is elevated from its usual default settings. 

...After a brief explanation of the symbolism of the bouquet of herbs that are to be thrown in to the fire &ndash; in place of a local ne'er-do-well &ndash; and some words from the Master of Ceremonies, a man appears with a bottle of white spirit to set things off in style. ...  For all the layers of ceremony, etiquette, poetry and faith superimposed over the night, the fire itself is the focus and this is as it would have been for our ancestors, a celebration of summer through the building of a simulacrum of the sun itself.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Merry Meet Under a May Moon</title><dc:creator>ianvince@mac.com</dc:creator><category>Strange Days</category><category>Everything</category><dc:date>2008-09-21T01:35:38+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/7e596373542cd4b030cfff51a09930ab-5.php#unique-entry-id-5</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/7e596373542cd4b030cfff51a09930ab-5.php#unique-entry-id-5</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Nobody is in the least bit surprised and this alone speaks volumes about the interesting mix of characters you find in an average English village, except that Avebury is anything but an average village. 


...Leaving the pub, I venture out into this cathedral and notice the bob and swing of hand-held lanterns on the far side of a dark field punctuated with sarsen monoliths.   Despite tonight&rsquo;s full moon, slowly rising over the clutch of thatched cottages at Avebury&rsquo;s centre, there seems precious little light about and I stumble over a short wall, up and down kerbs, over a stile and across rough ground, cursing the darkness with every step. 


...Tonight, the exact moment turns out to be just after three in the morning and though I am willing, my B&B is a mile up a road on which motorists observe only the reckless pursuit of Swindon, tending to drive in a manner that makes matters tricky for the hapless moonlit pedestrian. 


Fortunately, I have met Gordon Rimes, a 61-year old Wiccan priest with a kindly avuncular manner and &ndash; as it turned out &ndash; a day job as a balloon artist of some standing. 

...After a moment of reflection, off we go again, wheeling around hand in hand, singing, invocations flung out into the night like bats lobbed from a fast car on a roundabout. 

...I&rsquo;m not really given to singing and dancing in public &ndash; not even in a dark field with a limited audience, so I&rsquo;m grateful as things settle down a bit and offerings are made, but even here there are surprises.   When we met earlier, Gordon confessed that he doesn&rsquo;t always play it by the book and some Wiccans probably take issue with his interpretations of pagan rituals. 


...On the one hand, we drink mead from a chalice &ndash; which seems old-school-spiritual enough, even though Gordon boasts that he bought it in Morrisons for &pound;3.74, but for &lsquo;cake&rsquo;, we pass around a bowl of ready salted crisps.


At almost midnight our hosts wind things up by scattering the remnants of crisps to the four elements and thanking them in turn &ndash; air, fire, earth and water &ndash; each to a chorus of &lsquo;hail and farewell&rsquo;. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Capital Letters</title><dc:creator>ianvince@mac.com</dc:creator><category>Capital Letters</category><category>Everything</category><dc:date>2004-01-02T23:45:36+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/a72a3771c2ba157c6445735ceda8f712-4.php#unique-entry-id-4</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/a72a3771c2ba157c6445735ceda8f712-4.php#unique-entry-id-4</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[According to the Countryside Agency, there is an echo of reality in these reality shows: a million relocated in the last ten years alone and, it appears, there's plenty more to come. ...  But it's all very well for mid-to-late careerists who want to take things a bit easier, rear small humans or glory in the thick odour of shit. ...  To cap it all, the alleged rural bonuses of farm-fresh food, peace and quiet and olde world friendliness may be harder to find than a regular bus service. ...  Sure, they know nothing about bastard trenching and probably think that animal husbandry is a euphemism for barely legal farmyard action, but they regard themselves as informed about the packaging, distribution and sales processes that actually dictate how fresh the food ends up. ...  Then there's the thunderous roar of tractors, more gunfire than the Bronx and the casual assassination of animals for fun to contend with, but by far the noisiest parts of the country are all the areas colonized by city folk.   And that's because, like the chip-inhaling, Watney's guzzling Brit-crims bunging up the Costa Del Brinksmat, many exiled urban warriors make the mistake of towing their urgent old lives down with them. 

...Fortunately, while terribly adept at synchronising a Palm Pilot, firing nannies and talking bollocks in meetings, their life runs on the kind of precise routine unfavoured by the brutal realities of the country mindset, and many run back to town, claiming the countryside is complete shit. ...  When not on the water, there's nothing they like better than tacking their way to the bar in waterside pubs, illuminated by the dim glow of lamps stolen from marker buoys in the channel. ...  Labouring under the latest buzz-word of "Slippies" or Sloane-Hippies, people with this personal outlook parade their cock-eyed, crumpled spirituality in the country while retaining a well-appointed pied-&agrave;-terre, luxuriously furnished with unsustainable tropical hardwood knick-knacks, which are often crafted by kicked orphans in basement sweatshops. ...  You may have already suspected that the countryside is inconvenient, expensive and bereft of opportunity, but what might come as a surprise is that it is full of the kind of urban vermin that you already live next door to. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Hunger at Holborn</title><dc:creator>ianvince@mac.com</dc:creator><category>Capital Letters</category><category>Everything</category><dc:date>2004-01-05T23:40:37+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/78ccc0d8b1dd2e6351de008c6fe7ff20-3.php#unique-entry-id-3</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/78ccc0d8b1dd2e6351de008c6fe7ff20-3.php#unique-entry-id-3</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[As far as this part of town goes, the concept of the city appears to have gone too far; the environment which institutions find perfect for moving capital around the globe &ndash; a jumble of high-rise office blocks all concentrated in the financial hothouse of the Square Mile &ndash; is not an ideal habitat for humans. 

...It has been said that, on average in London, you&rsquo;re never more than fifteen yards away from a rat &ndash; which is, perhaps, the only life form that can truly make a go of it in the financial district. 

...Eventually I find that there is a tiny supermarket just around the corner &ndash; effectively the back door of head office &ndash; that stocks food for the financial district; sandwiches, baguettes, microwaveable plastic pots full of chicken snot and other offerings belched up by the ready-meal industrial complex. 

...Holborn Circus sounds so grand, so London, you may feel that it should be on the Monopoly board but it is really just a tiny signal-controlled roundabout with a statue of someone on a horse. ...  It&rsquo;s apparently Prince Albert up there on the horse straddling the carriageways between the number 25 bus and a couple of vans full of Polish builders, but it may as well be in memory of Derek Twiddle from Peterborough, the first man in history to open a tube of glue without sticking his thumb to his tie. 

...Six roads radiate from Twiddle&rsquo;s memorial at Holborn Circus, but none of them are at all remarkable, except Holborn &ndash; which is famous, at least in my mind, for being the location of the half-timbered building known as Staples Inn, a picture of which has adorned the front of a packet of Old Holborn since before I could comfortably breathe without making a high-pitched whistling sound.   There&rsquo;s also the old Prudential building &ndash; Holborn Bars, designed by the Victorian Gothic revivalist architect Alfred Waterhouse, who also designed the Natural History Museum and, apparently, Hove Town Hall, but most of Holborn is dominated by drab high rise offices that take over the landscape in an almost authoritarian way. 


...The building has the aesthetic potential of a dog turd in a food blender and the allure of a spreadsheet, so it should come as no surprise to find that it is entirely populated by accountants &ndash; not the humble, mousey kind who empty out shoe boxes of your receipts every year, but multi-national corporate serf-eaters who plot trajectories on graphs and eschew simple number-crunching in favour of systematically buggering entire third-world economies to turn a buck for their masters. 


...At street level, the building has this acute angle chamferred off, which would give people more room to get around the corner, that is if it wasn&rsquo;t for the accountants, who have built an otherwise pointless barrier to stop people crossing even one single yard of their property. 

...To add insult to injury, I can&rsquo;t help but notice on a planning application tied to a nearby pole that the hole in the ground will shortly become yet another Sainsbury&rsquo;s mini-market &ndash; the third within a few hundred yards of their headquarters &ndash; and one which will inevitably stock more on-the-go nourishment to keep the economy moving.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>A Rival for Departure</title><dc:creator>ianvince@mac.com</dc:creator><category>Capital Letters</category><category>Everything</category><dc:date>2004-01-03T23:40:26+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/9df88119917b9446b456e6341595fb33-2.php#unique-entry-id-2</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/9df88119917b9446b456e6341595fb33-2.php#unique-entry-id-2</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Puffins are noisy, they are gregarious, their chaotic lives are arranged so that that they live cheek by jowl with one another in tiny little homes and by the time that winter has come, Puffins, as well as their metropolitan namesakes, have all flown the county and are busy pumping their guano out to sea somewhere else. 


...On the social level, like many large cities, London can be a very lonely place, but there is another dimension; it is often said that a simple act of unsolicited friendliness, like a smile or an attempt at a bus stop conversation, will draw the same suspicion as an abandoned holdall on the tube. 

...Force-fed as they are, with an image of their home town as a world-class city &ndash; an image they accept without any question because it confirms what they think of themselves &ndash; they are often unable to deal with the realities of anything that exists outside the confines of the M25. 

...It was therefore a huge surprise to most of my friends when I announced that, in my extreme late thirties, I intended to move from a resting and rather self-satisfied seaside town on the idyllic coast of Cornwall to an edgy and urgent environment bang-slap in the centre of Britain&rsquo;s largest city.


Friends of family who comforted themselves that the move was going to be to some benign suburb or other were horrified when I told them that it wasn&rsquo;t the anonymous hinterland I was seeking, but the real deal; if I was moving to London it was going to be Central London. 

...In a sense, they were seeking the direct opposite of London; a complete volte-face lifestyle change; a symbolic about-turn that, I believe, says as much about them as the circumstances they were trying to escape from &ndash; whether that was fleeing the toxic cocktail of diesel fumes and low-level ozone, leaving the crime-filled streets of metropolitan life or striving for a simpler back-to-basics existence for themselves and their families. 

...Most of those anxieties are simply elevated versions of the worries on everyone&rsquo;s shoulders &ndash; that their suburban home is going to be burgled, then blown up by a brutish gang of teenage homosexual al Qaeda suicide bombers wearing hoodies, a situation that even the hysterical and lascivious Evening Standard would struggle to reduce to Gay Terror Teens Go Bang in Burgled Bungalow.   It&rsquo;s a compound worry, an amalgamation of anxieties fed to us daily by Standard screamer boards, headline crime figures (that is, statistics for headlines picked out of context for their emotional power) and blind terror of &lsquo;the other&rsquo; &ndash; what is not you and yours and you have no understanding or control of even though it is all around you. 

...One of my friends told me that one of the reasons he moved from London, where he worked as a high profile architect, was to get away from other high profile architects, whose sole topics of conversation were the interesting clients they were working for and the even more interesting clients they would cheerfully drop them to work for instead.   Another reason was money; not the lack of it nor the difficulty of gaining access to more of it but, rather, the measurement of it as a status symbol along with everything that entailed; the postcode you could afford to live in, the daily commute to the postcode you could absolutely not afford to live in, but were required to work in instead, your choices of home furnishings, mobile phones, personal digital assistants and mp3 player. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Cereal Killers</title><dc:creator>ianvince@mac.com</dc:creator><category>Articles</category><category>Everything</category><dc:date>2008-04-08T23:19:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/3466a8dc6c38e80b8c5251725573306c-1.php#unique-entry-id-1</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/3466a8dc6c38e80b8c5251725573306c-1.php#unique-entry-id-1</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I ducked under the airborne bolus of Ready Brek flung from my daughter&rsquo;s spoon but my arm, stretched out for balance, caught on a fork on the edge of the table, somersaulting it towards the other side of the kitchen.   Fortunately, no damage was done &ndash; a quick audit of eyes at the breakfast table revealed none sporting an item of cutlery, but it occurred to me that breakfast cereal can be pretty dangerous stuff. 


...Now that doctors and boffins have largely removed the scourge of infectious disease from the western world, all eyes are now turned on to an even more ambitious target &ndash; that of erasing every kind of inconsequential risk from our lives. ...  Then, last year, intrusion was elevated to a new level when specialist advice on the best techniques to employ while evacuating your bowels was issued by an NHS Trust in Scotland (the trick, apparently, is to leave your mouth slightly open). 


...Then, before we know it, they will be taxed heavily, then licensed and then finally banned outright while your local television news carries stories of a successful fork amnesty and shocked police officers hold a press conference standing over a cache of unlicensed Russian tableware. ...  Eventually, in fifty years time or so, someone will write a libertarian tract on silver service which will start &lsquo;First they came for the teaspoons and I did not speak out because I did not take sugar&rsquo;.


...I remember reading the back of the cereal packet when I was a child &ndash; it was where you could find out where the world&rsquo;s tallest building was, how many velociraptors would fit in a double-decker bus or how large the Moon was in terms of that standard unit of surface area, &lsquo;the size of Wales&rsquo;.&nbsp; ...  What you get instead &ndash; what our children ingest along with their toasted grain sweepings &ndash; is beige and brown cross-sections of wheatgerm, tiresome treatises on the importance of fibre, the recommended daily allowance of Riboflavin and now, the final straw, wilful incitement to exercise. 

...On one packet of Holier-than-thou Flakes, the usual couple of hundred words of powder-puff copywriting was followed by the suggestion that I should schedule 30 minutes of exercise every other day and treat it like any other appointment.   Which is fine, I usually arrive late and in poor condition for my appointments, so it does at least mean I can spend my scheduled exercise time in the same way as all my other engagements, swearing under my breath on a stationary bus, chipping away at a hardened glob of Ready Brek on my lapel. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Lady&#x27;s Day</title><dc:creator>ianvince@mac.com</dc:creator><category>Articles</category><category>Everything</category><dc:date>2008-05-07T00:09:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/b6911cab741461e712bb1c65a3fb0b50-0.php#unique-entry-id-0</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ianvince.co.uk/blog/files/b6911cab741461e712bb1c65a3fb0b50-0.php#unique-entry-id-0</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[However, before the early Christian missionaries came calling and did their level best to wipe out all traces of indigenous pagan practice, the Ladybird was known either as Freyjuhaena or Frouehenge &ndash; Freyja&rsquo;s Chicken, which is, curiously, also the old Norse name for the cluster of stars we now know as the Pleiades or Seven Sisters. 


...As the goddess of fertility, she was linked with mistletoe which, despite still being considered by the Anglican church as a pagan plant, has inveigled its way into Christmas in English-speaking cultures the world over, particularly in the United States. 


...Until England&rsquo;s adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1752, the Feast of the Annunciation, the date that marked Christ&rsquo;s conception, was also the start of the civil new year, being Lady Day, the first of the four quarter days that marked our annual journey around the sun.   The Annunciation and Lady Day were both celebrated on March 25, exactly nine months before Christmas Day, but after sixteen centuries of the old style Julian calendar &ndash; introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BC &ndash; an average 11 minute a year inaccuracy had accumulated into twelve days relative to the natural year. 

...The Gregorian calendar, introduced by Pope Gregory XIII on Friday October 15, 1582, sought to rectify the drift &ndash; albeit with particular reference to Easter, the arcane formula for which had been decided upon at the First Council of Nicaea, a kind of super-Synod convened in 325 AD in what is now modern-day Turkey. 

...The tax collection authorities and landlords of the day were faced with the threat of losing 11 days of revenue and so the forces of English accountancy ensured that provision 6 (Times of Payment of Rents, Annuities, &c.) was written in to add the missing days to the end of the 1752-3 tax year, which would now end on April 5. 

...Following the Austrian&rsquo;s humiliating defeat, Tsar Alexander &ndash; referring to the power of Napolean &ndash; commented at the time that Russia and Austria were &lsquo;babies in the hands of a giant&rsquo; and the Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II abdicated his title, dissolved the Empire, but continued to rule as Emperor Francis I of the Austrian Empire, which he founded in 1804. 

...Though a huge improvement over the Julian calendar, the Pope&rsquo;s numbers were just not right at all &ndash; we now know that there is a tiny error in the length of the year in the assumptions which underpin the Gregorian calendar &ndash; and along with the fact that Gregory ommitted to correct two leap years which occurred before Nicaea it means that the third millenium actually started just after 9.33 a.m. on Thursday March 22, 2001, which, I think you&rsquo;ll agree, is just the kind of nonsense you would expect from scientific empirical measurement. 

...Nobody has a clear explanation of why Friday 13 is considered an unlucky day &ndash; it&rsquo;s more than likely to turn out to be a compound phobia; Friday is considered an unlucky day in many Western cultures and 13 has had unfortunate connotations long before Judas Iscariot sat down as the thirteenth person at the Last Supper &ndash; the day before the Friday when Jesus was crucified. 

...Besides the coincidence of the first Good Friday and the number of guests at the Last Supper &ndash; incidentally, if the Last Supper really is the origin, why isn&rsquo;t it Thursday 13 that is considered unlucky &ndash; another popular explanation of the phobia is the comparatively arcane events of Friday October 13, 1307, on which all but a handful of France&rsquo;s Order of the Knights Templar were rounded up by King Philip IV and charged with a bewildering variety of offences and heresies. ]]></content:encoded></item></channel>
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