The most Zen place I have ever been
Celia Hammond was a supermodel in the Sixties. She modeled a lot of fur coats (among other things), until somebody took her to watch a baby seal clubbin’. Now she’s the supervillain mastermind behind C.H.A.T.
Um, the Celia Hammond Animal Trust. Mostly, they spay and rehome cats. Thousands and thousands of them. I get the impression she twists a lot of famous arms to fund this enterprise (she was Jeff Beck’s girlfriend for, like, thirty years).
Her main gig is trapping and neutering ferals in London (she trapped a lot of them with her own hands, using equipment she invented her own self, though I don’t know how much of that she does these days). But out in the country near us, she maintains a hundred acres of free-range pussoes. They had their second ever open day last Sunday, and we went.
Honestly, I think it’s the most peaceful place I’ve ever been. Inside the buildings are the ‘tame’ cats, suitable for rehoming, but the hopeless ferals are given a home for life, roaming free. Or coming inside, if they like. Or swanning around waving their wild tails and suiting their own damn selves.
There are about a hundred and fifty ferals in residence at the moment. The grounds are dotted with little hay-filled chalets and cabins, connected by ramps and stepped platforms, surrounded by woods and miles from the nearest busy road. Pictures here.
There were cats ev-er-y-where. They were all of them awfully friendly for unhomeable ferals, drifting around seeking treats and skritchies. It was terribly tranquil and hypnotic. I’m pretty sure that’s where I want to go when I die.
In the spirit of leaving something wholesome up for the weekend, there you go. Your weekend of Zen.
August 21, 2015 — 9:33 pm
Comments: 7
Last flight of the Vulcan
Well, not the last flight — there are several more on the calendar for 2015 — but this is the last in our range for the last operational year of the last airworthy Vulcan.
Or B.2 XH558, “The Spirit of Great Britain”, to give her proper name.
You want to talk airplane porn? Check out the picture (one of Uncle B’s). This was when she swooped overhead, turned her belly toward us and slowly opened the bomb bay. Hussy.
And we had a brief display of Red Arrows (there was a longer display on Sunday, but we couldn’t do both days) and a tribute to the Battle of Britain and acres of booths. Soldier of Fortune was there, and lots of people with the terribly mutilated antique guns that are legal for sale here.
The shop that impressed me most was full of rusty bits of junk from the Somme. Although they also had a whole bunch of rusty German helmets that had been found in a Danish lake in 2015, no explanation given.
The one that impressed me next most was the nice German couple selling real Nazi memorabilia. It’s illegal to sell that stuff in Germany, but I guess love finds a way.
I didn’t buy nothing. Not even a Nazi table setting.
August 18, 2015 — 10:16 pm
Comments: 13
Overalls, Sussex style
Last post from the country fair. We found this guy wandering around in his grandpappy’s nightshirt.
Just kidding! This is the uniform farmers wore here from about the 18th C, well into the 20th. And it’s not dissimilar to what Medieval peasant wore, so…since forever, really.
This was the inspiration for the smock tops girls wore in the Seventies. If you don’t remember that, perhaps you weren’t a girl in the Seventies.
There is, not surprisingly, a whole study of these things…regional designs, embroidery, fabric, colors. Here is a nice post about it from Lincolnshire.
This fellow told us this smock was his great-grandfather’s. Not really visible here, he’s also wearing a boffo pair of leather gaiters that were his grandfather’s. The rest of the costume is spot on, also.
Not much like the good ol’ boys I remember (though that expression started here, don’tcha know).
Good weekend, y’all!
August 14, 2015 — 8:54 pm
Comments: 13
I bought a sad ukulele
I bought this at the country fair. It is a sad, sad ukulele. The brand and model is a Jetel 5 and it has 1937 written inside in pencil (also Dalington, Sussex and a name I can’t quite make out).
I managed to get it completely apart without breaking any of the metal bits (metal fatigue is a serious problem in these old things) so I stand a chance of getting it all put back together again.
Don’t ask me why. My shriveled stump of a maternal instinct is triggered by grubby stray animals and really messed up gear (the guys at my shooting range offered to help me buy smarter after I came in with a succession of crappy handguns. Crappy handguns that I loved, thank you anyway fellas).
I already have an excellent uke. I’m thinking of making this one into a piccolo banjo, if I can figure out a clever way to hang a fifth string off’n the fifth fret.
August 11, 2015 — 8:58 pm
Comments: 15
Turns out I’m a lousy picker of weasels
This really is The Season ’round these parts. We managed to hit a village fete, a country show and an animal sanctuary open day this weekend. In the process, we had to drive by a church flower festival without stopping. The human body can only take so much.
I bet two quid on the weasel race at the country show and my ferret came in dead last both times. They race them down long sections of pipe, once down and once back again. My beastie got off to a promising start, but then sulked and refused to come out the end of the pipe.
So, to be fair to me and my weasel-picking skills, I did pick the weaselliest weasel both times.
August 10, 2015 — 9:04 pm
Comments: 1
This guy
It was an unexpectedly nice day today. I would like to digress a moment and tell you that weather reporting is utter shit here. They can’t help it — it’s a little island stuck out in the wild Atlantic — but they make predictions with such confidence and they are always, always, ALWAYS wrong. I miss being in New England, where you get to watch your weather come at you for five days.
Anyhoo! It was supposed to be cloudy, but nay it was sunny, so we decided, more or less randomly, to go to Bodiam Castle. Little did we know they were hosting a sort of Medieval Fair (Fayre, Faire, Faër, or Phære).
Most of the activities were for kids, and then there was this guy. He was hammering coins more or less in the manner of old. He put a disk of metal between two dies and bang, there you go. A man who did this for a living would be expected to make 2,000 in a day, he said.
He explained in some detail how he screwed with the mint marks on the back so no-one would think they were real old coins. As you might imagine, forging collectible coins is a thing, and collectors are mighty grumpy about it. But as all of this guy’s blanks were pewter, I doubt that would ever be an issue.
He also made jewelry and other bits. I bought a rather wicked-looking pewter torque bracelet, hammered and twisted (like moi). It didn’t fit, so he used brute force to pull it open and close it around my wrist. So…I guess I wear this permanently now.
Gotta show you this one large and in color, so you can see how cool his stuff is. My bracelet is just visible in the red case at the far left of the picture. Pictures courtesy Uncle B.
August 5, 2015 — 9:09 pm
Comments: 8
The English are so weird
I have posted about flower festivals before, where the members of a parish church fill the church with flower arrangements. Different people do different arrangements all around a single theme.
This sounds lovely, if you’ve never seen it. In practice, specific arrangements often include brain hurty items like plastic dinosaurs, old shoes or decapitated Barbie dolls.
I have no idea how this got started or what the point is, other than to spruce the place up and draw visitors. There’s usually a program (thank god for the program, or half the arrangements wouldn’t make any sense at all) and someone playing the organ and they sell you a cup of tea and a piece of cake. It is both civilized and grotesque.
We went to one this weekend that took it a step further and eliminated the flowers. The whole inside of the church was covered in…hats. Just hats. With labels.
Ladies’ hats, military helmets, Boy Scout berets, chainmail coifs, this here sombrero (there were two, actually).
I described this to a group of my neighbors and they were like, “oh, well yeah. That’s a little weird.” Then I told them that this same church last year featured wedding dresses of the parishioner and they were all, like, “oh, hey, our church did that!”
My life is a Monty Python sketch.
August 4, 2015 — 9:36 pm
Comments: 6
compare and contrast
It’s an armadillo, haterz. It won first prize in the “named animal made out of vegetables” category, so there.
The Summer fete season is at its peak. I haven’t posted much from our adventures because it’s all the same every year. That’s the pleasure of it: it’s all the same every year. I get the feeling it has been the same going back decades. With a few minor changes, centuries.
Contrast this with the news. About two thousand migrants a night are still storming the Channel Tunnel. Some make it through. There are supposedly women and children in the camps in Calais, but all we see are strong, young men, swarming over fences and onto goods lorries.
Oh. Excuse me. David Cameron has been slapped for using the word “swarm” — it’s dehumanizing, apparently. The UN has told us to shut up and take our fair share of Syrians, Afghanis, Libyans, Gambians, Kosovars. It’s worth asking what our fair share is, and why.
An awful lot of the people I know here are reflexively liberal (that’s what having a huge monopolistic state media will do for you), but I don’t know anyone who isn’t horrified by this scene. There’s an instinctive understanding that the world of armadillos made out of squashes is not compatible with…that.
‘Member, Dead Pool Tomorrow. 6 WBT. Be here or be somewhere else; I’m not the boss of you.
July 30, 2015 — 9:51 pm
Comments: 12
Got this badass coming up the Channel
England top left, France bottom right, we’re somewhere under those big black blobs in the middle. Thunder, wind, the whole schtick. A lifetime’s worth of rain in ten minutes, or however it was the Mail drama’d it up.
I shall wish you a good weekend and sign off, I think. Good weekend!
July 24, 2015 — 8:44 pm
Comments: 7
Big bird
An emu shut down the A21 in Sedlescombe today. They got it penned in a field, but they still haven’t found who it belongs to.
Used to be a flock near us, now gone. I wonder if whoever it was sold it on.
Anyhoo, the article makes a remark about Rob Hull. He was a British comedian of the Seventies who…had an emu. You kind of have to see it.
Here he explains how to groom an emu. Here’s something a bit more camp, if you like that. British talk show host Michael Parkinson once bitterly remarked that, for all his long career, he would mostly be remembered being knocked out of his chair by emu.
Fun fact: later in life, Hull came to resent emu bitterly. Because that’s what people who perform with dummies always do.
In 1999, Hull climbed up on the roof to adjust his TV aerial, slipped and fell through a greenhouse and died. He was survived by emu.
July 23, 2015 — 10:36 pm
Comments: 6