Woah there, another massively busy week. We hit the ground running (from both ends) with a lovely bout of the Noro on Sunday night. I was fine by the end of Monday but it was still a right pain in the jacksy. Tuesday I kept things very low key because I was still feeling a bit delicate so I did a bit of admin in that I wrote three reviews, which I’ve been meaning to write for ages. There isn’t really room for them this week but I’ll set them up to post, by the wonders of modern technology, while I’m running around like a blue-arsed fly over half term in a couple of weeks.
By Wednesday I was able to go back to the gym for a session, which was great fun. I haven’t done Wednesdays before and I should probably mix up my days a bit more as each day has a different set of exercises. They pretty much all do the same thing, but it’s fun to vary it. Instead of going Thursday, I went again on Friday and was exceptionally stiff afterwards!
Wednesday night we went to a wine tasting. It was advertised as coming with ‘tapas’ so we ate first. Mwahahahargh! Won’t do that again. They produced a fabulous 4 course meal although I hadn’t bothered to tip them off about allergies so one course was chicken in a sauce that was hooching with the only kind of mushroom out of the vast and varied world of edible varieties, to which I am allergic. Yes, of course it’s the ubiquitous one that appears in everything. It was a shame but it just meant I had more room for the other courses and it was a very entertaining evening.
I boreaborealis … yes, I saw the aurora (at fucking last).
Highlight of the week; the Northern Lights. Finally I managed to see them. Seeing the Northern Lights has been on my bucket list from pretty much the moment I knew about them … although on the downside I got a bit engrossed and have been catching up on my sleep debt all week.
Having had a text from a mate telling me to have a look, I popped out into the garden at 11.30. Didn’t get much … see picture … wasn’t sure if it was the northern lights or just light pollution from the railway yards and the site where a new housing estate is being built, both of which sit between us and North.
I was in my pyjamas by this time but one photo had a bit of a blue/purple bit in the sky above our garden looked hopeful so I tried from one of the windows at the top of the house.
The results were better, but still inconclusive so I decided I’d pop over the road and see if I could get a more definitive sighting in a dark street next to the allotments. It took me a minute or two to dig out a tripod and then I removed my bathrobe, because I didn’t want anyone I met asking me where my towel was, flung on an anorak and headed out into the night.
It was about 11.45 by this time and after having a go I felt was definitely getting a few shades of green but still wasn’t 100% sure if it was the Aurora or just … you know … light.
I realised there was a small park near a housing estate which was just another couple of minutes’ walk so I decided I’d go there. I took some more pictures and then, reviewing my photos, I realised there were funny lines in the green bit in some of the first ones and that the top of the frame was beginning to look a bit pink. Maybe I was getting there then.
I walked back to a different bit of the park and took one with more pink and green and then I just happened to look east. The whole sky was tinged with pink, you know the way orange streetlights used to make it look orange in the days when sodium lighting was a thing. Like that.
Hang on, I thought.
Pointing the camera at the pink bit I took a photo. At this point I could hear the hallelujah chorus full volume in my head as finally, I had cracked it, well … almost but I needed to aim it right. After taking a few more pictures—woot! See below—I thought I’d take some piccies of landmarks round town.
The beet factory, for good measure, on my way back.
I decided I’d start with the church I go to since it was near my house and then if it worked, I’d walk to the Norman Gate and take a picture of that.
I took a picture of the houses on our street, but not ours (doh!) and then headed up the hill.
Our house is just on the right beyond the sign. Did I photograph it. Did I bollocks! Doh!
Got some lovely shots of StJohn’s (the only inclusive church in Bury) and having photographed two big parts of the Bury skyline; St John’s and the beet factory, I decided I might head for the Norman Gate which was about 10 minutes’ walk away.
St John’s Bury St Edmunds looking North.
St John’s Bury St Edmunds looking South.
Luckily, before heading for the Norman Gate I looked at my watch.
Quarter past one!!! Quarter past fucking one! Had I really spent an hour and a half wandering round town with a mobile phone and a tripod, in my pyjamas, Arthur Dent style, like a nutter?
Yes I had. I decided it was time to go home. Still forgot to take a picture of my house (bell end) but I did get one of God’s. Oh well. You can’t win ’em all.
Other News …
It was all rather busy last week culminating in Mc(not so)Mini doing a gig at a really lovely small venue in Ipswich. It was great fun, I passed a very enjoyable evening talking to the other band members’ parents in the bar, where they served Adnams ales (always a bonus). We were discussing ‘modern youth’ and the whole trans they/them thing and how as dinosaurs we had trouble sometimes. Two members of the band are trans and so it was interesting talking to the parents, especially of one.
To my shame, she said that she had experienced a lot of prejudice from ‘Christians’ towards her son. I really struggle to understand the way some of my brothers and sisters in faith behave towards the LGBTQ+ community. The way I see it, Christianity is pretty fucking simple. It’s all about this bloke called Christ (the clue is in the name there, people, Christians because they’re followers of Christ).
What Christ, the original Christian, said was ‘love they neighbour as thyself,’ and then proceeded to tell the story of the good Samaritan as an example of who a ‘neighbour’ is. Yes, he tells a story in which someone his audience would have despised did a good deed and helped an injured man in distress while the pillars of their community, people they’d see as the epitome of goodness, pretended not to see and left him to die.
The basic gist of Christianity, then, is to treat other people the way you’d like them to treat you. That you treat everyone as deserving your respect until they have proved otherwise. This does not mean that because one gay person pissed you off, you decide all others are the same. That’s bigotry.
The clue is in the name there people. Be like this bloke, Christ, who was pilloried by the authorities in his time for talking to all the wrong kinds of people, the kinds of people the authorities despised like Samaritans, tax collectors and women some of whom were even—shock! Horror!—hookers.
Seriously though, it’s not difficult is it? Not if it’s that bleedin’ obvious to someone as thick as pig shit like myself. There are two types of people in this world. People who are wankers and people who are not wankers. Sometimes two different people can tell you the same thing and it will be offensive from one and fine from the other simply because of the spirit in which you know it is meant.
Ergo when it comes to being a Christian, I thought the point was to be as Christ like as possible, which means seeing the humanity of others before everything else and Doing The Right Thing. You know, love your neighbour as yourself and all that. I’m probably being a trifle simplistic but ‘doing the right thing’ means doing what is just, which isn’t always following the rules (no vigilante justice bringers, that’s NOT what I’m talking about). I’m talking about being kind to people others spurn. Kind to people who are doing things that are perceived as ‘bad’ by the rule makers. I’m talking about stopping and offering to help when you see someone in trouble.
Recently, I’ve read extraordinary things stemming from friends who appeared to be perfectly normal (until they started sharing this stuff on t’interweb and moved themselves to the bat-shit crazy area on my venn diagram of living).
There is a conspiracy theory that the pedophiles are after our children and that they are hoping to achieve this by pushing back our tolerances to other forms of ‘deviancy’—their words, not mine—so that eventually pedophilia will be allowed. I really struggle to see how pedophilia—in which an adult forces a child who does not consent or too young to do so into sex, or sexual activities—can be remotely compared to consenting adults choosing who they love or who they’d like to be, or indeed consenting young adults being allowed to fall in love with whoever they fall in love with.
Yes, as mother of a teenager it is a complete minefield but, as I understand it, two people falling in love with one another, and being allowed to admit it and even express it, within the bounds of the law, wasn’t a crime last time I checked.
If someone female happens to fancy females rather than males then, again, the way I see it, it’s fine, because it’s none of my fucking business. They’re not forcing their choices on me, which, incidentally, is what the establishment has been doing to the LGBTQ+ community, and up to a point, women, for the last thousand years or so.
Likewise, when I was at school in the 1980s, my gay friends were not forcing their choices on me then either. Instead, one of them only came out to me when we were both 25 because she knew I was a Christian and thought I’d be like those other cunts.
At least we’re not all gits. Here’s a story about what even just avoiding a topic can lead to (let alone being openly anti and judgemental) …https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2018/8-june/news/uk/it-took-this-death-to-end-silence-on-inclusion-says-priest-of-teenager-who-took-her-own-life
Here’s another thing that completely bamboozles me. How is the ‘Christian’ right are pushing to erode women’s rights and return us to ‘our place’ in the kitchen and to the days when the male half the population was sexually repressed to the point of obsession, while the female half was vilified and hidden away as if their very existence was shameful.
It hasn’t been like this in our society for years but we know how crap it is. We’ve seen ISIS, and these ‘Christians’ were all anti that. Therefore, I fail to understand how they can despise members of other faiths, Muslims, for example, and then paint an ‘ideal’ world that mirrors the ISIS Caliphate. The point of a moral stand point is that you live up to those morals. This kind of crap isn’t being better than the Daesh. It’s just doing what they fucking do. How does the world not see this? How do their brainwashed followers not see this?
Also, why do these ‘Christians’ care so much who other people choose to love or how other people see themselves. Do they realise how far from Christ’s teachings this actually is. Well no, of course they do, because everything they espouse is from the Old Testament and they completely ignore the New Testament most of the time. Which makes them … I dunno … some kind of extremist Old Testament sect. Not Christians anyway. I really don’t care if someone decides they’re a fucking toaster, so long as they’re not a cnut … unlike those judgemental bastards who weigh in with a ten out of ten score on the cuntomter every day of the week. Judge not, lest ye be judged. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
Twats. Never mind. Here are three of the band.
Sorry where was I? Oh yes, other stuff.
Detecting
Or Wombling With Pretentions as I sometimes call it. I am a member of a number of Facebook groups now which organise digs. Mostly these are on Sundays and as that’s the only day I get a lie in, I am always on the look out for digs mid week or on Saturdays. One group has run two on the last two Saturdays in the same place (but different fields).
Having attended last week’s and found not much, but at the same time, found many bits of good things which indicated there was old stuff there to be discovered, I decided I’d go this week as well. My first signal was an Edward II half penny so that was something good, job done, can happily go home. There were lots of signals, mostly fragments of old things and then, at the top of the hill in a really junky area—where the machine was making farty iron noises as if we were at a rave—I dug up this tiny milled coin.
Milled coins are made with a machine and is how coins are made today. Before that, coins were hammered which is when you get a die with a design, stick a blob of silver/copper/gold on it and then put another moulded die over the top, smack it with a hammer and bob’s your uncle you get a hammered coin. See pic.
Tiny, tiny hammered coin. I think it’s a ha’penny
The first milled coins were introduced in the reign of Elizabeth I but it didn’t work out. They were not reintroduced until the reign of Charles II. As a result, Elizabethan milled coins are quite rare. The tiny milled coin didn’t look like anything I’d seen, ever. It was really, really thin for starters and small. It had a shield on one side, which I’d seen on hammered coins of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. This sent me to early stuff, Chas II or maybe James 1st? I wasn’t sure, But at the same time, when I flipped it over and cleaned the other side, the monarch was clearly a woman … wearing a crown … and although at the time, I assumed Victoria. But then, when I cleaned it up, I could clearly make out that she had a crown on her head, and a distinctive aquiline nose. there is only one queen that this could be; Elizabeth I.
As. you can see, this coin is in a really shit state.
It’s pretty unmistakeable. Neither of the Charleses looks similar and since it’s base metal, copper? I’m assuming it’s a threefarthing. Yes there was a denomination for three quarter of a penny at that time, lord alone knows why but there you go. So this is a rare thing, and possibly a significant thing. I dunno.
Also, fun fact, the monarch’s heads alternate, so Henry VIII has his nose pointing right. It does help with identifying them sometimes.
On the one hand, yes, this could be a seriously rare and significant find. On the other, it’s bollocksed so even if a decent one is worth anything, this one won’t be worth more than about £40. So once again, subject to checks—because I will make sure I check this out carefully, in case it is worth something, in which case I must either buy out the farmer or sell it and ensure they get half—but subject to checks it looks like the usual. I get to find something really interesting and significant, and by din’t of it being a really shit example, I get to keep it. I’ll take that.
Next stop the finds liaison officer for more advice and to see if I need to add it to the portable antiquities database or think about getting it valued. I’ll keep you posted. At least, I’ll try.
And finally …
At last we reach the end … I’m thinking that if it’s going to be like this I should write a blog twice a week. But finally, I’ve been working on some jolly japes for my website and I’ve come up with a K’Barthan Insults and Swearing Generator. You click and it will produce the cream of K’Barthan swearing for your enjoyment, enlightenment and edification (probably). If you think you’d like to have a go at that, click here.here.
Until next time ..
For years people have been asking me to do a photo book.
Yes. I’m doing a kickstarter at the same time as there is a craptonne of Mum stuff going down. I am clearing out our house, clearing out my childhood home because there is no cash, and chasing up the company who are supposed to be doing Mum’s continuing care application who do nothing unless I prompt them. I must be a fucking masochist.
M T McGuire Authorholic 