Tag Archives: metal detecting

15 May 2021 · 3:19 pm

Let’s talk about THINGS!

Blimey, here we are nearly at the end of another week. I’m becoming very concerned about the quality of the comedy on this blog. For some reason, I am sitting down to write on Saturday mornings feeling increasingly unfunny. It’s a bit of a pisser so I do apologise that the joke quality seems to have plummeted. It’s very much I did this and I did that. I must try harder.

My smashing detecting booty!

In the meantime, if I can’t make it funny, I’ll make it succinct!

This morning there is a sensible reason in that I’m just plain knackered. I went metal detecting yesterday and the luck gods smiled on me, which meant we did an extra hour which was probably a bridge too far. It was fun though and there were two hammered coins in that hour so even if I can’t walk for a couple of days it was worth doing! One of the highlights was a coin from the reign of King John … I think. But I got a George III shilling, a really lovely Victorian half crown which is enormous and a long cross penny of some description. We went back to the area where I found the silver … thing … and I found a very knackered Saxon strap end and a medieval stud (or half a hollow button, I’m not sure which) that still had remnants of guilding round the edges, so that was a bit of a bonus.

It has to be said that I am comprehensively knackered though, which is why I am only writing this now. And since I have been metal detecting more regularly recently, usually on a Friday, it might explain why I arrive at the blog a little bit puggled of a Saturday morning these days. That said, I did, until today, have an incredibly alert ten days when I was almost myself. Hence last week’s blog being a bit more zippy. That was ace-tastic and I’m hoping it will come back when I’ve bounced back from my detecting extravagances.

Yesterday I was trying out a new spade. Yeh, I know. I usually go for lightness so I have a small, short-handled spade I use. However, when the soil is hard it’s hard going so I thought I’d look at something longer, or sharper or possibly slightly heavier. I was recommended three. The one I wanted most was out of stock so I went for the cheapest, a Fiskars spade for the princely sum of £13.95 plus P&P. It arrived, in timely fashion, on Thursday.

Fiskars is a Finnish company and what I learned, from ordering my spade, was that Finnish people might, possibly, be very tall. Either that or they have a Grongolian trading arm, from which I have somehow ordered a spade designed for a larger, stronger species than mine. No. I think probably this is about the average height in Finland.

In the picture the spade looked like a normal metal detecting spade size, so a blade? A business end that is about as long as a normal spade but about half the width and quite curved so it will do nice round holes and won’t flex. The a handle’s usually shorter than average, about seventy five centimetres long – about I dunno, just under a yard in old money. The rationale is, usually, that if you’re going to be dragging it about all day it should be as compact and lightweight as possible. In the picture, the Fiskars spade looked about that. When it arrived … wow. The pointy bit had the same dimensions as a metal detecting spade but it was the same width as a normal one and the handle was loooooong. It came up to just below my boobs. No room in the boot for it, it had to be put in the passenger seat!

So I turned up with this giant spade, but, I have to confess, though it was heavier it was really good to dig with. It did flex a couple of times – when I had the entire cutty/diggy bit buried up to the hilt, but what I noticed was that I got a lot more soil out with each dig. That meant that when, for example, I dug pretty much to Australia only to discover the thing I was looking for was about two inches down in the side of the hole, it didn’t take me as long. As a result, I dug about three times as many targets as I had the week before. Or to put it another way, I kissed more frogs; ergo, a higher handsome prince quotient, so to speak. This would also explain my knackeredness … I dug more holes.

Meanwhile yesterday evening, McMini tried and, luckily, failed to review one of my books. I mentioned a review one of them has on Google play which is complete gibberish – it’s clearly typed on a different keyboard or something because the letters are grouped like words, in some places they are words but mostly they aren’t and it makes absolutely no sense. I don’t mind whoever it was gave it 3 stars. However it is quite bizarre. I’m not sure how it cropped up last night, but McMini threatened to one star bomb me unless I gave him one of my chocolates so I asked him if he’d left me a review on Google, because he has a gibberish thing he does, and I genuinely wondered if it was him.

‘Of course,’ he said, adding, ‘er … no.’ Which made sense, because if it had been McMini he would have used a joke name, as you can see from the ‘review’ he did try to post for Nothing To See Here on my website. I haven’t approved it, but this is what it said:

Phil McCrackin (joke name) says

‘THE HOW IF WHEN IS THE WHAT NO ME GUSTA AH NO PLEASE NO WHAT THE HOW IF WHEN IS HOW TIMES WHAT THE YELLOW PEP’ note the crazy person caps lock on.

The review was this …

You see why I asked, I mean, that is pretty mad. Probably it’s just someone’s keyboard is broken. Or it’s Enigma code.

What made us guffaw about this is the fact that despite being complete gibberish. We liked that Munich features and also the BBC, NBC, MGM and … Bob. Lots about GB too. And someone has liked it! Mwahaharhgh. Why?

Why indeed, we wondered. Were these instructions from the handlers of an assassin to their asset? Does this say ‘do not throw the perfume bottle into the canal. This is Britain and someone will find it?’ Is it some kind of message from MI6? Did the person to whom the message was sent click ‘like’ to acknowledge that these orders had been carried out? If I ask Google to remove it will some men in dark suits come and kill me? Will they come and kill me for writing this blog? With this paragraph have I just signed my own death warrant? You can see how easy it is for me to write a character like The Pan of Hamgee, can’t you?

Other good news, I have managed to kickstart the writing again. Clearly Wednesday was a bit quiet because once I’ve got to and from Mum’s (via McMini’s school run) there’s not much time. Ditto Friday, because I went metal detecting – but hey, you can’t win ’em all. To get back into writing, I’ve re-started my ten minutes a day thing. In grand scheme of things ten minutes isn’t much but if it’s flowing I carry on. To my delight, I’ve managed to write 5,904 words this week.

Yes that’s as many words as some folks achieve in a morning but for me that’s pretty good. I will probably do ten minutes after I’ve finished this. I am feeling extremely uninspired but there are some A to B bits that I can write which don’t call for a huge amount of inspiration. Sometimes you just have to put your head down and plug on with these things, bum in chair, words on screen day after day until it’s done. Thanks to Too Good To Be True, there is a whole new aspect of K’Barthan life to play with; Goojan Spiced sausage. It’s just asking for a wealth of stories about smuggling sausage, forging it and other sausage-related skull duggery. Even better, one of the sweeping this’ll-take-years-because-you’ll-hardly-ever-be-alert-enough-to-work-on-it epics I’m working on now has a much better driver. I was going to have it that one character was trafficking beings, but it was a pretty grim topic for a humorous novel. There is still an aspect of slavery involved but I can temper it with sausage related stuff so it doesn’t get too dark.

It doesn’t sound much, I appreciate, but I am pleased to get some momentum going. Initially, I was slightly concerned that I couldn’t find a lot of Space Dustmen. Luckily, this turned out to be because the beginning is so old that it comes from my pre Scriviner days. I hadn’t realised that I’d been working on that story for so long.

The writing has been causing me a little trouble in that I’ve been trying to push some of the projects on a little before I revert to some Hamgeean Misfit. Especially as Hamgeean Misfit is the one I need to write next to, naturally, with the pressure on, it’s proving difficult. That said, I got 1.6k of the next one down this week so it can’t be all bad and doubtless The Pan will end up delivering something at some point, with disastrous consequences, naturally.

Meanwhile Gareth is still working on the audio and yes, it is still an absolute joy. Wonderful stuff. He’s so clearly enjoying himself. I love it when that happens. You see it sometimes, in plays or films, when it’s just obvious that the cast are having an absolute scream. It adds an extra layer of atmosphere which I always like so I’m delighted. Next, I need to listen to it extremely closely and flag up any typos that need re-recorded or pronunciations I want edited a.s.a.p. so he can fix them up and go on to other things. He’s going to be doing some books with Scottish characters next so he’s been riffing with Scottish accents in mine.

K’Barthan Swearing Quiz Update

Early K’Barthan blingery samples.

When I compiled this, I thought folks would be on it like a rat up a pipe but there has been a surprisingly small take up.

Maybe people are getting quiz fatigue! Or it might just be that not enough people have read all of the books to feel entitled to vote. Or I might just have not publicised it widely enough.

That said, while things K’Barthan do have a dedicated fan base, it is a small one and I forgot to share this on social media, or say much about it, if I’m honest, so I doubt everyone has seen.

However, so far we have six clear leaders, the first two, though, are right out in front.

  • Arnold’s toe jam!
  • Arnold’s Y-fronts!
  • Smeck!
  • Arnold’s sweaty sandals!
  • Arnold’s armpits!
  • Arnold’s underpants!

So there you are. If you haven’t done the K’Barthan Swearing Quiz yet, and you’d like to, click here.

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1 May 2021 · 5:23 pm

Unicorn farts and other sundry ephemora

This is going to be a short one because it’s twenty past five, which means I have approximately forty minutes to write my usual fifteen hundred word blog post. Hmm. Isn’t going to happen.

Looking at my notes to write about this week they read as follows:

  • Auto correct and bloody Duke
  • Metal detecting and throwing a six

That is all. Okay… off we go then.

Metal Detecting and throwing a six

Saxon ... thing.
A Saxon … thing.

Quite pertinent as I write this, that one. Yesterday, to my absolute delight, I was invited along to a friend’s permission to do some detecting. It was an old club permission so I’ve been going there for a while. The land owner is thoroughly good egg and it’s a lovely spot.

The last time I was there I found a crushed silver thimble from the 1600s I think, and a hammered coin. I love finding stuff from that era because it was such a stormy time in our past. Anything less civil than our Civil War is hard to imagine. You know I’m fairly obsessed because I’ve told you the story about a house called Woodbines which my family lived in, in Kingston, although I’m not sure it’s on this blog. You can read it on the blog on my official author’s site, which I no longer post to, down the end of this link here. Excuse the lack of pictures. I believe that if you’re using a picture to illustrate something under discussion, on a personal blog, it’s supposed to be fair use. However, I still got hit by copyright trolls. I don’t want to risk a huge bill, but also I don’t want to inadvertently pirate photos. I thought it was clear cut but it seems not. Hence, I’ve removed the three pictures I, personally, haven’t taken from all my blogs and two of them were on that post.

Where was I? Oh yeh, so I love Civil War era artefacts mainly because that era was so uncivil and it makes me feel close to a very turbulent part of our history.

The thimble wasn’t my first bit of treasure, there was a bit of Anglo Saxon strap end previously to that from another permission. Both were interesting and have to go through the process by din’t of being silver, rather than particularly brilliant in any respect. That said, a museum somewhere might want the thimble because it’s a bit rarer, coming as it does from an era in history when they were being melted down to make coins to fund the war effort. The modern day ‘evangelists’ yelling ‘Jesus needs your money’ on telly are clearly nothing new since the Puritans really believed they were doing God’s work. Humourless and uptight, they were eventually kicked out of the UK and a lot of them became the founding fathers of America. I’m wandering off on one though.

So we started detecting. The setting is one of the many studs in this neck of the woods and our main purpose is to get any big or spiky bits of iron out of the ground after a piece injured one of the horses a few years ago. This week there was a gorgeous little foal who was too shy to be photographed. I nearly managed it though. After a while I felt I should try and actually find some iron, it wasn’t going very well, I was digging what I thought were big crap signals and discovering, after digging a very deep hole, that the thing that had caused the bing was not iron. Eventually, I got what, in theory, should be a decent bing and sure enough, down in the hole, I found a random silver bit of something. I checked the hole but a bit was all there was. I thought it was either arts and crafts or Saxon. To be honest there wasn’t going to be any middle ground.

Now, having consulted smarter people I am pretty sure it’s Saxon, so that’ll be off to the treasure process then. On the up side, it’s so good it’s likely to come from a grave so there may be more of it. Even better, we should be back on the site this week so I will be able to have a look. But the thing I find most amazing is that when I pulled it out of the ground, mine were the first hands to touch it since someone living six to eight hundred years after the death of Christ pinned it, grieving, to the tunic of a recently dead loved one.

Where is the throwing a six bit to this? Well, I have this theory. I’ve never found gold or anything like that with my detector and I’ve always assumed that my main problem there is the walking over it bit. Because I think, to walk over something really valuable like a hoard or a piece of valuable gold, you have have a certain kind of luck. I remember as a kid playing Ludo with my family. You had to throw a six to start and then you threw the dice to go round the board and back into your ‘home’. The person who got all four of their counters home first was the winner. I remember sitting there, round after round, trying to throw a six to get out and failing dismally. Often I’d not succeed to get anyone out onto the board until my brother’s first counter was already ‘home’. Then Mum, who had similar dice throwing skills, and I would make our way round the board throwing a one each time.

I was always last.

The luck that follows me is not the kind of luck that wins me many premium bonds … or board games. When the Unicorn farts, I am usually up-wind or indoors or … I dunno … facing the wrong way. Except for people; there’s the McOthers, many of my friends and a lot of the colleagues I’ve stumbled upon through my working and writing life. Work stuff would clearly be things like Gareth popping up and wanting to narrate my books … well it could only have been a cloud of sparkly unicorn gas that wafted that piece of good fortune my way! Bloody hell! And nothing gives a person a bigger lift than when someone with a generous dollop of talent in their own field seems to think your stuff is good, I mean he is an actor but I think that’s genuine! Mwahahargh. Also Katherine Jackson, who taught me so much about editing, while editing my books and really had no business dying like that. I still miss her. Then there’s the lovely folks who do my covers, who I blundered upon because they were the people my employers used. And the lovely folks I’ve met and become cyber buddies with in my authoring efforts. But that’s not the luck I’m talking about. The luck I mean is the throwing a six and winning at board games kind of luck.

Am I content with that? Well yes, I think for the most part I am. If I can only choose one, I’ll take the one I have. But reverting to the silver thing – actually I’m pretty sure it’s a silver gilt thing – it’s clearly a tiny fragment of something special. What, exactly, I do not know but, as I mentioned before, most likely it’s grave goods. A brooch pinned to the clothes of a very loved, cherished and high-status dead person before burial so they would be looking at their best in the next life. The rest of it is probably still there somewhere … if I can find it.

If …

Part of me thinks – possibly a little churlishly – that were I the kind of person who could throw a six on a regular basis, I’d have found the whole thing. Another part of me realises that even this tiny fragment is like throwing a double five, a whole one would be the find of a life-time. It’s not that they’re rare, although they are, I believe, but one that good, whole, would be a hen’s teeth job. On the other hand, it definitely ties in with my ability to find interesting things. The ideal, of course, being something interesting enough to be fabulous (to me) but not so interesting it’s worth stacks and I have to sell it! And then another part of me is thinking that I’ll be back there next Thursday. I was chatting to the ex finds liaison officer for this area on line. He told me that in his time, someone had found a fragments of a similar things, returned to the site and found more … Mmm. I’ll keep you posted.

Autocorrect and bloody Duke

A brief one here. Anyone who knows me, personally, will know that when it comes to communication, using my phone, if I’m not speaking, is the bane of my life as it is one long battle with auto correct/auto complete. Auto whatever it is is like wearing a gag, although if I turn auto correct off it seems to be even worse. Part of the problem is that I use the swift keyboard – the Google one.

What is wrong with that thing? It seems to be possessed by some dyslexic demon with an exotic name fetish. Case in point, here in the UK, on the whole, Duke is a surname, a title or something you call your dog. I do not know anyone called Duke as a first name and I think, in the entire two years, so far, that I’ve owned this phone that I’ve typed the word ‘Duke’ on purpose, twice. Yet, whenever I type the word ‘done’ Duke is what it gives me. Not only does it give me Duke but if I change it to done and continue I will find, when I hit send, that it’s quietly changed ‘done’ back to Duke again. Every. single. fucking. time.

Someone or sometime. Bog-standard words. Often used you’d have thought. Summertime. Not so common. Uh-uh-uh, says Auto correct. Every time I type either of those words it defaults to summertime. This is with actual real auto correct switched off. This is just the stupid slidey keyboard getting it wrong. Then there’s or. What is so fucking difficult about understanding it when my finger is sliding from the o to the r key? I’ve no clue but what I get for ‘or’ is out or put. And once again that’s every. fucking. time.

I read somewhere that these things work by looking at what the normals type, averaging it out and offering suggestions. Lord above I haven’t a fucking hope then have I? I mean, look at the words I use. OK so it’s learned the word, K’Barthan. That said it seems to unlearn it and have to be taught afresh from time to time. I’ve no idea why that is. But if it can learn that when I type in K’ I’m going to be saying K’Barthan because that’s what I type every time I write K’ then why the fuck can’t it learn, by the same logic, that every time I type in Mc I’m going to type McGuire? Why is it able to understand that I spell ‘realise’ without an ess rather than a zed but at the same time, be pathologically unable to grasp that if, every time I type done and it offers me Duke I cancel it and type done again until it accepts it, I must actually mean done. Why, when I type in the letters d-o-n-e and not Duke, does it default to Duke, a word I never type, comprising completely different fucking letters?

Also, new factor here. Random capitalisation. If I am in the middle of a sentence, or sometimes in the middle of a word it will suddenly give me a capital letter so I get stuff like,

Hello, how are You doiNg today?

Mental. It’s not as if I’m typing the name of some obscure chemical that is only written by out in full every six million years. These are bog-standard words that everyone uses. Seriously though, who, in God’s name, are the people it’s taking averages from to work out how english … well … you know … works? What in the name of holy fuck are they saying to produce the shit-show that is my phone’s text suggestions? I can only assume it’s mostly folks in Asia where English is used a lot but isn’t anyone’s first language, or that my vocabulary is simply too wide for the parameters of the algorithm to operate. (Really, though? Sounds doubtful.)

At a complete loss, I tried speaking to it. But it can’t understand my fucking accent! My fucking ENGLISH accent for fuck’s sake! The other day I was speaking a sentence which involved the phrase, ‘power of attorney’. My phone decided I’d said, ‘parrot Ernie.’ Give me fucking strength!

As a result, I find myself typing each word tiny letter by tiny letter and the phone, which should be something I can use to quickly reply to stuff, turns into a time sink.

Bah! Swift key? There’s a fucking oxymoron if ever I heard it.

Bookish things …

Yeh, those. So, this month, was officially the worst in about three years for sales.

Last April, I made £408.74 in book sales. This April, I made, er hem, about £65 if I count the sale on my website. Then again it’s up on April 2019 when I made £56.68. Mmm.

Something appears to have happened to Amazon, maybe it’s because I dicked with my series pages – as in changed the name from ‘K’Barthan Trilogy Series’ to K’Barthan Series. Actually no, thinking about that it wasn’t this month. But needless to say, the K’Barthan Trilogy, while disappearing completely from my dashboard, is still alive and well on Amazon. I now have a two book series called the K’Barthan Trilogy (it contains books three and four) which appears nowhere on my dashboard and is therefore undeletable, but alas, all over Amazon. I will sort it out but at the moment I just don’t have the strength of will to deal with emailing KDP customer service repeatedly until they stop giving me boiler plate answers to some other vaguely related question, finally read my actual query and give me a bastard answer.

On the up side, I discovered something weird about myself. Because I’ve made about forty quid on Amazon this month, instead of a hundred and fifty, my wide sales are a much bigger percentage. For the first time they are over a third; 34%. For some bizarre reason, this makes me feel fantastic. Audiobooks, I still appear to be unable to give the bloody things away off Amazon/Audible – except for the odd library purchase or sale on Google Play. Ebooks though, there’s a weeny hint of movement from non-Amazon vendors. This may be because I’ve been actively advertising to people in countries where Amazon companies are not the number one supplier.

It’s not that I don’t like Amazon as a customer, it’s alright, except it’s getting harder and harder to find out how to pay for anything I buy without joining Prime – talk about black pathways. But while I don’t want to penalise Amazon users, I have no wish to be beholden for my income to a company with such rancid corporate ethics, so ideally, I’d like to see a lot of my income derived elsewhere.

Sales last month with unfeasibly high percentage wide because Amazon was low. This month because there’s only been one day, and Amazon sales continue to flatline, I’ve sold a book on Kobo and am 100% wide for a while! Yay!

Yes, here I am a hundred dollars plus down on my monthly earnings and I’m not nearly as pissed off as I should be – and year-on-year looking at 2018 and 2019 they were about the same – but the distribution of sales over the different platforms is making me happier than money? Well yes. But also it’s because the action on other platforms seems to be increasing a teeny bit. Even better, as my Amazon sales continue to flatline, I have sold my first book of the month, on the first day, from Kobo. Yes, for a while I have a 100% wide sales chart. This also makes me unaccountably happy. There is zero logic in this. I am doing badly and I should be worried but strangely I care more about increasing my sales elsewhere (which is really hard) than on Amazon. I appreciate it sounds a bit touched in the head. But Amazon is difficult to deal with and has the corporate ethics of a morally louche confidence trickster. All its rules are enforced by AI but it’s the cheapest crappest AI possible – NOT like the algorithm at all – which means they are totally inconsistent and their measures ridiculously draconian, often with no appeal or recourse.

Amazon’s customers love the experience but they mostly do prime. The books I’m interested in are usually like my own, outside Kindle Select so I know I wouldn’t maximise the benefits of Prime. Also I don’t understand people who pay £7 a month for netflix, £7 a month for prime, £7 a month for Spotify and so on ad infinitum. All those invisible direct debits chipping away at my income … the thought gives me hives. I need to know the cash is going out. Then again, I am eclectic and have a wide range of interests. Therefore, just as auto correct throws up its hands and has a melt down trying to predict what I will say, so a subscription algorithm probably isn’t going to deliver me with what I require once it is tweaked for commercial gain. Since Amazon’s algorithms are now driven by advertising payments rather than entirely by the desires of the customer, it’s unlikely I’d find what I wanted there. And since Spotify has announced that it, too, will be shifting to that model, I’d suspect theirs will become the same.

I appreciate that the Normals like Prime and Amazon’s customer service is excellent for those who fit their ideal customer criteria (I don’t). But to deal with as a distributor, Amazon is extremely high maintenance. Clearly, they are important and I will always have my books there, but ideally, I want the lion’s share of my income and interaction to be with entities where things are smoother, pleasanter and better run. And where my royalties will not inexplicably go tumbling from over £300 a month to £40. Not to mention that the other sites, and my own, all pay me higher royalties than Amazon for book sales. That’s just business logic innit?

And now, some free stuff and a lot of Things On The End …

Small Beginnings …

Small Beginnings: Ebook version

This month, I have mostly been doing some marketing. I have two things that might be useful. First, Small Beginnings is now free pretty much everywhere except Amazon. I’m hoping it will go free at Amazon eventually.

Normally if I reduce books in price to zero pence elsewhere Amazon makes it free on their own but they don’t seem to have noticed this time. Anyway, if you’d like to bag yourself a free copy of Small Beginnings, or you know someone who might, you can find a page with links to download it. NB, in this particular case, avoid my online shop as I haven’t sorted out a discount code yet and Amazon, because … ditto. Yeh, still steeling myself to contact KDP help (shudders) with the web address of my book on every single Amazon site, followed by the web address of it shown as free on every single country Amazon serves on Kobo, Google Play and iBooks.

Kobo are featuring it in their free section this week, too. For that information link click here.

Unlucky Dip: Audiobook version

OK so you do actually get this as part of my mailing list sign up protocol but if you aren’t, and you have a boring half hour job to do and would like something to listen to to lighten your spirits while you do it, you can’t really go wrong with this. It’s all that is joyous and wonderful about Gareth doing his thing – albeit on a bit of writing that is, if I’m honest, not my best work. Never mind. That is free in two places this month, from iBooks and from Kobo. For links to that, click here.

Merchandise …

Finally, do you remember that K’Barthan merchandise I was talking about? Two developments on that one.

Thing one … If you would like to vote and haven’t yet, the quiz is still open for you to choose your favourite K’Barthan invective. because I have to send it to my mailing list in two week’s time as well! You can still vote for your favourite invective here.

Well I finally have a sort of shop, although it’s Zazzle so no-one will be able to afford anything – I’m working on other suppliers who are less expansive (and pay more royalties) – and also I haven’t finished adding products. But if you’re interested to see how it’s going and you want a gander, you can see that here.

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16 Feb 2019 · 12:57 pm

This week I have mostly been … unmentionable.

At some point I will have to talk about the next stage of Dad … but I can’t do that right now so instead, highlights of the other bits!

This week has been … interesting. The noisy cricket is playing up again, this time, its indicators have stopped working along with one of the daylight running lights. It’s as if it’s driving around with a permanent wink, its driver’s side daylight running light refusing to cooperate. Perhaps it’s having a dirty protest, it is filthy and I haven’t washed it. Then again, a few minutes on the motorway network does that to a car in weather like we’ve had lately. It’s like a brown pod. I have to keep cleaning the muck off the windows to see the wing mirrors. I have to keep cleaning them and all, and the numberplate has long since disappeared under the grime.

Luckily, the mechanic I use is very good and after looking at it he realised that one, it’s an intermittent fault and two, if I have the headlights on dipped all the time the indicator starts working again. He said that the probable fault was a dodgy connection or a dirty contact and the ECU was worrying it would knacker itself and was trying to protect it. With these electrical faults, he explained, he and his colleagues spend a lot of time arguing with the car. If the Noisy Cricket’s ECU is like the AI system that came up with the designs for love heart sweets you can see in the nearby picture, I feel I may be avoiding expensive repairs by driving with my headlights on for some time. Low beam and high beam only, the side lights don’t work either. Maybe I’ll get it fixed if I sell the car. BTW, on the picture, I particularly like the second love heart from bottom, for Scotsmen everywhere! Get yer hole! Snortle.

What else is happening? McMini has been ill all week, except the day I had to drive to Sussex to see Dad and Mum. So it’s been a bit full on because I haven’t managed to get out of the house. Except this morning when I got to ride my bike up to the school and collect McMini’s lunch box. Didn’t fancy leaving the uneaten chicken sandwich to fester over half term week. Mmm Mmm. E-coli anyone? I have developed a kind of low down cough. It’s like wheezing and I only realised, last night, that it’s just the usual cough tickle except it’s further in. No deadening this one with mouth ulcer cream then. Pity. I thought of going to the Doctor’s but when I get to the what colour is your snot question I’ll have to say that I don’t know because it’s still in there. So they’ll just tell me to go and have a lie down.

On the metal detecting front, things have been a bit freaky. I managed to find a bucket list item, a stirrup mount. They

A Norman stirrup mount.

used to put metal bits on to protect the stirrup leathers so they wouldn’t wear out and fall off. I only dug it up because I was on a job to remove the iron from the fields. The signal sounded like iron and when I flipped out the clod of earth a massive nut rolled out (to go with the massive nut digging it) but alongside it something green and triangular pinged into the grass a few yards away. Ooops. I retrieved it, not daring to hope that I’d found a Saxon stirrup mount but the artefact was too claggy with mud to tell.

It being me, this was not Anglo Saxon, although it was the same style and mechanically mounted the same way, but the design is Romanesque, which puts it from 1060 to about 1140. It’s an early one, I reckon, because it’s a similar shape to the Saxon ones (to my untrained eye). It’s known as howling beast style. I was dead chuffed as had I not been digging everything, I’d have left it.

Another howling beastie! Woot!

The following weekend I had a lovely flu bug but the one after was a club dig on some interesting land where I’ve found good things. To my amazement, the first signal I had was a kind of high-pitched screechy one that usually means can-slaw or lumps of lead (although lead can be interesting so I always dig it up). Recently I’ve had a few squeaky signals like this and they’ve been Roman coins which was a surprise and also spurred me on. I dug a hole and out popped another stirrup mount, exactly the same as the previous one, except this time the howling beastie was pointing the other way. Woot! Two consecutive signals, albeit fifty odd miles and a couple of weeks apart and I have a set.

Sadly I got nothing else that day, indeed, it was slightly difficult because after about an hour I became aware that I was very much in need of a wee but there was no cover. I have bought myself a thing from the internet (Where else?) that allows me to stand up and wee, like a bloke, but I do prefer to take my trousers down beforehand because … you know … wiping. But there was nowhere to wipe in privacy. A few hours later and I realised that a) I’d dug up just about every piece of metal buried in the vicinity of the stirrup mount and it was all junk and that b) the need to find a secluded spot to have a wizz was getting somewhat critical. I looked around and decided to trudge across the field and up a hill across another field to a small copse.

Having trundled up there, bitching and complaining about my sore knees the whole way like some ancient crone, I found a secluded spot behind a hedge. Well, I say secluded since it was a spot that couldn’t be seen from the fields my fellow detectorists were working on but in the other direction it was an open invitation for anyone looking on from anywhere in a 180 degree radius to see parts of a middle aged woman that are best left unexposed. And bum wiping.

Never mind. Needs must. The glorious thing about being middle aged is you cease to give a flying fuck about anything. This is especially true if you’ve had kids because then you will, of course, have given birth to your dignity, never to see it again, with the first one.

It was cold so I was wearing skiing trousers and wool long johns and was layered up with shirts so it took me a while to pull my pants down. Just a bit, not so far that you’re going to be shaking your lettuce at anyone who sees you. Then I got out my she-wee. The she-wee is a fantastic invention. No, not fantastc, it’s chuffing magnificent. It’s basically a er hem, lady shaped funnel with a hose that you can put on your bits. At the doctor’s there’s no more peeing all over your hand, or missing the silly little jar completely when you’re asked for a mid flow sample ladies, no sireee, no more spending twenty minutes wiping the piss off the seat in a motorway services so you can sit down – ladies with arthritic knees do not hovver, anyway when I hovver it goes sideways and runs down my leg – oh heavens did I just say that out loud, I did didn’t I? Never mind – where was I? Oh yes. The she-wee.

The she-wee lets you wee like Martini; any place any time! With this thing you are golden. Ah, yes, I could have used a better word there. You are not golden, obviously, because that’s the point. I use it all the time and I can thoroughly recommend it with two caveats.

One, you have to put it under your … ok, I’m going to go right ahead and say it … labia, ladies, because that’s what makes the seal, you see. Labia (Lorks a lordy I’ve said it again) to edge of she-wee. Then when it’s all snugly fitted in with no gaps you can start but …

Two, you need to start off gently just in case you’ve got the angle wrong or it’s not tucked in all the way round or something, because if you begin at horse’s pace and then find you’ve got the seal or the angle wrong it’s going to be ugly. You don’t want it all coming out over the back and going on your pants, and the skiing trousers and the long johns, which are wool and not absorbent and which are merely going to allow the wee to flow, unhindered, into your shoe. Obviously, this is not the kind of golden you want to be in a she-wee situation.

Unfortunately, I had a she-wee failure of gargantuan proportions and spent the rest of the afternoon walking like Billy Connolly when he does the incontinence trousers sketch. Then I dug up about fifty signals, still while walking like the Mummy out of 1970s Dr Who and every single sodding one was a shotgun cartridge. People who shoot lob those fucking things absolutely anywhere but in a bin. The littering bastards.

What I’m saying is that after a great start, the day did fall off somewhat. But not too much because salopettes keep the smell in and work in a very similar way to incontinence trousers and, anyway, washing machines, and baths, and the set of howling beasties … Yeh.

Other highlights this week. I danced on a table. I am too arthritic to dance, let alone climb on a table so once on the table I had to be helped off, howling with laughter as I went – I’m a classy lady but you knew that and on the up side, I managed not to fart. It was like the encore of a James Brown concert me dragging myself back, with the help of my acolytes, but rather than onto the stage for an encore, it was back to the safety of the chair. Never mind, at least I didn’t try and sing, Sex Machine.

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2 Dec 2017 · 5:34 pm

Beeper and Bingy, and free books … #randomwittering #metaldetecting #mcmini

Scroogeability factors.

Better late than never today. The build up to Christmas is well and truly under way and I am gradually disappearing up my own bottom. As usual I am slightly dreading the holiday period but mainly because of all the travel, the being away from home and the general pain-in-the-arseness of that, the people I visit are lovely I just wish I didn’t have to do it all at once. Short school holidays are a bit of a bind in that respect because we have to use the time to visit when we can because in term time we’d have to take McMini out of school and neither set of parents can travel. I couldn’t do it any other way and like myself as a person so it’s head down, get it done and then I can feel enormously smug that I’ve been a decent human being when it’s over.

The bit I do like is the looking for presents for everyone, that’s where I can forget the bits I don’t like; travel, admin, remembering to pack everything, and focus on the bits I do; the people involved. Now that is a gas although this month, I have been rather remiss. I got my Christmas money from Mum and Dad early and I have spent it on a present for myself.

Meet Beeper … or is it Bingy?

Yep, a couple of weeks ago, I bit the bullet and upgraded my metal detector. I managed to spend about £40 more than McOther spent when he bought my original entry-level detector new but for that I got second hand detector that would be about £700 when new. An XP Goldmaxx V4. I also bought some of the XP wireless headphones for it because I was fed up with getting the headphone cable tied around my ankles, burying it in the hole by mistake etc etc.

So this new detector, is it good? You bet your arse!

Although, of course, it means I have to go back to the beginning and start the learning curve again because each detector’s beeps and whistles and peeps are different and the only way you can truly know which beeps represent something you should be digging up, and which don’t, are by digging every single signal until you’ve learned them by heart. I think I’ve just about worked out what hot rocks (coke) sound like and I suspect I’m nearly there with aluminium and deep iron but I’ve only taken it out twice, so I’m still digging every signal I hear.

Last week, I took McMini along to a club dig; me with the new detector, he with my old detector which is now ‘his’. It didn’t work as well as I’d hoped, the detector was too heavy for him and it was the day after a very late night so he whinged constantly. Ideally he needed to stop to eat, and I mean properly eat, at half hourly intervals which was a pity as I only brought along lunch and I needed an almost bottomless supply of snacks. We wasted the first two hours footering around, other than deciding that our detectors were called Beeper and Bingy. I think his is Beeper but sometimes mine’s Beeper and his is Bingy, depending on which name he thinks is the funniest at the time.

However, after lunch, he stayed at the car, and while that did doom me to only detect on one field (because I don’t like it if I can’t see him) I did get a couple of hours of proper detecting in. The new machine was good. Sure, I dug a couple of chunks of iron but I have gone past the ‘I wonder what it is,’ zone and reached the stage of thinking, ‘that’s iron, but I’d better dig it to check.’ So that is progress. Getting past that will be tricky as I am an eternal optimist and will probably be digging everything, ‘just in case’ in several years’ time but that isn’t so bad.

Hand made wingnut and old metal … thing.

Despite having no display screen, everything about the new detector is easier, and as the information on the screen the old one had was wonderfully and wildly inaccurate, losing the visuals doesn’t really make that much difference. But my faster pinpoint and dig rates mean I can find more targets, meaning that if something is a lump of old shite, it doesn’t take up nearly as much of my time as it did before. The last two outings, it’s been a case of right metals, but that medieval lead seal matrix I think I’ve found turns out to be a tiny blob of shapeless lead, and that Roman broach-style coppery bing brings up a hand made wingnut. OK so it’s hand made and probably over two hundred years old but sadly, though almost everything has someone somewhere who is interested, a wingnut of any age is regarded as crap in all quarters.

Ho hum. You can’t win ’em all.

That said, one of the fragments of green metal I dug up turned out to have the hint of a embossing on one edge when I got home. So I had a good old scrub at it with a wooden cocktail stick and brought up a lovely pattern. Then I dropped it and trod on it, breaking the bent corner, which was really smart of me, and when I put it out on the finds table at the club one of my hawk-eyed colleagues said.

‘Look, there’s a bit of guilding on that.’

A clog fastener, Regency era? Going on the pattern.

I examined it under the lights and sure enough, he was right. My mind wandered to the industrious scrubbing with a wooden cocktail stick that I had done to bring up the pattern. ‘Hmm. Yes,’ I had to admit as I clocked the hints of gold in the cracks. ‘Sadly, I think there’s probably a lot less than there was.’

Then to compound my embarrassment, the FLO said he thought it might be Saxon. I think the metal’s too thin for Saxon but it’s definitely 12th or 13th Century. He’s taken it away to check it out so I’ll let you know which it actually is when I collect it in January. It’s a bit like the thing that looked like the end of a metal bag tie that I dug up on one of my first digs. It was green so I reckoned it was old, and I thought I’d kept it but now I suspect, I threw away – at least I can’t find it. I found another one a month ago but kept it this time because I noticed it had a pattern on it. It’s a clog fastener.

What I like most about it is the way it’s designed so that the precious metal bit can be removed and reused when the clogs/leather bits on the clogs wear out. It’s like another thing I found a few months ago that resembled part of a suspender belt, that was a stud chape fastener which was used to do up a 1660-1720 shoe. I love the way that even basic, mundane things were treasured in past times and how the resources were valued and reclaimed. Things that we would throw away without a moment’s thought are regarded as reusable and precious. Can you imagine removing and reusing the metal cleats on a pair of dead hiking boots? That said, they still managed to discard a truckload of stuff for people like me to dig up and puzzle over. That’s another thing I absolutely love about this detecting lark; the whole, what the fuck is this? Aspect to three quarters of the stuff I find. I love that I discover things I didn’t know.

Sometimes, in life, it seems that the most boring and innocuous-looking things turn out to be a lot more interesting than we thought. Especially if, like me, you’re a bit of a spud.

Back to the dig and those bits of iron. When I made to throw the iron in the hedge, McMini stopped me.

‘No Mum, I need that to make my iron man suit,’ he told me, in all seriousness.

Who was I to argue? We now have a finds bag full of iron in the garage. I’ll give him a week or two to forget about it and then creep in there and stick it in the recycling.

Meanwhile, during my couple of hours’ hard core graft, McMini explored the area round the car. This involved standing in about the only sticky mud to be found until his boots stuck and he had to get out of them and stand in the mud in his socks to retrieve said stuck boots. Then he got back into my car and as he did so, found some stones he’d picked up on a beach a few months ago in his pocket. So he made a rock sculpture with the mud, which he then put on the dashboard to dry. By the time he’d finished, the inside of my car looked like this:

Our kitchen sink approximately 3 minutes after the cleaners had left. Thanks Harrison.

Mud sculpture.

More wonderful McMini-isms this week include Hide and Worry; a game he and a friend have invented. ‘It’s like hide and seek but when they find you they stab you,’ he explained. Yes, well, I could see why that might be alarming. He and the same friend have also developed a habit of putting their back packs on the wrong way round and then they pretend to sumo wrestle. They call this new form of Sumo ‘Flab Fight’ which I find unaccountably hilarious.

And now to books for a moment …

Well, this is supposed to be an author blog so on a completely different but probably more on-message note, I’m doing a giveaway at the moment with a bunch of other lovely authors and I thought I’d share it with you because it has a manageable number of entrants and the books – all sff – look interesting. So if you’re looking for some new reads for no pence, or if you are like me and want to give yourself a sneaky present without the guilt of spending cash you’re supposed to be spending on others, on yourself, check this one out. I’m pretty sure you don’t have to join Bookfunnel to take part. Here’s the link (or click on the picture): https://dl.bookfunnel.com/b8dr8lj6w1

 

 

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30 Sep 2017 · 12:46 pm

Real treasure isn’t always shiny #writing #metaldetecting

Opening a little window on the world of metal detecting today, and chatting about gold, not comedy gold, like last week but kind of tenuously linked gold … Oh, I’ll just get on with it shall I?

A few months back, the finds liaison bod who attends both the clubs I go to and asked us to bring in all the interesting things we’d found detecting. The local museum was mounting an exhibition of lost items and he wanted some of those lost items to be things which had later been found by local detectorists.

To my delight he chose two things from the pile of worthless shite I took along; a King Charles pipe tamper and a Limoges Mount.

It could be that I’ve banged on about them before but basically, they’re that glorious type of find which is not worth that much, so I get to keep it, but is incredibly rare, so it’s cool. The Limoges Mount was made in Limoges (I know there’s a shocker) between the 12th and 14th centuries. At the time a pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostella ran past the town and it was very popular. The good burgers Limoges, with their eye on the prize, started to make religious souvenirs to sell to the passing pilgrims. It’s probably an early one because it’s quite good. Close up there are hints of guilding, green and blue and I think there was some ochre coloured glaze as well, I can’t look right now because it’s in the museum, obviously. It’s bent which is a pity but it doesn’t really matter. It’s worth about £70 and when I tried to look it up on the Portable Antiquities Scheme database there had been about six found in ten years, so it’s quite rare.

The King Charles pipe tamper is worth about £45 and took a fair bit of perseverance. I dug out three nails before I managed to find it and had practically reached Australia by the time it came up. It was about eighteen inches down. I love both these items, the mount because it’s so rare and so interesting, the pipe tamper because it is rare, too, but I also love that because it comes from a tumultuous time in my nation’s history.

England at this time was a police state, people were bullied, picked-on and even ruined over their political allegiances, or those of their forebears. Worse, these were decided on the word of someone in favour with the regime. You could, literally, be executed on the word of someone who claimed to have heard you saying something seditious in the pub if they were prepared to swear it in court. Despite the fear of lying after swearing on the bible, it must have been easy enough to denounce someone who stood in your way, especially as both sides were fighting on religious grounds so would, no doubt, be able to convince you that you were doing God’s work perjuring yourself, anyway. It sounds like a grim time. All the theatres were closed, there may even have been a curfew. The arts were dismissed as frivolity, some of the most beautiful religious artworks were wrecked cf every single statue in Ely Cathedral, where the New Model Army also stabled its horses.

Cromwell really was a fucking vandal.

And he was born just outside Ely so in the case of his town of origin he should really have known better.

Despite being three hundred years ago, the language of that era intrigues me, it sounds so modern, Lord Protector, New Model Army. It’s very now. And much of what we consider to be British traits today, the idea of even-handedness and fair play for example, actually come from Cromwell’s ideas. But for all the new dawn he wanted to achieve, it didn’t quite work. There was to be no music, not even in church and no dancing, very Myanmar under its previous dictatorial regime (as opposed to the current dictatorial regime). I believe there are some places where Christians still believe dancing is the devil’s work, mostly in areas Cromwell’s followers fled to when the monarchy was restored; sorry US and Canada, I’m looking at you again; would the Pilgrim Fathers please stand up.

My finds in a glass case, in a museum! Not something I ever thought I’d see.

But for all its horror, or possibly because of it, that time holds a kind of morbid fascination to me. Probably because as an ex stand-up comedienne, who writes comedy, I would be considered the devil incarnate by Cromwell’s regime. However, I also am fascinated at how bravely people stood, and fell, by what they believed. Would I? Could I?

Things I like, they got to wear really cool clothes; you know, big hats, frilly shirts and … swords … and thigh boots. Mmm Three Musketeers anyone? What’s not to like? Oh yes, the dying young, and being a public enemy for making jokes. Alright then, so it’s cool but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Back to the stuff. How did these things end up buried? Who knows? The mount came from just outside Lavenham and it probably fell off something holy as it was being paraded around the fields, to bless the harvest? To pray for newly planted crops? But it could just as easily have been torn off and thrown there by an over enthusiastic Parliamentarian. The pipe tamper would have been a highly political object. If it’s restoration, it’s a celebration of the return to ‘normality’ such as it was – in effect, it was little more than swapping despots. If it’s during the Protectorate, it’s a red hot political potato. The kind of object that would get you beheaded or hung – subject to your social status – if the wrong people saw you with it. Perhaps it was buried, perhaps a concerned wife lobbed it to keep her husband safe? Who knows. But basically, because of that, anything from the Commonwealth era and the years just before and just after it, are bucket list for me.

Which brings me to this:

Cromwell shilling with the sun on it so you can see what it actually is. It’s about an inch and a quarter across.

Woot.

This is a Commonwealth Shilling, from the time of Cromwell, and it belonged to someone who either a) hated the Commonwealth – perhaps it was the same guy whose pipe tamper I found a few hundred yards away in a field across the road or b) someone who was trying to use it afterwards, had missed the date to return it and be issued with new, Chaz II head-on-it legal tender and tried to scrub the picture off so possession of his cash – and it was a lot of cash in those days – wasn’t treasonable and therefore punishable by death.

This is the best picture I could get, angling it on sideways to the evening sun. If you look at it in normal daylight it’s little more than a silver disc. But the point it, it’s good enough for me to see what it is, but too knackered for it to be worth anything. Indeed, the dealer I showed it to reckoned it was worth about £35, which is brilliant because it means that since it’s worth Jack Shit to anyone other than me I get to keep it.

Sod finding a hoard.

That, my friends, is a result.

In case you’re worried that I’m getting ahead of myself, here’s a picture of the kind of thing I usually find.

A piece of aluminium – probably once an aircraft – which McMini and I found. Obviously, the eyes were applied later. It may look like a pug but we are going to call it Glorb.

So how does this link in with my books? Well, some days, when I’m really in the zone, I get impatient with Real Life. It feels as if it is little more than an annoying obstacle between me and the far more interesting places I make up in my head. Other days, usually when making up the interesting places in my head is going well and I know I won’t forget what I’m doing if I walk away from it, I enjoy the Real World as mightily as any made-up place I could concoct brain-side.

But over and above all, I guess it says that I cannot lock myself away, sit in a garret and write – well, I can but only for short bursts. Because if you want to get things out of your head you have to put stuff in. There has to be living between trips to the garret. According to my conscious mind, much of the stuff in K’Barth is informed by my skewed understanding of European history in the 1930s and 40s. But I never realised how thoroughly I rationalised it through my own national view and, unconsciously, though that period of history when England – but Britain also – underwent a similarly monumental upheaval.

Amazingly, it was only a few months after publishing the last K’Barthan book that I realised where I’d got Lord Vernon’s title, ‘Lord Protector’ from. I would have changed that if I’d cottoned on but at the same time, I guess that’s part of the joy of it all. That this shit goes in, my brain mangles it about for a while, warps it through the prism of weirdness and then something else comes out: Cromwellian Britain with multiple alien creatures and flying cars.

Mmm.

One of my current projects, Space Dustmen, features a truly disgusting – but very nutritious – food called Dagon Porridge. I’d got the Dagons down as being a very practical and sensible but utterly unimaginative bunch of aliens who are now extinct and have left the universe with little more than the benefits, if that’s the right word, of their perfectly balanced nutritional meal. The Dagons lacked the imagination to appreciate the joy of making nutrition interesting, of course, so they are roundly and regularly cursed by our protagonists. I now realise I got Dagon from church, it’s the god of the Philistines; Goliath’s god.

Hmm … to change it or not to change it? I might just have to call them Aygons instead, except then they’ll sound like a baby Toyota (Aygo). But it does go to show that there is so much hidden treasure in Real Life. All you have to do is listen, let your brain suck up the information, blend it and spit out the literary smoothie of your unique warped-eye view. At some point, every experience becomes useful.

Example: About twenty years ago, I remember sitting down on a bench just outside Riquwier, in the Alsace, waiting for my husband and our friends so we could go and see a vineyard somewhere. I was joined by a little old lady – rather glam, dressed in a silk shirt, smart skirt, nylons, heels, immaculate make up, jewellery but not too much, dyed brown hair and silk scarf tied into a type of turban (well smart though, not 1960s sit-com cleaner style). I wasn’t in much of a mood for conversation but she proceeded to chat to me, as old dears do. She turned out to be absolutely lovely and told me, from what I could understand with my rather rudimentary grasp of French, that she’d been one of Picasso’s models and a mistress in the 1950s and that she had a book of his sketches which she hoped her family would sell after she died – or possibly which they had sold already, I couldn’t be sure – to pay for her flat, where she lived, in the walls of the town. Obviously, as an art historian originally, I was really chuffed to meet her. So it just goes to show that however unassuming someone, or something looks, it’s worth paying attention, because it might turn out to be treasure.

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