The May Parade - End of Year Update

I've made a couple of new characters in the past few days. First up there's the Bobble Man. He was made using a wire frame and with legs, arms and antlers sculpted in Super Sculpey. I then covered the figure in balls - some wood, some plastic, some made from paper clay.

The second new character is Reggie the Robot. He was entirely scratchbuilt from a Christmas bauble, cardboard, balls, beads and various plastic waste.

Once painted, they joined the parade.

   

More to come in 2024. 

Happy New Year!

Oaky reflections

 

The curious deaths of the Gävle Goats

The Gävle Goat (Swedish: Gävlebocken) is a traditional Christmas display erected annually at Slottstorget (Castle Square) in central Gävle, Sweden. The display is a giant version of a traditional Swedish Yule goat figure made of straw. It is erected each year by local community groups at the beginning of Advent over a period of two days. However, what marks the goat as unusual is that it has been destroyed by vandals (usually arsonists) pretty much every year since it was first erected in 1966. 

As of December 2022, 38 out of 57 goats have been destroyed or damaged in some way.

Since 1986, two separate Yule goats have been built in Gävle: the Gävle Goat by the Southern Merchants and the Yule Goat built by the Natural Science Club of the School of Vasa. Neither is immune from attack. 

In 1966 the goat was destroyed by fire. It survived 1967 and 1968 (a fence had been built around it). But then it was burnt down again in 1969 and 1970. 

In 1971 it was smashed to pieces. In 1972 it collapsed and in 1973 someone stole it. In 1974 it was burned and it once again collapsed in 1975. In 1976 it was rammed by a teenager in a car. Arsonists struck again in 1977 and it was kicked to pieces in 1978. In 1979 it was burned down before it had even been completed. 

The 1980s saw both goats mostly destroyed by fire although they did survive in 1981 and 1988. The 1990s saw a range of fates with fires in 1991, 1992, 1996, 1998 and 1999. But a goat did survive the years in between.

We then enter the 21st century, Between 2000 and 2009 goats were burnt eight times but survived the other three years. 2005 was somewhat different as two men dressed as Santa and a Gingerbread Man shot the Yule Goat with burning arrows.

They survived in 2010 although there was a bizarre plot to kidnap the Yule Goat. On 17 December, a Swedish news site reported that one of the guards tasked with protecting the Southern Merchants' goat had been offered 50,000 SEK to leave his post so that the goat could be stolen via helicopter and transported to Stockholm. Both goats survived and were dismantled and returned to storage in early January 2011. 

The arsonists then returned in 2011, 2012 and 2013 and the goats survived three failed attempts in 2014. However the 2015 and 2016 both goats were burned down. The goats then enjoyed a run of four years unscathed - largely due to the erection of a double fence, 24 hour CCTVcameras, a nearby taxi rank to increase numbers of people nearby and two guards who patrolled around the area with dogs. Despite this, the arsonists returned in 2021. So, in 2022, citizen monitoring was introduced with 24-hour real-time public webcam feeds to bolster the existing security. And the goats survived!

All of which brings us to 2023. Have the goats fared well? 

No.

But it's not arsonists or helicopter thieves or wannabe Robin Hoods to blame this year.

It's birds.

Due to a wet harvest the straw used to construct the goats contains higher than usual amounts of seed, so they have been severely damaged by flocks of jackdaws foraging for food.

As one Facebook commentator wag said, 'It's gonna be a pretty funny addition to the Wikipedia article's chart. Fire, fire, fire, survived, fire, fire, survived, fire, BIRDS.'

The question now, of course, is ... what is the tradition these days? The goat or trying to destroy it?

Awaiting the Spring

The Rudston monolith

I've recently been re-reading Alfred Watkins' seminal works The Old Straight Track and The Ley Hunter's Manual. I'm not convinced about much of the romanticism and mythos that's been layered onto the concept of ley lines since Watkins first proposed the idea (he was very much against any ideas of energy lines or magic). But there's no denying the existence of alignments. I'm also quite happy with the idea of the 'dodman' - a respected member of the community who could map out the landscape and create paths for people to travel between notable places and sites. The fact that churches and other religious buildings were built on top of existing neothithic sites shows that the church acknowledged the importance of these places too.

Perhaps the most extraordinary example of this is the Rudston Monolith. It's not as famous as Stonehenge or Avebury or the Rollright Stones for some reason but it should be - because it is the tallest standing stone in Britain. And it's in a churchyard.

Made from glomerate Moorstone grit and transported over 40 miles to Rudston from the Cleveland Hills near Whitby, Yorkshire, the pillar is has a circumference of nearly 17 feet and stands at 26 feet high. Sir William Strickland's excavation in the late 18th century revealed that the depth below ground matches its  height. This means that people once transported a 52 feet long stone to its current location. Rudston must have been a important sacred site or worship centre in prehistoric times to warrant so much effort. Following a successful strategy, Anglo-Saxon missionaries likely 'Christianised' this already revered object, possibly by affixing a cross to its summit. This could explain the name 'Rudston,' as the Old English term for cross is 'rood,' while 'stane' means 'stone.'

During the Saxon era, a church may have been constructed on the site where the present-day church now stands. Unfortunately, all traces of its existence have vanished, and the Domesday survey of 1086 does not record any church building in Rudston. A popular myth surrounding the stone's origin suggests that the devil, angered by the construction of a church on this pagan sacred hill, hurled a colossal stone javelin or thunderbolt to destroy it. However, divine intervention deflected his aim, causing the stone to land in its current position. 

_________________________________

Afterword:

After writing this post I noted that the classification given to The Ley Hunter's Manual by the publishers is 'paranormal'.

This despite the fact that Watkins himself was not an advocate of any kind of paranormal association. He was, however, aware of it. As John Michell notes in his foreword to the book:

'Watkins himself avoided contact with the occult, but he was well aware that there was a deeper significance to leys than could be expressed by supposing them to be ordinary traders' and travellers' routes. In The Old Straight Track he wrote: "I feel that ley-man, astronomer-priest, druid, bard, wizard, witch, palmer and hermit, were all more or less linked by one thread of ancient knowledge and power." This idea was taken up by many of Watkins's followers, among whom it began to be whispered that leys and the ancient sites lined up along them were the transmitters and generators of ancient occult power. An early ley hunter, the occult writer Dion Fortune, in her novel of 1936, The Goat-Foot God, described standing stones and other landmarks of the ley system as 'sighting-marks on the lines of force between the power-centres'. The same theme occurs in folklore traditions all over the world which attribute strange magical aualities to ancient sites and the paths between them, and it remains a notable feature of modern ley researches'.

Popp go the Sunday Trading Laws

On my blogpost of the 23rd December I took you on a short video tour of one small part of High Wycombe. And, at one point, I point out a building on a street called Frogmoor that has a sign on it saying Popp's.

Number 14 Frogmoor - formerly 23 Frogmoor Gardens - was the shop of Jacob Popp from about 1901 to 1911. Jacob Ivanovitch Popp (1873-1939) was a Russian immigrant from Pernau, Estonia, who settled in Wycombe in 1891 where he married local woman Philadelphia Priscilla Moon in 1899. They opened a newsagents on Frogmoor and sold papers, tobacco and confectionery. 

Popp achieved notoreity when he decided to open on Sundaya which, at the time, was illegal. His argument was that he was simply responding to what the people of High Wycombe were demanding.

Despite being prosecuted and fined under the Sunday trading laws he continued to open as his profits more than made up for the fines - even though he was eventually fined every week for 8 years.

The case became a cause celebre reported in the national and international press. The New York Times headline of 8th March 1908 read "Popp the Martyr of High Wycombe; Tobacconist who has been arrested once a week for the past six years. Keeps shop open Sundays His Martyrdom has been a grand thing for his business - takes in over $100 every Sunday." 

Popp even issued a set of postcards satirising the affair.

Popp's act of defiance caught the public imagination and a wave of copycat action followed. However, Sunday trading remained illegal until after the Second World War when the Shops Act of 1950 set into law what could and could not be purchased on a Sunday. Only a small number of specialist outlets were able to open legally, including garden centres, small 'corner' or family-run shops, and chemists. You could buy cigarettes or ice cream, but not frozen vegetables or fish fingers. Other anomalies reflected the type of retail outlet allowed to open: you could buy newspapers and porn mags, but not bibles, fresh cream but not evaporated milk. You could buy bicycle spares, but not a bicycle, have your shoes repaired but not buy shoelaces. 

Despite more than twenty attempts by various MPs to change the laws it wasn't until 1994 that all shops could open on Sunday. One attempt by Margaret Thatcher's government in 1986 was defeated in Parliament, with opposition coming from Conservative MPs who saw it as a threat to family life and church attendance, and Labour MPs who were concerned about workers' rights. This led to the formation of the Keep Sunday Special campaign, backed by church groups and USDAW, the trade union representing shop workers. 

However, it's now a free-for-all and - whether you love Sunday trading or loathe it - we owe it, to some degree, to Popp's. His occupation of the building is commemorated by the Popp's signs on the upper storey.

Penbrons - a new character for the May Parade

 

I decided to make a Hobby Horse - specifically a mast horse like the Mari Lwyd of Wales and the two 'osses' - - Penglaz and Pen Hood - that parade around Penzance during the summer festival of Golowan and the midwinter celebration known as Montol.

The term ‘Hobby Horse’ comes from the common name for a small or middle-sized horse or pony. The antiquarian Bishop White Kennett recorded in his Parochial Antiquities (1695), that, ‘Our ploughmen to some one of their cart-horses generally give the name of Hobin’. The names Hobin or Hobby are variants of Robin (just as Hob was). Another, more familiar, variant of this is the name Dobbin. 

There are three general types of traditional Hobby Horse. The first is the Tourney Horse, which looks like a person riding a small horse. An oval frame is suspended around the waist with a skirt or caparison draped over it. These horses often have a carved wooden head with snapping jaws. The Padstow ‘Obby ‘Oss is a very stylised form of Tourney. 

The second type is a Sieve Horse, which is a simpler version of the Tourney and only really known from Lincolnshire. They are made from a farm sieve frame, with head and tail attached, suspended from the performer's shoulders. 

The third type is the Mast Horse which has a head on a pole. This can be a carved head or, as in the case of the Welsh Mari Lwyd and the Penzance ‘Osses, a real horse skull. The jaw is usually hinged and the person carrying the mast wears a costume to disguise them.

My figure is a Mast Horse.

So, that's it for 2023 ... but more figures will be joining the May Parade in 2024.

Merry Christmas and a joyful Yule to you all.

A Christmassy Ramble

A video that includes a visit to Soho for Christmas drinks with friends (and some mellow jazz), a trip to my workplace and some views of High Wycombe, and then a dog walk where I muse on the time I once wrote the QI Christmas episode.

Oh, and this wasn't Storm Gerrit yet (that was declared on Boxing Day). This was the end of Storm Pia (see here).

And here are a few more behind the scenes photos from that episode:

Name that storm

I often thank my lucky stars that I live in a temperate country that is not prone to extreme weather effects such as twisters, heavy snow, prolonged droughts, monsoons or hurricanes. 

The practice of naming Hurricanes has always struck me as a being a little incongruous. Take Hurricane Katrina, for example. 'She' was a devastating Category 5 Atlantic hurricane that smashed into New Orleans in 2005, resulting in 1,836 fatalities and damage estimated between $97.4 billion to $145.5 billion. Katrina seems much too nice a name for something so deadly and indiscriminate, doesn't it? Surely it should have been named after some hellish demon or powerful god like Beelzebub or Lucifer or Shiva or Thor? When it comes to naming hurricanes, Cindy, Harold, Nigel and Whitney all seem just a bit too ... nice (yes, they were real 2023 hurricane names - see here). 

But now climate change means that we are starting to experience more frequent severe weather here in the UK. Storms are becoming increasingly common and we've started to name them too. At time of writing this, I can see that it is a very blustery day outside because we're at the tail end of the most recently named storm.

But what name do I use?

Because it turns out that there is some argument over this.

The UK Met Office has released this list of storm names for 2023/2024. Note that, in keeping with hurricane tradition, they alphabetically alternate between male and female names:

 

However ... the current storm that is causing high winds in the UK seems to have several names. I've seen it as Gerrit but I've also seen it as Pia. Why?

It turns out that (like so many things) there is no international agreement on naming storms. There are several 'Naming Groups' around Europe which issue storm name lists. The UK Met Office, Irish Met Eireann and Dutch KNMI are in one group, the Western Group. They named Gerrit. But Pia was the name given by the Northern Group (Norway, Sweden and Denmark). There is also a Southwestern Naming group (Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium and Luxembourg, a Central Group (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary), a Central Mediterranean Group (Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Malta) and an Eastern Mediterranean Group (Greece, Cyprus and Israel). 

However, Gerrit/Pia started in one naming region and then travelled into ours. And that's where the confusion lies. 

When a hurricane begins to slow and becomes a storm it retains its hurricane name. So if Hurricane Ophelia, for example, formed over the Atlantic but then headed northwest to reach the British Isles as a post-tropical cyclone, it would still be known as Ophelia (or sometimes ex-Ophelia). This can mean that out list of storm names gets out of sequence alphabetically. 

If the same rule is applied to storms, then we are currently experiencing Storm Pia, which started in the Northern Group but then shifted to the Western Group. Technically it is still Pia and the UK Met Office has not yet allocated Gerrit.

(screengrabbed 22/12/23 from the Met Office)

You might remember Storm Otto that hit the UK in February last year and caused travel disruption for NE Britain. It was named by the Danish Met Institute. And in April 2023 we experienced Storm Noa (named by Meteo France) resulting in huge waves and coastal damage, power outages and high winds to south Wales, southwest England. It also closed the Severn Bridge . In those cases, we retained the original names.

So there you go. This is Storm Pia.

You can tell I used to be a QI elf - one of the TV shows researcher/writers - can't you? 

I just need to know stuff.

_________________________________________

Footnote: 

Storm Gerrit was officially named on Tuesday 26th December. It blasted the whole of the UK but the strongest efects were felt in Scotland and northern England. Trains across much of Scotland ground to a halt on Wednesday and a major incident was declared in Greater Manchester after a supercell thunderstorm and localised tornado damaged around 100 properties, tearing roofs and chimneys from homes and smashing windows.

But climate change isn't real is it? Ask the politicians. 

Sigh.

Nativity Fails

 I was thinking about school Nativity plays today.

I appeared in a lot of school plays as a kid. It was a mixed blessing. My secondary school was boys only and, for some reason I've yet to find an explanation for, I was often chosen to play female characters. However, I was luckier in infant nativity plays. I was usually Joseph, or a shepherd or, because I was a choirboy, an angel. However, these days, in amongst the shepherds, wise men, sheep and cows you'll now find children playing a very odd mix of characters.

Me as a shepherd, bottom left at St Marys School, Penzance 1967

My son once played the stable door. In the spirit of 'inclusivity' that is foisted upon teachers these days, no child - no matter how keen they are as actors - can be left out. I guess it's better than how it was in my day when the shy kids got nothing and the divas got everything. But a door? It got me wondering what other strange roles teachers have created to ensure that all of the kids get something meaningful to do during school productions. So I asked around and heard some amazing stories. 

Back when Twitter was fun, it proved to be a particularly fecund source of anecdotes, some quite tragic. One lady told me that she'd been the 'glamorous assistant' to a quoit thrower played by a kid called Wayne. To do this she was forced into a green leotard and, in her words, 'I wasn't a skinny kid'. Ouch. 

My friend Ally Craig told me a tale that brought a tear to my eye: 'Being unable to walk, they made me Santa in the school play. They built a chimney around my wheelchair and sang When Santa Got Stuck Up the Chimney.' 

Another friend, Trina Wright, got to play the mirror in Snow White but, in a moment of exquisite torture, discovered that she'd have to tell the girl she hated most in school how pretty she was. 

The winner for sheer pathos however is Michael Moran who had to dress as a duck for a school play. This entailed getting dressed up at home and travelling 11 miles to school. Alone. Dressed as a duck. 

Among the more curious inanimate objects people were asked to play, I heard from people who had played a leaf, a hailstone, the Moon, an ant, a milk bottle and an 'Optional spear carrier'. Several people recalled being animals or parts of animals or Christmas puddings. And one woman once had to dress up as a Space Invader in a Waitrose cardboard box costume. In a Nativity. 

Not that the traditional Nativity is a stranger to introducing new characters. One Tweeter told me that she was once asked to play 'a woman who wanted to shop at Harrods instead of giving money to a homeless man - hard hitting stuff for a six-year-old.' Another played a 'welly wanger' - one who chucks Wellington boots - but had to do it with a haggis instead. One woman was a Hula Girl and another played Jack the Ripper. Apparently, the Nativity that year was loosely based on A Christmas Carol and one possible future for the star was likely to be a trifle visceral and grim. 

Extraordinary. 

Do you know of a worse or more bizarre role? Do let me know.

This is not a meme

There is what looks like a meme going around at the moment that suggests we should all stop playing 'Whamageddon' every year because we're robbing charities of money. The meme makes the claim that radio stations may not play the song 'Last Christmas' for fear of people changing channels to avoid the song. 

Really? 

There are a few things to unpack here. 

Firstly, yes, the profits from 'Last Christmas' do get donated to charities in Africa. George Michael and Andrew Ridgley agreed to this because the single came out in the same year (and was kept off the #1 spot) by Band Aid and 'Do they know it's Christmas.' 

Secondly, the song has made millions for charity and continues to do so. It's been in the UK Top Ten six times and 15 times in the Top 40. It's the bestselling Christmas song of all time in Germany and spent 161 weeks on the singles chart in 2021 before hitting #1. It has been #1 in Sweden four times. It has become the UK's third-bestselling song of all time, with a combined lifetime total of 5.34 million chart units, comprising 1.93 million sales and nearly 413 million streams, according to Official Charts data. Until this year it was the best-selling single to never reach the top of the UK charts. But, of course, this year it did take the Christmas #1 spot, notching up 13.3 million streams and downloads. Has Whamageddon really affected any of that? 

Thirdly, I can find no evidence whatsoever of radio stations refusing to play the song - if you can find any proof of it, please let me know. The whole point of Whamageddon is for the player to avoid the song - radio stations should be playing it as often as possible to make the game harder! And the charitable causes will still get the money whether you are listening or not. So why refuse to play? 

Social media is full of memes that have no evidence to support them (Facebook own all your photos if you don't write a declaration denying them that right, your newsfeed is limited to 26 friends, people are being killed in India for eating beef etc.) and many are complete fabrications. And that's a problem because, in a recent study by The Pew Research Center, about two-thirds (67%) of Americans get at least some of their news from social media, with 44% getting news from Facebook. In addition, more than half (56%) say they get news from search engines like Google or Bing, and 32% say they get news from Twitter. I'm pretty sure the figures would be similar for the UK. 

So here's an idea for your New Year's Resolution for 2024. How about we all chack our facts before forwarding a meme, tweet (Xeet?) or TikTok video? We can all help to clean up social media and prevent disinformation, misinformation and downright lies by not recycling it. And with elections coming up in the UK and USA, this is more important than ever. 

And, yes I got sent to Whamhalla on the 18th December, dammit. 

P.s. This is NOT a meme.

Chainsaws and byelaws - Land management

 

Twiggy joins the May Parade

Here's the next character in the May parade - I'm calling him/her/them Twiggy Loghorn (until I come up with a better name). After the complexities involved in creating the previous addition to the artwork - the Carnyx Cart (see here) - it was nice to create a simpler figure this time.

I began with a basic frame of wire and kitchen foil. I then gave it a 'skin' of Original Sculpey. Then I collected a good handful of oak twigs during a dog walk (I should stress that this is all dead wood - nothing was taken from live trees).

After washing and drying the twigs, I cut them up into short lengths and started applying them to the figure using a hot glue gun. 

The head was made from a piece of the cardboard tube from inside a roll of kitchen foil.

I carried on with the twigs until the whole figure was covered. Then I added some beads for eyes and a golf tee for the horn/mouth. 

I used a blowtorch to melt away all of the 'spiderwebs' you get when using hot glue and then coated the whole figure with PVA to stabilise it and prevent any twiggy fraying.

Then I painted it black.

Finally I gave it some gold spray and Twiggy was complete.