Why I'm having more fun than anyone else

This post is long overdue. Long, long overdue. Every now and then it occurs to me that I should really knuckle down and get it finished. But something else always seems to get in the way. Just lately it's been yet more building work in the house. We've had a couple of walls knocked out in the kitchen, the ceiling re-plastered, and the bricked-up fireplace in the dining room opened up. Oh, and we've had new windows and doors put in and a shiny new fire escape installed. That's about it really. And in amongst all this I've managed to find myself a part time job, five mornings a week. Quite a lot to be going on with. And I'm still morris dancing.

Apparently, some years ago, someone said, 'Try everything once except incest and morris dancing'. Now, I had always thought that it was conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, until I discovered that he had said 'folk dancing'. After a wander through the halls of cyberspace, it appears that this phrase, or something like it, has (allegedly)been uttered by a good many people over the years. Politicians (Sir Winston Churchill); Writers (Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw); Renaissance men (Stephen Fry); actors (Woody Allen); philosophers (Bertrand Russell); composers (Sir Arnold Bax); all seem to have got in on the act. And even the 'model' Linzi Drew used the phrase as the title of her autobiography. You'll probably be pleased to hear that I've only ignored half of the advice given me by this positive gallimaufry of personalities.

Little did I realise, when I retired from my job back in August 2008, that two years later I'd be kitted out in knee breeches, bells, baldric and rop (that's what they call the spotted neckerchief, apparently), stepping out with Long Man Morris at various venues throughout East Sussex and beyond. And I have to admit, dear bloggy friend, that I find morris dancing curiously addictive. Only yesterday I was dancing Much Wilmington in a freezing car park in Polegate, and next week we'll be in Eastbourne and Alfriston (a pretty little village, and in Hailsham a week after that. So, why, when others are sprawled in front of their TVs, drinking wine and eating chocolate, do I put myself through what is to all intents and purposes a special forces style workout every week? Apart from the sheer enjoyment of the dancing (frustrating though it can be when I can't get the steps right), the motivation is acquisition of The Hat.

The Hat. Many morris sides wear hats. Some have bowlers. Others have bucolic straw numbers, with or without flowers attached. Ours has a black top hat, beribboned in the sides's colours of yellow and two kinds of green. And I'm not allowed to have one. Not yet, at least. Because I have to satisfy the Squire and the Foreman of the side that I am sufficiently proficient a dancer to merit the award of my badges. These badges, worn upon the baldric, are leather, and bear upon them our motif - the chalk hill figure (not to be confused with Tommy Hilfiger, which is something else entirely) known as The Long Man of Wilmington, from which the side takes its name. And until I have earned my badges, I may not acquire The Hat. Every now and then I will glance wistfully at an elderly top hat, sitting forlornly in an antique shop in Lewes or Brighton, and thinking how well it would sit atop my head. Or I might come across one upon the excellent website of the Vintage Shirt Company and think, 'if only...'

But I shall not tempt Providence by purchasing The Hat too soon. So, dear bloggy friend, it shall remain upon that antique shop shelf, gently gathering dust until, wavers (hankies to you) in my hands, I shall Bledington-step it up to the counter, impatient to exchange hard cash for a top hat that has (like me) seen better days.

Not a very happy anniversary

This post was to have been called 'Why I'm having more fun than everyone else'. However, something else has occurred to me and I hope, dear bloggy friends, that it will not prove uninteresting to you.

At around 5.34pm on Sunday the 25th October 1942, sixty eight years ago today, a single German aircraft flew low over the English Channel in order to avoid detection by radar, and approached Seaford, East Sussex, intent on a 'tip and run' raid. With machine guns blazing, it dropped four bombs. The first fell on Broad Street - the town's main shopping street - destroying two shops and flats, killing 85 year old James Gale and his 53 year old daughter Fanny, and wounding eighteen more people. The three bombs that followed exploded in Sutton Road, Sutton Park Road and Vicarage Walk. Bomb number two completely destroyed two houses, killing George Borissow and his daughter Kathleen, Jessie Andrew, George Farnes and Mary Willis. It also caused serious damage to a third house - the house in which I now live - and killed Kate Holcombe, who was sixty eight years old. The third bomb killed sisters Fanny and Mary Buck, Catherine Meeson and Sarah Smith. The fourth caused damage to several properties but fortunately only one injury. The last fatality was a 54 year old air raid warden named William Tomley who, whilst making his way to an ARP control point, was struck in the chest by machine gun bullets and killed instantly. Sadly, this was the third death in the Tomley family; William's two sons, who served with the RAF, had been killed in action earlier in the war.

Altogether, there were thirty seven raids on Seaford during the second world war, resulting in twenty three deaths, sixteen dreadful injuries and 2064 properties destroyed or damaged. Rather strangely, it suffered far more than the port of Newhaven, three miles to the west, which one would have thought to be a more likely target for Germany's bombers.

Eventually, the war ended and life in Seaford returned to something approaching normality. My house, solidly constructed in 1907, was repaired. The two houses next door, being too badly damaged for repair, were replaced by a small block of four flats. Kate Holcombe was laid to rest in Seaford Cemetery. Her name and the names of all Seaford's war dead were inscribed upon the memorial that still stands in Sutton Road...

Today was a beautiful autumn day in Seaford. A gentle breeze rustled the fallen leaves and the sun shone in a cloudless sky, its light glinting on the calm and unruffled sea. On such a day it is hard to imagine the fear and horror suffered by the residents of my home town all those years ago.

Coat tales

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the World was round, goes the popular ditty. I'm not surprised. He should, of course, have said 'spherical', or, more properly, 'an oblate spheroid' in order to avoid becoming an object of ridicule. And I'm fairly sure that they (whoever 'they' might be) laughed at Prince Charles when he said that the British Library looked like the assembly hall of an academy for secret policemen. And it was to that same library I betook myself on Wednesday last in order to renew my reader's pass for another three years.

I've held a reader's pass for some years now. When I first started using the library it was still a part of the British Museum at Bloomsbury; the old round reading room was opened in 1857, and researching there amongst the polished wooden desks, leather chairs and gold-tooled books made you feel for all the world like some old Victorian scholar, or the member of some exclusive club. Most of the 'members' seemed to be elderly, or at the very least middle-aged, and tweed clothing was much in evidence. In some ways, the round reading room felt a bit like a church where the written word was god, and the librarians were the priests and acolytes, working from a central, round pulpit. You could no more think of raising your voice there than of singing a comic song in the nave of Westminster Abbey.

Sadly, things move on. The old library wasn't big enough to house the ever-growing collection; it took hours for your book order to arrive; and many of the books were stored at outstations around the UK, making them even less accessible. So it was that the present incarnation of the British Library at St. Pancras came into being, and that's where I found myself on Wednesday.

Brimming with confidence and armed with my new pass, I entered the Humanities Reading Room and flashed said pass at the security guard.

'I'm sorry, sir,' he said, 'but you can't come in with your coat.'

I was momentarily taken aback.

'No coats are allowed in the reading rooms,' he said. 'You'll have to leave it in the cloakroom.'

I presumed it was some kind of security initiative. Perhaps someone had once tried to smuggle the Lindisfarne Gospels out of the place beneath an Inverness cape. For a moment I toyed with the idea of questioning this directive. It wasn't a particularly warm day and I didn't want to catch a chill. However, I adopted the standard response to a seemingly pointless rule and decided I'd best obey it, otherwise I'd get nowhere. I took myself off to the cloakroom. It was the biggest cloakroom I'd ever seen. I wasn't overly worried that my coat would be stolen, or sold, or mistakenly given back to someone else, but I was concerned about what to do with my 'stuff'. I had two wallets (one large, one small), a bunch of keys, a mobile phone, and a camera. Too much stuff to cram into my trouser pockets. I needn't have worried, though. The library helpfully provides its readers with clear plastic carrier bags in which to put their things. I picked up a bag and studied it. It less like something you might find in a library, but more like an item to be found at an international airport in these days of heightened security. No coats, bags or umbrellas, it warned. No pens, highlighters or sharp implements (did my keys count as sharp implements, I wondered). No food, drink, bottled water (how is bottled water different from 'drink'?), sweets or gum. And lastly, No Cameras. This was beginning to feel less like a place of study, more like Prince Charles' Secret Police Academy. I dumped all my stuff into the bag, with just a slight concern that I had a camera on me. What would happen when I tried to enter the reading room? Would the camera be noticed and confiscated? Would they take it and hang on to it until I was about to leave, as teachers do when kiddies take banned items into school?

I decided to forget about this particular concern, and went to hand in my coat. This biggest cloakroom I'd ever seem also had the smallest number of staff I'd ever seen; just two men. Now, in some circumstances, it is possible for two men to do the work of ten. It just needs enthusiasm, drive and determination. These two cloakroom attendants seemed to be doing the work of less than one man. It appeared that neither really wanted to be there, and the whole business of giving and receiving coats was, to be quite honest, a bit of an inconvenience. I bet they couldn't wait till summer. Not many coats then. I handed in my coat and received a token, the entire transaction being carried out in silence, apart from my 'thank you' to the Trappist Collector of Coats.

Now coatless and armed with my clear plastic carrier bag, I was granted unfettered entry to the reading room. I found myself a desk and had a quick look around. To be sure, it has the polished wooden desks, the leather, the brass fittings; but it still feels so new, as though it hasn't had time to develop a soul. And the clientele seems to have changed. Gone are the tweedy scholars with their leather-bound notebooks, replaced by young women with impossibly short skirts, young men with impossibly asymmetric haircuts, and all of them armed with Apple laptops. I idly wondered what on earth they were all studying. I doubt very much that they wondered the same about me.

It was, by now, too late in the day to order any book and hope to get it before closing time. I resolved to get there earlier on my next visit with a clear plan of action. I thought I might go there on a warm day so I wouldn't need a coat.

I wandered back down to the cloakroom. They seemed to be having a bit of a rush on. There was a queue of around forty people in front of me, waiting either to deposit or collect. I noted that this sudden surge in business had not resulted in any attendant increase in the speed of the cloakroom brethren. They went about their work slowly and deliberately. I wondered about their lives. Were they always this morose? Or were they the life and soul of the party outside working hours, regaling friends with tales of the interesting coats and bags they had encountered that day? I decided the question probably wasn't worthy of an answer.

I caught the Lewes train at Victoria. As it left the capital, I watched as a tableau of events beyond the carriage window presented themselves and then winked out of sight. A man walking slowly along a footpath. A queue of traffic at a junction. The backs of nondescript industrial units on a trading estate. Smoke from a bonfire. Trackside detritus - gravel, sleepers, bits of plastic cable trunking. Suddenly, built up areas were left behind and we entered the chalky, undulating ploughlands of East Sussex. In the distance, the whalebacked Downs. As dusk crept over the land a light mist had appeared and I found myself, apparently, inside a watercolour painting by Eric Ravilious. This is an ancient landscape...

I was suddenly transported back to the here and now. A young man opposite me with a hands free kit was talking very loudly to a friend. 'Yeah,' he said, 'he takes that corner really tight every morning. Then, last week, he hit the bank. Now it's a perfect shape and he can really zoom round it.' I sighed to myself. I thought I'd left these kind of boy racers behind when I emigrated from London. But as the one-sided conversation progressed it became clear that he was talking not about some high-performance car, but a Massey-Ferguson tractor. This young man was a Sussex farm worker. During the course of the journey I also discovered that the John Deere is his favourite tractor, and that it is difficult, but possible, to steer with the knees whilst talking on one's mobile and drinking a cup of tea. I had hoped to hear some dialect words tripping off his tongue, but the closest he came to archaisms was 'bollocks' and 'pissed'.

It was just about night when I arrived in Seaford. As I made the short walk home, I could smell wood smoke. I could hear the suck of the pebbles dragged down the beach by the tide. I could see shadows on the curtains as the people of the town went about their lives. And I was glad of my coat. It was bloody freezing.

A terrible case of mistaken identity

This is a very unusual post; unusual in the sense that it is all about me. I won’t hold it against you if you decide, after a paragraph or so, to wander off to put the kettle on and grab some chocolate biscuits.

I think I may already have mentioned to you, somewhere in this humble blog, that the good people of my little town are a friendly and pleasant bunch. Not long after I arrived here I noticed that people would smile and nod as I passed by, so I would, of course, return the compliment. On one occasion I was even waved to by the occupant of a passing car and, once again, felt bound to reciprocate. It seemed to make all those years of working in a potentially dangerous job - where people, although they did not perhaps actively seek to kill you, wanted you dead through some unspecified but effective means - worthwhile.

But then something happened. I was mooching about the town - Church Street, I fancy it was - when a middle-aged chap walking towards me smiled and said, ‘Hello, Pete.’ I did my usual brief nod and smile in return, and then suddenly realised what had happened. He had called me Pete. Why? Was he a theatrical mind-reader who had decided to take a stab at guessing my first name? Did I perhaps look more like a Pete than a Chris? Had I simply misheard? Anyway, the moment passed, and I though no more about it.

Then it happened a couple more times. And a lady flashed me a smile of rather greater warmth than one might expect of a stranger passing another stranger in the street.

Then one day, quite by chance, I came across my doppelganger. It was in my local pub. We’d popped in for a drink and something to eat, and there, propping up the bar, was Pete. His hair was about the same length as mine, he had a similar beard and similar glasses (or ‘spartacles’ in Sussex dialect), but his skin was a little darker in complexion than mine. Probably something to do with a lifetime of living on the coast. I could understand why people had confused us upon seeing us separately, but put us together and the differences would be blindingly obvious. For a brief moment we glanced in each others’ direction and exchanged the usual nod. I suspected that one or other of his companions had advised him that there was a stranger in town and that the stranger bore a passing resemblance to himself.

Sadly, my similarity in appearance to Pete has not resulted in any benefit to me. No-one has offered me a drink when I walk into the pub. No-one has pressed a note into my hand, saying, ‘here’s that fifty quid I owe you, Pete’. But equally, nobody has said, ‘when are you going to repay that money you owe me, Pete?’ so I suppose I should be grateful.

Only last week I was standing at the counter of the local bathroom tile emporium, waiting, not surprisingly, for a quote on some bathroom tiles. There was one other person in the place - a builder, I suspected. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, but has anyone ever told you that you look like Pete? Only I saw you outside Morrison’s last week and nearly tapped you on the shoulder. It’s the hair, you see.’

It’s The Hair. Yes. The Hair. Another potential source of embarassment. No; I’m lying. An actual source of embarassment. Around a month ago, I was wandering around Morrisons (I do plenty of wandering; early retirement and a desire to escape the decorating that needs doing) and paused to peruse a shelf laden with pickles, chutneys and spices of the East. Then, quite unexpectedly, I was mildly jostled by a gentleman shelf-filler.

‘Oops! Sorry, madam!’ he said, then hastily corrected himself. ‘I mean sir!’ and that was it. Not only was I someone else; I was apparently someone else and a woman as well. With a beard. I went home and regaled Mrs. H with this tale, and she professed herself much amused by this case of mistaken gender, then she boxed my ears and told me to get on with the decorating. It has also just come to mind that, last December, I was sitting in a restaurant in Ruislip with Mrs. H and my mother (also Mrs. H, but I didn’t want to cause confusion) when the waitress popped her head round the corner of the booth and said, ‘Have you ladies decided what you’re having yet?’

It happened again yesterday. I live in an area where water is metered. The little meter sits at the bottom of a hobbit-hole just outside my front gate and, being a ‘retentive’ sort, it is my habit to lift up the inspection cover from time to time and check, with a torch, how much water I have used. As I was hunched over the hole, trying to read the tiny figures on the display, a female voice said:

‘What a clever young lady you are, to be able to do that.’

I looked up and found that the remark had been made by a pleasant-looking middle-aged lady. Seeing that I was, in fact, a man, she lost nothing of her composure. She merely stated:

‘Oh. You’re a man. I thought you were a girl. It’s the hair.’

It’s The Hair. Later that evening I told Mrs. H of my encounter. She likened the incident to the conclusion of the 1973 film Don’t Look Now, where Donald Sutherland confronts what he believes to be a child in a red duffle-coat, only to discover that it is a grotesque dwarf who stabs him to death.

I wasn’t quite sure how to take that.

Sussex mud and fornication

The weather has been quite pleasant this week, if a little cold. Last week was a different story. We had rain. Lots of rain. More than our fair share, if the overflowing gutters and temporary lakes were anything to go by. And with the rain came the mud. I had thought that Middenshire was the muddiest place on this earth; but no - I think the prize (last week, at any rate) should have gone to East Sussex.

The South Saxons had their own word for mud - àdela; and the word for ‘muddy’ was gyru. That would appear to be it. Not exactly up there with the number of Inuit words for snow - allegedly somewhere between seven and a hundred. But more recent Sussex residents had some interesting dialect words to describe soggy conditions brought about by wet weather, the resulting mud, and where it ended up. Ground made swampy by wet weather was flushy; indeed, it could be said to be sabbed, or saturated with water. Any wetter and it would become a swank - a bog. Down on the farm, the cattle would be stoaching - trampling the ground into stodge or slub, both terms for thick mud. Walk through this slab gubber (wet and slippery black mud to you) and, depending on your term of preference, you would be grom, grabby or stoachy. And woe betide you if you trod this into the house. You’d be stabbling or spanneling, both of which would make you rather unpopular, especially if the floor had been newly swept or washed.

All the above dialect words were collected in the nineteenth century by the Reverend W D Parish or his acquaintances. I introduced you to the good Reverend here just under a year ago, but his Dictionary of the Sussex Dialect is so interesting that I felt he deserved another airing. Once can just imagine this Selmeston vicar, notebook and pencil in hand, passing the time of day with some old Gaffer or Gammer, hastily jotting down an interesting word or phrase. But one can’t help wondering whether his parishioners were having a bit of a giggle at his expense, as he dutifully wrote down their innocent-sounding definitions of the following words: Fornicate, Hard-Dick, Crap, Jack-Up, Nonce, Pimps and Shag. And I’ll leave it to you to research these and get back to me.

Joking aside for a moment, I think we owe a debt of gratitude to the Rev. Parish and his ilk. In most villages the vicar or parson was the only man to have undergone a university education, and many such men of the cloth made extensive notes of the world they inhabited - take a look at the diary of Francis Kilvert, or the Natural History of Selborne, compiled by Gilbert White. Their notes and diaries give us a fascinating insight into the people, places and events from an age that is now almost entirely lost to us. Equally, if William Douglas Parish had not taken the trouble to note down these old words and sayings, so much would now be lost to us, and our language (and this blog!) would be much the poorer for it.

Anyway, I think I’ve fornicated for long enough now. I shall bid you adieu.

Port whine?

Newhaven. It's quite a pleasant name, isn't it? I can imagine Newhaven as a cosy little seaside town in New England; all white painted, weatherboarded houses with paling fences; a couple of bearded old salts mending their nets on the quay, spinning yarns for the tourists; sand dunes sloping lazily down to the sea; the smell of freshly cooked lobsters...

But the Newhaven close to where I live is a very different place. It's a port town at the mouth of the River Ouse in East Sussex, handling passengers and goods bound for Dieppe, and port towns always seem to have a rather scruffy air about them. Our Newhaven is no exception. It has a hinterland of industrial estates, scrap yards, sewage treatment plants and empty factories, one of which, the Parker Pen company (remember them?) has recently laid off all its workers and moved operations to France. That's nice of them, isn't it? The town centre isn't much better. Many of the shops are empty and some of those still operating seem to be in two minds about it. As I walked down the High Street a herring gull was pecking at an empty pizza box, trying desperately to turn it over in order to reach whatever residue was left inside. Every time someone passed, the gull would wander off, feigning a lack of interest in the box. You could almost hear it whistling and staring vacantly into space. But when the passer-by had gone it renewed its assault on the box. A child coughed without putting its hand over its mouth. Outside a nearby pub a heavily tattooed employee was enjoying a doorstep cigarette, whilst at the bus stop, someone had helpfully written the word "ARSE" four times on the red plastic bench beneath the shelter.

All of this might lead you to think that I've got a bit of a downer on Newhaven. Curiously, I haven't. There's something about the place; something that gives it special character that one only finds in marine towns. Alright, so the pubs might look a bit scruffy, but they have a kind of faded grandeur; a sense of having been buffeted by the weather for a couple of centuries, a bit like some weather-beaten old sea captain. And, what's more, they're still open and offering bed and breakfast to the traveller. The street lamps in the High Street have canopies that are reminiscent of the sails from some old square-rigger. There are no less than three war memorials placed in a tiny but beautifully kept garden at the edge of the town. The smart marina, set about with pastel-coloured apartment blocks, is home to a large number of expensive-looking yachts, their halyards slapping against their masts in the stiff breeze. And there is a special quality to the light; a brightness that is not seen in an inland town; a brightness that makes you want to take up a paintbrush and commit something to canvas...

Just occasionally, I look out of my bedroom window at night and see a ferry steaming out to sea, its bright lights reflected in the inky blackness of the English Channel. Sailors have been putting to sea from Newhaven and other Sussex towns for centuries, rowing, sailing or under power; many have failed to return, due to war, weather or shipwreck. But watching these great vessels gliding silently to goodness knows where brings a sense of continuity to an ordinary event. Newhaven has seen better days, but it battles on regardless, like a tramp steamer chugging on in the teeth of a westerly gale. Long may it do so, I say.

Blimey. I got all poetic there for a moment.

A flaming good time

Question. Where can you see, all in one place, Vikings, smugglers, Siamese dancers, a samba band, and a bunch of Zulu warriors? Disneyland? Wrong, I’m afraid. What if you add a torchlit procession complete with fiery crosses, the burning of a Pope, some blazing tar barrels and a dyslexic pirate? The set of some British low-budget cult film? Wrong again. In italics. All these curious characters and props can be seen every year at the bonfire night celebrations in Lewes, the county town of East Sussex. And it was to Lewes, despite the exhortations of the local law enforcement agencies that ‘outsiders’ should stay away, that my family and I, and several thousand other curious visitors betook ourselves on November the fifth.

When, on the 5th November 1605, the ‘Popish Plot’ to kill King James and his parliament was discovered, the day was declared to be ‘a holiday for ever in thankfulness to God for the deliverance and detestation of the Papists’. Officially, the day was celebrated with a church service of thanksgiving, but in the seventeenth century and earlier it was traditional to mark significant events with the lighting of bonfires, so it is quite likely that an ad-hoc bonfire party was held in Lewes, as well as many other towns and villages, on the 5th of November 1606. Now, you have to bear in mind that, in the absence of councils, police, health and safety officers and a whole host of EU regulations, these celebrations were nothing like the well-ordered, all-ticket affairs we have now, and were probably more like drunken riots. Little wonder, then, that Oliver Cromwell sought to ban these and all other similar ‘celebrations’ when he came to power.

When Charles the Second ascended the throne, Cromwell’s ban was rescinded, and bonfire celebrations in Lewes resumed and continued haphazardly until the 1820s, when semi-organised groups of ‘Bonfire Boys’ lit fires and set off fireworks, but these were still riotous affairs. In 1838 a magistrate who remonstrated with the boys was unceremoniously chucked into the River Ouse, and in 1847 a contingent of a hundred Metropolitan Police officers were drafted in to prevent disorder, the riot act was read and a good number of police officers were injured in the ensuing fight with the ‘boys’.

It was clear that this sort of thing couldn’t carry on. And so it was that, in 1853, the Cliffe and Town (now Lewes Borough) Bonfire Societies were established. Other societies were established later, and the night took on a rather more orderly air. On the night of the fifth, these societies, whose members wear amazing and elaborate costumes, march through the town carrying flaming torches (and fiery crosses in memory of Lewes’ Protestant martyrs), throwing firecrackers around, and throwing blazing tar barrels into the Ouse. The Cliffe Society displays flaming banners, proclaiming ‘No Popery’ (I’m amazed some over-zealous individual hasn’t tried to ban this!) and ‘We Wunt be Druv’, reflecting the determination of Sussex people not to be pushed around by the self-appointed or over-zealous individuals aforesaid. According to one very nice lady to whom I spoke, there is intense rivalry between the societies. I’m afraid I put my ‘London head’ on at this point, suspecting all manner of incidents such as drive-by shootings, kidnaps and knee-cappings. I suspect, however, that a little good-natured ribbing about the merits of their respective societies is as far as it goes! And here's a small aside...I managed to spot, and greet, a fellow Twitter user (@_Flik_) who was part of the South Street procession. Who says social networking is a waste of time?

One of the high points of the evening is the burning of effigies. Of course, Guido Fawkes and Pope Paul the Fifth are regulars. But each year the societies also choose a number of ’hate’ figures who are also consigned to the flames. This year, they torched a very realistic effigy of former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and some other politician, sailing in a gravy boat with a pig for company. The banking fraternity, symbolised by a massive Fat Cat, was given similar treatment.

I have to say that Bonfire was a most amazing night out. It’s the type of festival I thought had been legislated out of existence years ago, but, thankfully, it has survived. Despite the presence of all those flaming torches, bonfires and fireworks, there were (as far as I’m aware) no major incidents or injuries. I saw no violence, no disorder, and the police were at their unobtrusive best in letting everyone get on with enjoying themselves. I’m pretty sure the worst casualties were (like me) just a little over-zealous with the local brew.

What I’m going to say now is likely to upset both police and council…don’t listen to their pleas for you to stay away! If you find yourself anywhere near Lewes on the next November the fifth, do yourself a favour and trundle along to the Bonfire celebrations. I guarantee you an amazing experience. I’ll be there, so tap me on the shoulder and I’ll buy you a pint of Harvey’s Bonfire Boy. Maybe even two pints.

Oh, I nearly forgot about the dyslexic pirate. He had a carrot on his shoulder...

Cuckmere Carpenters, Seaford Shags

Now, before you ask...no, I didn't take this picture, but I wish I had! Doesn't it look like something from the lid of a chocolate box, or some Beautiful Britain calendar? It's a view of a series of sea cliffs called 'The Seven Sisters' from Seaford Head, just a short distance from my new home. The houses you can see are former coastguard cottages at Cuckmere Haven, one of which was featured at the end of the film Atonement, and is presently inhabited by a carpenter called Cassian Garbett, who makes extraordinarily expensive pieces of furniture from driftwood collected on the beach.

Seaford, my new home town, is only about 60 miles from London, but it's a world away. It has a proper, old-fashioned high street with a butcher's shop, a greengrocer's, a fish shop (we had some brilliant fresh squid for lunch the other day), and an old hardware store where you can buy anything from a single nail to a bag of nutty slack (erm...coal, I mean!) It also has something that I have always wanted; a number of decent pubs where you can have a sit down meal, or just relax with a pint of beer for as long as you want.

At present, we are so preoccupied with the business of sorting out the house that we haven't had time for a leisurely stroll on the beach. But spring and summer are around the corner, and once the boxes have been cleared away and the last ornament has been carefully dusted and placed upon the shelf, there will be plenty of time for such things! And, best of all, the sun, the sea and the beach are all free.

Apparently, in the 1500s, the good people of Seaford were in the habit of lighting fires to lure ships into Seaford Bay. The ships ran aground, were wrecked, and were then looted by the local populace, who were colloquially known as shags or cormorants. What's the difference between a shag and a cormorant, I hear you ask. I am certainly not going to get involved in any such vulgar discussion! At the time of writing, I haven't seen any desperate fellows wandering through the town, carrying casks of rum or baccy. But it's early days yet.

Anyway, it's way past my bedtime. We countryfolk are normally abed at sunset, but tonight I have special dispensation to stay up and chat. But all good things must come to an end. My cup of cocoa awaits, as do my nightcap and hot water bottle. Night night all!

I'm back. And to prove it, I'm here!

Greetings, dear bloggy friends.

After a not altogether untraumatic moving day (which I may tell you about when I feel a little stronger!), and a couple of weeks wrangling with BT (the phone company, to those of you elsewhere in the world who are fortunate never to have encountered this arcane and circumlocutory institution) I am, at last, back on line!

We chose, it appears, the worst time to move. Heavy snow, high winds, driving rain, mountainous seas...we've had the lot. We're still waiting for the locusts and boils, however.

I write this missive from my living room (drawing room would be pretentious, would it not?) with my late father's laptop...erm...on my lap. Do men have laps? Do Lapps (or Sami, as they are correctly termed) have laps? Two weeks away from my keyboard has neither dimmed nor dulled my sense of enquiry with regard to such matters.

To say I have missed our cosy fireside chats (incidentally, I do have a proper fireside now) would be an understatement. I have missed the humour, the banter, the erudition and the giraffes - you all know who you are! As we wade our way through the tide of boxes, my postings may be a little more sparse for a while; but rest assured I shall be reading, and commenting upon, your own commentaries upon life.

Kind regards as always,

Chris.