29th October 2026

 

‘It’s magic’: scientists rediscover how to make ancient Roman colour-changing glass

Lycurgus Cup

It is indeed magic how to change the colour of glass in Roman times.  The story depicted on the wine cup "shows the triumph of the god of wine, Dionysus, over Lycurgus, who is ensnared by a vine."

The funny thing is I saw an article in, I think the New Scientist, about bees and fruit fly. The fruit fly also turns to alcohol when it can't get any sex,  the humble bumblebee has feelings as do the flies.  So every time you swat down that fly, or grumble at the little black creatures that festoon vegetable peelings  remember they have feelings.

Not finished quite yet.  I went and looked up the story of Lycurgus in the Illiad, I have I think 5 - 18th century books on it.  Found the relevant 6th book of Homer's writing, which of course is difficult to read with all the 's's turned to 'f'.  A modern version of the story

"Not even mighty Lycurgus, son of Dryas, survived his war with the gods for long. He chased the nymphs, who nursed frenzied Dionysus, through the sacred hills of Nysa, and struck by the murderous man’s ox-goad their holy wands fell from their hands."  Taken from the book though... it is difficult to understand.    But the curling vines found in the glass still wind their vines around Lycurgus.

Homer's Illiad with Alexander Pope's unravelling him..

27th October 2026

 A few photos from the 'Cloud' ;)  It is a nice thought the cloud,  photos and thoughts living for evermore up in that blue sky!

Freddie Mercury remembered

Family at a restaurant in Vevey

At the left hand, Marc sitting next to me, Jeannot, my late SIL's partner and Tom.  Tom and Ellie off tomorrow on their travels. 

 

The following photos similar to those I put on the other day.  They are sobering to look at, the clothes for a start, though of course we all put on scruffy clothes for gardening.  But it was a hard rural life working the land. 

 

Yesterday I heard that rather than the five vegetables a day, we should have half our plate full of vegetables.  Because all the stuff we put on the vegetables growing in the field has robbed them of their nutrition.

This photo strangely enough reminded me of the enormous plastic used for vegetables in Spain, which seems to stretch for miles.

I think that is Gunnera on the right side and not rhubarb

Everyone enjoying lunch

  Edit  "Statement of independence and defiance against traditional gender norms. Figures such as Emmeline Pankhurst and other activists wore trousers to assert their public presence and challenge societal expectations. This period marked the beginning of trousers being associated not only with practicality but also with women’s rights and empowerment." 

So says the internet rabbit hole.  I bet there is a whole book on women and feminism and women of course wearing trousers, upending the concept of power resting with  patriarch ;) 

25th October 2026 - King Sil

 

Halloween is just around the corner but of course today's date heralds in other changes such as the hour going back and so left me hungry for an hour this morning.  Not strictly true, there were nuts.  Tom and Ellie come today to say farewell before their six months wander round Thailand, Japan and such places. I worry but of course parents or grandparents always worry.  I can hear the storm outside ,the trees still have their leaves on.  Autumn storms, even bought down part of the old Brighton pier.

I have been reading 'Silbury Treasure' by Michael Dames.  What do I believe??? He piles the goddesses on, fertility, those enormous breasted and hipped fertility clay figurines found at Catal Huyuk and other places in the Neolithic era, he is trying to makes us understand that the shape of Silbury Hill is a pregnant woman.  Yes I don't believe him.  Stories abound round prehistoric monuments.

 Silbury Hill has King Sil and his treasure for one story.  When an excavation took place at the top of the hill, one of many during the 19th century, human bones were found and a riding bit for a horse.  So of course a story arose that a king had been buried there with his treasure.  This story can be knocked on the head easily.  You would bury a body at the lowest part of the hill and the horse bit looked suspiciously like a later 17th century one.  So perhaps someone thought it a good place to get buried. A quote from Dames.

Who put King Sil into Silbury?  We did because we wanted him there - a superman with a super treasure hoard - a man (naturally) so vain, so aggressive, so successfully acquisitive, so preoccupied with eternal fame, that he could provide us with a standard of excellence so worthy of respect.  In defeating the obscurity of death, he carries our best wishes and gives us hope.  Without such men how would we stand vis-a-vis earwigs, elms or clods of mud?

So ironic ;) 

But it is very true that many barrows were only raided and dug into for the treasure they supposedly housed in the 19th century, think of the Egyptian pyramids how they revealed the ornate burials.  True we have filled our museums with such treasures and in the end it is good for us to see past cultures. but the capitalist mind is always looking for the next haul of money.

The question I wanted answered was is there a drawing of the 'plaited grass strings' that Dean Merewether saw.  Of course there isn't, Dames had made a drawing of the barrow that sits at the centre of the hill. (No bones inside).

A clay core with flints, wattle fencing and star shaped configuration of double stranded grass strings.  Now whether that is a true interpretation I cannot say but plaited grass reminds us of weaving and of course Dames attributes that to the pregnant female.  It also reminds me of the honeysuckle rope found at Sea Henge wooden circle in Norfolk.

Thinking about 'treasure', and Sutton Hoo comes to mind, as does the Mildenhall Roman silverware Both safely in the public eye.

22nd October 2026

 

John  Atkinson Grimshaw - Stapleton Park.

Grimshaw, he even has the name for these dark miserable mornings in Yorkshire, or maybe it is Lancashire because Tod sits on the boundary?  He hasn't captured the wet shiny pavements that can often be seen in his other paintings.  The light fall of misty rain or fret as it is called down here.(and it does make you fretful!)

The photos below are taken from Dorothy Hartley's book - The Countryman's England, 1935 and is probably a perfect time capsule from the 1930s to capture a beautiful England that would soon disappear into two World Wars and forever more be changed by the relentless march of progress.  I know many people think of these times as golden, but they weren't.  Poor housing, cold and damp, limited food and illnesses still waiting for the cure that would banish them.

Somehow all this talk about warfare has brought these books to mind.  Yes Hartley wrote another book Food in England, perhaps we may need it in the future as we learn how to go back to the land and learn how to use the apples of our orchards and the vegetables from the fields.

Washing spring onions in the stream

The 1930s was a fascinating time in our history, the painters, poets and theatre actors represented their country, no silly tv programmes and constant news from all corners of the world, just a simple life style captured by the authors of that time. 

Funnily enough one of my favourite poems captures the ending of one way of life to the life we now experience (sometimes with great reluctance).  The Horses by Edwin Muir...... Make of it what you will for there is plenty of discussion as to its message.

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
"They'll molder away and be like other loam."
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads,
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

A couple of other books.

H.J.Massingham - The English Countryside. Also English Downland. Massingham wrote a famous book call Prophecy of Famine but it never happened ;)

Links

 Ian Rae  "The man known for lechery is up for treachery"  Words that make you laugh.  Such a beautiful pairing.

One green shoot at a time: the women restoring mangrove forests in the oil-ravaged Niger delta | Global development | The Guardian

Sometimes there is good news.  Just seen a woman skating down  a busy road, somewhere in America, probably New York.  She holds a banner 'Abolish ICE' behind her two ICE  men are in  hot pursuit.  But everyone is cheering her on.  Small sparks igniting people.  

How can all this mess that America has found itself in happen?  Apparently Winston Churchill said of democracy. 

"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried"

 I quite like the quote about if there is a knock on your door early in the morning, it is probably the milkman.  That is the sort of country we live in now of course, we are not fearful.

Whether you believe any of the stuff written at the moment, the thought that democracy is under threat is scary.  That it's removal is being deliberately engineered by those in power and those who are rich but hopefully it becomes manageable by the people who vote them in or out.

Rebecca Solnit has written one of her long essays  The Democracy Vs Oligarchy Show.  She seems to be in Japan out of harms way at this important time of voting but they are still protesting there.

On a lighter note, The Green Witcher's are holding a meeting tonight, it will be about foraging.  A nice easy foray into things to eat from the countryside.  Debby in America will no doubt be foraging for deer:) but here in England we just forage for the 'greens' found in nature.  All I can think of is  blackberries (season now over) bilberries and even wild raspberries.  There are the mushrooms of course but this can be a dangerous game.  I have always fancied trying the Amethyst Deceiver a pretty blue mushroom, we had been on a couple of mushroom foraging with an expert but I have never had the courage to try one.

Laccaria Amethystina.  Taken from Wikipedia

The other thing I love is crab apple jelly, it's golden translucent in the jar reflecting an amber/gold colour.

An over abundant crab apple tree

But on the whole, unless you resort to killing wild animals the British flora is rather scarce for eating purposes.

17th October 2026 Creature Comforts

Nick Park was on the radio this morning.   If you remember he and his crew produced Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run and Creature Comforts and other films.  In 1985 he had joined Aardman Animations in Bristol and their clay figures given life by human voice dubbing was to go on to win awards.

As I  lived in Bath at the time the local news station was often on and these strange little zoo creatures (Bristol has a zoo) would feature at the end of the news under 'Creature Comforts'  They were hilarious at the time.  Real human speech dubbed with animal characters.  So my offering for today.

How it is done.

Today Friday 16th October 2026

 Friday morning.  Sam our cleaner and her daughter are here.  This because she is helping her mother through the day so that they can go to a funeral this afternoon.  Sam draws my attention to the tiles round the Aga, she has cleaned the grouting and they do look better.  She must despair of us as a household not noticing things, though I shall draw people's attention to her marvellous cleaning.

Yesterday we had two lots of builders around.  One filled the holes in the basement with gravel they had dug to see where the water level was.  The other to finalise the work they will be doing next year in January and to look at the damp patch on the ceiling, which turned out of course to be leaves cluttering the top guttering.

Come the weekend and Tanaker will be here to go walking on Saturday with Andrew and then football on Sunday with Leeds playing Manchester United.  Isn't that the club in trouble?  I am glad I do not have a busy life.

Substance keeps throwing questions at me, I do believe it is a social experiment to see who we are.  It has a high note, you have to answer questions from the Roman philosophers, Cicero for instance.  I remember years back when we had a whole bookshelf  of Roman and Greek Penguin books but I don't think I read them and definitely can't quote.

Talking of experiments, my tablet has the cheek to write blogs for not only me but for others. It calls itself AI mode, which suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and definitely wasn't asked for. Can you not imagine one day in the future when people will read your blogs but it won't be YOU just some mindless computer chugging out words.  It was a great help though for North Stoke in Oxfordshire. ;) These computers will really have to size up if they can't understand the original task.  Still I know exactly how to create a Yorkshire Pudding!

Doodling

 

where to start? Well drawing two blogs together.  Today Steve Reed goes to Nottingham too listen to Owen Jones talking about his new book.  I always feel very motherly about Jones, he is so articulate and bright but he does tend to squirm around on his seat when in full flow.  In fact he has 'ants in his pants' as the saying goes.  Ants are something Jabblog has been talking about.  The saying, probably coming from America is early 20th century - 1930/1940 and of course came from really having ants in one's pants - I suppose from sitting on the grass.

I would love to see a green woodpecker once more on the lawn jabbing the grass furiously to make the ants appear from the ant's nest.

It reminds me of Tom when he was about four years old.  He had decided to make a 'tent' on a slope in the garden.  He worked busily away and finishing went and sat inside his abode. Only two minutes later to come fleeing out chased by an angry queen bee.  He had built his safe place on top of a bumblebee's nest hole.

I had my eyes tested on Monday, I now need glasses for distance, computer and reading, four pairs with my sunglasses.  Opticians have really moved forward with their equipment.  I was taken through my examination by a sweet Asian girl, sadly the young all look too young to be doing adult jobs;)

I am listening to A.S.Byatt - The Virgin in the Garden at the moment.  The story is set in 1953, the year of the Coronation of the late Queen.  On reading whether anyone had criticised it. Well they had.  Basically because of its cleverness and clever references to Shakespeare, etc.  I have never been enamoured by Shakespeare so will I be able to hear the book to the end as some say they never finished it.  It is all very 'loves lost dream', fumbling at suspenders but never going further.  A group of young people who live in that quiet, very English way, so many people want to go back to.  It is the time of D.H. Laurence's book - Lady Chatterley's Lover.  Which eventually broke the barrier of being able to be read by the public and which probably launched the 1960s.

Not to worry, but cyber attacks on fridges and freezers in French Supermarkets here? are slightly scary.

Edit.  Professor Tim Wilson, someone I listen to'  it is about the terrible tragic death of the young man who got killed by a tiger.  Trump that morally degenerate man is totally despicable in making fun of this tragedy.  The tiger will live.

Time to sleep for butterflies

 

A butterfly from a few years ago taking nourishment on a cotton wool ball.

Butterflies do not hibernate like mammals; instead, they enter a state of dormancy known as diapause. This physiological state allows them to survive cold temperatures and lack of food by reducing metabolic activity.

The butterfly above was not let out though he had woken up to bright sunny skies but it was too cold to let him out into the cold March air.  They will hide in your wardrobes, cupboards or curtains so give them a quiet place and allow them to survive.

Our first butterfly has moved into the kitchen and now takes up residence on the curtain.  Completely immobile he must live through several months of dormancy before the spring sun wakes him.  Actually I am not sure whether he is a she but whatever he is definitely a butterfly seeking the warmth.

translucent blue

I am actually rather worried about the butterflies peace here.  Will the builders start work early next year?  My daughter is already sorting her books out for the charity shops.  Andrew takes a bag every day to one of the shops, and cookery books are the latest.  Though Nigel Slater and Nigella Lawson remain.  

10th October 2026

The oldest of the old follows behind us in our thinking, and yet it comes to meet us.  Martin Heidegger

I start with a book which ordered has now arrived.:  Which has been nagging at the back of my mind for ages.  I read it years ago and was taken somewhat with Louth Gur, a lake which nestled in a sacred landscape and one of the most important prehistoric sites in Ireland.  Dames spun a story around it with Aine as the goddess who protected it.  As a sun goddess she made the grey waters of the lake sparkle.

Trees often float by in my memories, the tree up on Bath Downs with the barbed wire used as fencing tied tightly round its trunk, The wire had grown deep into the bark, of an ash tree and I was never quite sure that trees felt pain.  It was an ash that had had the wire tied round it like the Norse  Yggdrasil Tree probably the tree that Odin hung on for nine days......

Brian Bates sees the Yggdrasil Tree as representing Sleipnir, the spirit horse of Odin, a great eight legged creature that takes him down to the otherworld. Bates works his way from the word Yggdrasil, Ygg being a nickname for Odin and drasil a word for horse. Odin of course famously hung from the tree for 9 days but it was during this time, a time of spiritual quest and dreaming that the tree transformed into Sleipnir. And Bates points out that the gallows in Anglo-Saxon times were also known as "a 'horse' upon which its victim rode to death"

But to get back to Louth Gur, it has the most beautiful circular stone circle in existence, and had I read that it had been done with a pole in the centre and a rope to get the evenness of a perfect circle.  You can see the gateway on the right, an invitation into what? what happened in this circle, surely not a market but a place where the priests watched the happenings of the sun, moon and stars.

Borrowed from the Louth Gur Holiday Cottages web site.

The other thing that I had remembered, half unconsciously, was the Stone of the Tree,  Cloch A Bile which was also nearby.  You can find it on The Modern Antiquarian  a strange beast of a stone with its moss and lichen. 

Louth Gur also has a' dead hunt' at night occasionally through the skies a bit like the Cw Annwn Hunt of Halloween Night.  But the person in the Dead Hunt is the hunted quarry  selected by the spirits of the underworld and who are chased from one world to the other.

Apparently there was also a 'silent coach' which belonged to Aine and the tale is told of how Sean O'Shea, a herdsmen, was summoned by Aine to play the bagpipes at a ball she was giving, a party of good food and wine. I bet he never returned.  The coach was called Coitose Bodhar and, according to Dames, was similar to the one that carried Nerthus in Denmark, Mother Earth of Northern Europe

******************************

 Found this, a Seamus Heaney old video.  At one stage I collected his archaeological poems called 'North' from a book I found in Bath library.  The poems were so profound, imagining the prehistoric world.

It is strange how old myths build up through the stones.  Heaney whilst studying archaeology at Queen's University wrote this poetry.  He was inspired by Ted Hughes, how strange that things revolve in a circle and Hughes bleakness is somewhat captured in Heaney's writing.  I have written some of the poems down and they can be found through the blogs.

North Stoke: Kinship

North Stoke: Seamus Heaney

Life: interesting but scary.

 

This is what greets me this morning on my computer, Milan Cathedral square.  A glorious over the top elaborate wedding cake of a cathedral shining white against a blue sky.  A beautiful example of what humans can build.  Yet today we remember all the Israeli young killed on the 7th October in a brutal butchery by the Hamas group.  Andy Burnham made a statement last night here.  

Is that cathedral a pointless reminder that religion is just a waste of space in any bodies mind.  Well that is a pointless question because the answer is all around us.  And in this country, churches are slowly slipping away from religious teaching whilst other religions gather their war like forces to fight.  We seem to have made gods since time began.

Many would argue as I do myself that religion is all to do with power play.  Keeping a social order through the offices of religion, royalty and government.

 Yet I love my gods and goddesses.  Captured for eternity in Greek and Roman statues.  Conveniently silenced by the marble they are made of. Celtic gods more crudely made, but given names and their own land, cleverly merged by the Romans with their own gods.

We imagine these gods into our physical world and give them names and duties to perform.  So that the old Germanic thunder god Thor still gets mentioned 2000 years later.  They travel with us through time.

An interesting biblical quote came into my head as I wrote the above, 'am I my brother's keeper? A question asked by Cain after murdering Abel.  How much must we as humans take responsibility for the fate of the people around us?

And now for something lighter (no not really) we discussed last night what our fortnight of spare food would be like that the government is asking us to set aside.  Are we talking about WW3 here, or a very violent El Nino.  Andrew said that the amount of water needed to be kept each day for each person would be colossal.  I suggested we did have a sort of well in the basement, I think it is the ground water level, the builders had dug a hole to see what foundations these terrace houses sit on.

Apart from that we are in the middle of party conferences, the Conservatives today.  John Crace is so wicked over Kemi Badenoch, their leader that he restores my faith in the human race.  

Interesting that Zac Polanski did not vote on the Zionism is racist motion of the Green Party but was out canvassing for another Green seat, voting of which takes place tomorrow I believe.  But then 4 of the 5 Green MPs did not vote either.

Thor, the Norse God of thunder

Celtic Gods