@ Saturday, 12. Apr, 2008 – 10:52:41
For personal reasons, I have decided to withdraw from active blogging and will be gradually dismantling my various blogs, starting with this one.
There will be no further postings on either Mardlingham or Poppycock, although the content may be made available in another way.
@ Monday, 31. Dec, 2007 – 21:18:33
A Happy New Year and a Healthy and Prosperous 2008 to everybody! 
This blog is now discontinued - no further postings will be made.
@ Saturday, 03. Nov, 2007 – 15:14:22
About fifty-five years ago this week, a small epidemic of poliomyelitis occurred in and around Norwich, UK. As I heard it later, the physicians involved did a perfunctory investigation and could find no obvious connection between the cases, although there was talk of a bus vehicle being a possible common factor.
The polio virus is one of the most primitive lifeforms on the planet, being little more than a few molecules in an organised form. It is spread by ingestion of microscopic contaminations of fecal matter from carriers of the virus, many of whom will be asymptomatic. In places where it's endemic, it tends to be present in untreated sewage, contaminated water supplies and sometimes on surfaces infected by carriers who have not washed their hands after using the toilet.
I have no idea of how I came into contact with this virus, but some time ago, I fictionalised my subsequent experience as a short story now republished on my POPPYCOCK blog. Some of my regular readers will have seen it before in a different forum and it also appeared in a local creative writing anthology sometime towards the end of the last century - Wow! Saying it like that does make me feel old. 
@ Sunday, 28. Oct, 2007 – 16:15:55
As a young child, I thought weather just happened where you were. It came as a delightful surprise when I discovered it moved about and that what we were getting one morning could be somebody else's by the afternoon. It was the continuity that was so impressive.
For many Victorians the discovery of geology must have come as a similar revelation. And like my discovery of the working of weather, it's the continuities that count. For example, the thick layer of chalk under the Mid-Norfolk agricultural plateau is the same strata that dives down under the London blue-clay and reappears in Kent as both the North and South Downs. With this discovery, the structure of the land beneath the Victorian's feet ceased to be the mere workings of providence, and entered the realms of science.
Geological Map of Great Britain Published 1878
by A. C. RAMSAY, LLD. FRS.
DIRECTOR-GENERAL OF THE GEOLOGICAL SURVEYS OF THE UNITED KINGDOM
Map Copyright David C.Bossard ©2003
However, even with the rapid growth of the sciences, there was still room for the workings of mystical minds in the form of fossils and other, at that time, inexplicable anomalies. Boulders found at the foot of a glacier, flattened on one face and grooved by the movement of the ice, seem to be effects with an obvious cause, but the same boulder left sticking out of the ground in Norfolk, hundreds of miles from the nearest mountains, is something else. For country-folk living in an out-of-the-way place like the village in - The MARDLINGHAM Saga - it is considerably easier to believe that the Devil dropped it there, than that the land had once been covered in an ice-sheet a quarter of a mile thick.
@ Sunday, 21. Oct, 2007 – 11:22:19
Desperate as I am to find an artist/illustrator, I shall struggle on with my own efforts even though the process is proving quite painful from a creative point of view. On a more practical point, rather than buy new sketching paper, I decided to reuse the backs (and some of the fronts) of my student drawings. Most of the stuff I did then were items for submission as part of my architectural course, so mostly they're fairly specialised and of very little general interest. However, I did find a couple of things worth recycling for their curiosity value rather than just as a sort of palimpsest.
One of these, I have used above as a banner header. It was a study I did back in around 1960 of the Norman (or possibly late Saxon) font at Fincham, Norfolk, UK. This was originally at St. Michael's Church until its demolition in 1746, and is now at St. Martin's. The photo was taken around 1900 by H.J. Dukinfield-Astley and appears in his book ‘Memorials of Old Norfolk.’
Artistically speaking, when I came to do the drawings below, I was either experimenting with textures or feeling a bit dotty:
Elevations scanned from my original 1960 drawing.
I suppose in a way, you could call this a Norman Cartoon Strip, especially as originally it would have been painted in brash colours like a fairground calliope or traditionally decorated bargee's bucket. The Puritans, seem either to have restrained themselves to giving it a thick coat of whitewash, or perhaps this was done by the locals as a preservational disguise. When I did the drawing, it was just clean mellow stone. Curiously an even more cartoon-like font from Burnham Deepdale was used as a cistern in the garden of Fincham Rectory between 1807 and 1842.
Anyone care to add an amusing commentary, starting with Adam listening in the first panel - feel free to reorder the sides (or should that be ‘slides’) or even the panels.
@ Thursday, 18. Oct, 2007 – 09:58:03
It was a lovely sunny day sometime in October 1990. I was surveying the land round a chicken farm. Apart from the chickens and such of the natural wildlife as hadn't died off from the effects of agricultural spraying, the only creatures supposed to be loose on the farm were me and a farmhand doing chores in one of the poultry prisons. My atire, suitable for such a sunny day, was a smart, light cream coloured linen jacket with matching trousers.
There had been considerable rain overnight, much of which was still attempting to soak away in the corner of some low-lying pasture just beyond the three strand wire fence to my right. To my left was a large caravan used as a restroom by the farmhands. Unknown to me, under the caravan was a delusionally insane Jack Russell terrier. Of course I only realised that the dog, like many of its breed, was delusionally insane when it erupted yapping in a cloud of teeth.
The Tasmanian strain of Jack Russell Terrier."
I lept the fence in one bound - as yer dew - landing in the classic pratfall position with my seat in the mud, arms and legs spread wide and a daft expression on my face. The dog then attempted to sink its teeth in my trouser-leg, but being congenitally short-legged got stuck in the mud before it reached me. Leaping up, I abandoned both the struggling dog and the survey, then drove home in my Y-fronts with the trousers tied to the roof-rack.
When I went back to finish the survey, with a promise that the dog would be properly restrained, the meadow was covered in inkcap fungi, all with their "lawyer's wigs" all just coming into curl. It was seeing them mentioned on Usksider's blog that reminded me of this cautionary tale, that and the fact that in tomorrow's episode of The Mardlingham Saga, the miller's name is John Pratt, after an ancestor of mine who worked at Horstead watermill.
@ Tuesday, 09. Oct, 2007 – 16:10:42
Nearly half my non-blogland readers get their posting notification from Munzly and most of the rest from Mardlingham. So I try to make regular posts to both with inter-links as appropriate. Since most of the recent action has happened on the Marlingham side, you may want to use this link to catch up: - The MARDLINGHAM Saga -
This morning I uploaded a portrait of the boy Ragamuffin, with the comment that I had attempted to draw a lot of other character portraits and just got strangers. This is one of them - I'm not sure who I was trying to draw at the time, but it wasn't him:
The Clerk in the Coal Merchants perhaps?
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