A bit of history first

When I moved into my house, one of the first things I did, or, rather, thought I did, was to have my back garden gravelled.  I invited a number (at least six) of so-called specialists (oh, how naive I was) to inspect the garden and make suggestions and invited them to provide me with quotes.  I waited.  And waited.  Eventually, one of them submitted a quote for using beach pebbles across what was the lawn, and larger stones around the base of the trees.  (I had an apple tree, a pear tree and a forsythia at the time.) I had made it clear that I wanted the flower beds left as I wanted to plant something there. Despite their apparent enthusiasm when they visited, the others didn’t bother getting back to me.

Come the day, the gardener turned up, and set to work.  After a couple of hours, he called me and said,

“We’ve got a bit of a problem.  I didn’t order enough stones,” he said.

“Oh.  So what do we do?” I asked

“Well, there’s not much we can do, I’m booked for the next few weeks and can’t come back.”

I got the vibe and said,

“You haven’t left me a bed down that side, but don’t worry about it, I’ll sort it out.”

I paid him and he left.  And I did sort it out, by having a ton of loose river stones delivered to my front garden one hot, sunny day.  I had to carry the stones through the house into the back garden in a bucket (I didn’t have a wheelbarrow and it wouldn’t have fitted through the dog-leg kitchen anyway). 

I made the garden look respectable but unbeknown to me, I still didn’t have enough stone and by this time, I had fallen out of love with my garden.

Pre-Pandemic Gardening

I did plant some roses and some other perennials in my garden and even had a few abortive attempts at growing vegetables, but that was about the extent of it until a few years ago when I decided to tackle the ivy.  There is a proliferation of ivy in my street, the likes of which I have never seen before.  It grows like trees, as you can see in the picture below of the ivy in my next-door neighbour’s garden. 

It took months of hard work to get rid of it, by which time it had already started moving the concrete fence posts.  The ivy still grows in the gardens of my neighbours and tries to encroach in my garden.  I spoke to the lady who lives at the bottom of my garden and she told me I could go ahead and try to kill it – there is a very old shed in the way so she can’t get to it. 

I hate ivy.  It is one of the worst things for my hay fever, it’s invasive (as I’ve said, it’s moving my fence posts) and will grow over everything else if given the chance.  I have tried a whole host of things to kill it, including vinegar and bleach.  The trouble with ivy is that those shiny leaves mean that everything you put on it just slides off them which, in my experience, means that any weed killer that needs to be absorbed by leaves does not work.  Today, I chucked a load of salt over it, although I will have to wait for it to rain to really take effect.

Salt works by changing the osmotic pressure – basically it stops the plant being able to absorb water.  If it doesn’t work, I may have to resort to one of those nasty organo-phosphate weedkillers.  I have been trying not to use anything like that – they are apparently carcinogenic – but I may have to if I can’t kill off the ivy any other way.

And now the Pandemic

Last year, I started growing vegetables again.  Not, I admit, an unmitigated success. I harvested a few beetroot, some garlic and some potatoes, but that was about it.  I did it because at the start of Lockdown, I had trouble getting everything I wanted.  It’s a different plan for this year.  I checked the planting dates on the vegetable seeds, and I still have time, so will plant them next weekend.  Today, after I’d but down and salted the ivy, I put some mulch down.  I’m trying to mulch all the areas where I won’t be planting anything else.  Then I planted some micro-greens.  It’s all on track.  Let’s see how it all goes.

© Susan Shirley 2021

That expression, or something similar, has been attributed to both George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde and I’m not sure who actually said it first.  No matter, it’s the idea that matters. I’ve been writing for some US companies of late, so I have to ensure I use American spelling.  But it’s not just the spelling, some of the terminology is different too.  Faucets instead of taps, back yards instead of gardens, pants instead of trousers,  mom and pa…. And the spelling: colour vs colour, valor vs valour, and so on.

I don’t know why the two versions of the language have diverged so much but I do know that, depending where I am in the States they either adore my accent (Georgia, Louisiana) or they don’t understand a word I am saying (Nevada). 

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by differences in the language, we have a regional differences in the UK – I brew tea but further north, they mash it.  I take a bath (NB there is no r, it’s just a long a), but up north they take a bat-h.

Accent is quite a significant difference between the two languages.  The Americans tend to have longer vowels than we do.  My somewhat clipped vowels were what confused them in Nevada.  The main difference, and something lots of nationalities struggle with, is that we English do not roll our r’s. 

Then there are the prepositions.  I know lots of English people get this wrong (it is correct to say different from, not different to) but in the US it’s ‘different than.’  Then they say, “what are you doing on the weekend?”  On the weekend?  They mean “at the weekend,” obviously.  And then there is that whole “Monday through Friday” thing when they mean Monday to Friday.

The Americans do not understand the difference between collective and singular nouns either.  For example, it is correct to say that the government is doing all it can to help businesses during the pandemic.  However, Americans would say the government are….  Wrong, wrong, wrong.

We’re probably all used to Americans saying they’ve gotten a headache.  It’s not wrong (after all, we say forgotten) it’s just we usually tend to drop the end of it.  But they have also regularised some irregular verbs, eg leapt becomes leaped, burnt becomes burned and learnt becomes learned.  I could go on but I’ll stop with some differences vocabulary UK and American English and the translations:

© Susan Shirley 2021

What a year it’s been.  It started just like any other year and became the Year of the Pandemic.  I don’t feel bad that I didn’t see it coming, well, not too bad, anyway.  Pandemics do seem to happen roughly every 100 years, and when that was put to me in February, I was quite dismissive.  More fool me. 

There is an old Chinese curse – may you live in interesting times.  Never has that curse been more relevant.  I think that 2020 was one of the most interesting years of my life, and probably almost everyone else’s. 

I know it’s been an awful year for many people – deaths through Covid, and not being able to attend funerals of loved ones, businesses folding, redundancies.  Long Covid and the effect it is having on people.  I haven’t had to go through any of these things and for that, I count my blessings. 

But things haven’t been all bad.  We’ve seen some people do some tremendous things, as so often happens when there is any kind of adversity. 

For example, there is little Tony Hudgell, whose birth parents abused him so badly that he had to have both legs amputated.  This heroic little boy decided that he would raise £500 for the Evelina Children’s Hospital by walking 10k on his prosthetic limbs after seeing Captain Tom Moore walking.  At the time of writing, he has raised over £1m.

https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/tonys-10k-walk

Then there was Captain Tom himself.  At age 99, on 6 April, he started walking laps of his garden, intending to do 100 for his 100^th birthday, to raise money for NHS charities.  By his birthday on 30 April, he had raised over £30m. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Tom

And then there was Kevin Sinfield.  Kevin’s ex-Leeds Rhinos teammate, Rob Burrow, was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2019.  Rob wore the number 7 shirt when he played rugby so Kevin Sinfield decided he would run seven marathons in seven days in order to raise money for MND charities.  His aim was £77,777 but he raised over £2m.

https://www.runnersworld.com/uk/news/a34892131/kevin-sinfield-marathons/

All of these are wonderful examples of what people can do, and even more wonderful when you think it’s at a time when many people have lost earnings, so have less money to spare.  And then there have been those who responded to the call for volunteers put out by the Royal Voluntary Service to assist with deliveries to those unable to leave their homes, and to telephone people who need someone to talk to. 

For me personally, I started growing my vegetables again.  Not 100% successfully, but this year will be better, and I did a lot of other work in my garden, so it will look better than ever in 2021. 

I’ve taken a renewed interest in cooking, making things I would never have bothered making before because I used to eat out a lot. 

I published my first books. 

I’ve worked hard to get fitter and, in many ways, am fitter than I have been for about twenty years.  I’ve achieved a few other things too, so I can only be grateful for what I’ve done.

What does 2021 hold?

We’ve got some vaccines now, although it’s going to be sometime before we are all vaccinated – more correctly, all those of us who are willing to have the vaccine.  Will life ever get back to the way it was before?  Somehow, I don’t think it will ever be quite the same again.  People in countries where they’ve lived with SARS tend to wear face coverings as a matter of course, and I suspect that will persist here. 

It will take a very long time for us, and other countries, to recover from the cost of the pandemic, and then there is the long-term effect on young people and children, with their education and how changes in the job market will affect them.  We will all have to work hard to get things back on track.

Who knows what 2021 is going to bring?  Just let’s all hope that we can continue to work together.

© Susan Shirley 2021

In these turbulent times, it seems to me that there is a lot of intolerance, rudeness and lack of consideration for others.  It got me thinking about times gone by when there was a lack of tolerance and the often-fatal consequences.

The witch trials in Pendle, Lancashire, is just one example.  In 1612, twelve people were accused of committing murder by using witchcraft.  Ten were eventually found guilty and executed.  One died while in custody.  During these times when witches were actively sought out, about 500 were tried, so ten at once was a high percentage.

It wasn’t uncommon for people to be found guilty of witchcraft in those days, but it was unusual for so many to be tried and found guilty at the same time.  What was even more uncommon was that the trial was officially documented by the clerk of the court in The Wonderful Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster.

The Prevailing Situation in the Country at the Time

Lancashire was, at the time, considered to be a lawless county, but one where most people were still Catholic.  During his reign, King Henry VIII had dissolved the monasteries and expected his faithful subjects to convert to his new Church of England religion. 

Although anyone with any sense overtly converted, those who were staunch Catholics openly reverted when Henry’s first daughter, Mary, became queen.  This was a time of burning heretics – Queen Mary herself would sit in a building near to St Bartholomew’s Hospital to watch heretics being burned.  If you go there, you can still see the place where the burning took place.

There was a complete reversal again when Elizabeth became queen with mass being celebrated in secret in some places.  It was Elizabeth who had an act of parliament passed a law against witchcraft, although the death penalty was only to be imposed where harm had been caused. 

When James I became king on Elizabeth’s death, the country continued to be protestant, at least, that was the theory.  If you refused to attend a Church of England service and take communion, it was a criminal offence.  In 1612, every justice of the peace in Lancashire was ordered to make a list of all those who refused to attend an Anglican services.  James I also had a massive interest in witchcraft and had written a book in which he told readers to prosecute supporters and practitioners of witchcraft. 

The Witches

Six of the witches came from two families, the Demdike’s and the Chattox’s.  The matriarchs in both families were old widows:  Elizabeth Southerns was known as Old Demdike, Anne Whittle was known as Mother Chattox. 

Southerns was known to have been a witch for around 50 years.  It wasn’t unusual for those who had a good knowledge of herbs to be healers and ‘miraculously’ help people who were ill.  If they were good at it, it was a way of making a bit of money.  In fact, if they gathered the herbs etc from fields, it was pretty much all profit. 

The Story

One of the accused, Alizon Device, one of Southerns’ daughters had an altercation with a pedlar named John Law.  Some of the details are a bit hazy, but the essence of it is that Alizon asked Law for some pegs.  He refused to give them to her, so presumably she didn’t intend to pay for them, and she cursed Law. 

A short while after this happened, Law suffered a stroke, and blamed Alizon for it.  Somehow, the local justice found out about it, and when he questioned Alizon she said that she had told the Devil to harm Law.  She also accused her grandmother and members of the Chattox family of witchcraft.  Whether she did this under torture is not known.  It seems that accusing the Chattox’s was revenge for an alleged theft that had happened some years previously.  In addition, Alizon’s father, John Device, blamed Mother Chattox for an illness that subsequently led to his death.  She had threatened to harm his family if they didn’t pay for protection. 

As well as this, the deaths of some villagers that had occurred some years before were brought up and blamed on the Chattox family, as well as various other curses and illnesses, effigies and blood sucking, it all sounds exhausting.  As a result, four of them were detained pending trial.  Soon after, Alizon’s brother stole a neighbour’s sheep, the judge found out and investigated, resulting in eight more people being called for questioning and then attending trial.

The Trials

The trials were scheduled for hearing between 17 and 19 August 1612.  Elizabeth

Southerns didn’t survive the harsh prison conditions to reach trial.  The rest of the accused varied from pleading innocence at one end of the spectrum to believing in their powers and confessing their guilt.  Nine of them, including Alizon, were found guilty and hanged. 

Postscript

A funny thing happened while I was writing this….  I write my posts in Word first, have done for years.  As I was writing this, parts of the text kept disappearing…. The third para under ‘The Story.’  I closed Word, re-opened it and the same thing happened again.  It happened about four times.  As chance would have it, I received a call from the dental surgery telling me I had an emergency appointment 20 minutes hence, so I closed word again and when I got home and started typing again, all was well.  Maybe the ghost of the witches helping me to heal?

© Susan Shirley 2020

It was my birthday recently, so I went to see Big Bro and Li’l Sis down in Dorset.  

            “What do you want to do?” said Big Bro.

            “A real-life pub quiz and a Treasure Trail,” said I.

We’ve been doing Jay’s online pub quiz on Thursday nights so I thought a real life one would be fun, although with social distancing, I could see there could be a problem.  To be honest, we are not winners but it’s a bit of fun and we learn a bit along the way.  Anyway, Bro couldn’t find a physical one, so we did Jay’s.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLcSqjJWHJeDWD_SbdorBRw

The Treasure Trail, well, I participated in one a few years ago, in London.  I am hugely competitive, so when my team didn’t win, I was not happy.  I stopped short of a full, public sulk though.

https://www.treasuretrails.co.uk/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwuL_8BRCXARIsAGiC51D3yfBIsoVWKup65MKxCHuU7O4orcXlBAi8V0Y9CYW9kO4sKfe_jp8aAjlMEALw_wcB

They do these treasure trails all over the country and I was pretty sure Bro and Sis would enjoy it.  I asked them to choose the town and trail.  They chose one in Blandford.  It was a murder mystery trail.  You can go to the website, pick your trail and once you’ve paid you can print off your booklet.  There are a series of questions (I think there are 20).  To find the answers you need to walk around your chosen location.  One of the reasons I like them, and Bro and Sis liked it was because you get to go to parts of the town that you probably wouldn’t normally go to.  And we got the answer right for this one, so it was a win-win.

If I’d ever been to Blandford before, it was a long time ago, and I didn’t remember it, and the Treasure Trail was a good way to learn about the town.  Years ago, I spent a lot of time at steam fairs.  What is now the Great Dorset Steam Festival was much smaller and was held at Stourpaine in my day, is now held at Blandford.  Stourpaine is only about three miles from Blandford so the festival hasn’t moved far. 

Blandford is, for the most part, a Georgian town.  There was a fire in the early 18^th century which destroyed most of the town, so it was rebuilt in Georgian style by the Bastard brothers.  They were famous architects at the time, despite the name.  Obviously, I had to look up the origin – it’s of 11^th century origin.  William the Conqueror was also known as William the Bastard and it is believed that those sharing the name were closely associated with him.  To put the record straight, in those days, it wasn’t an insult, but the meaning was pretty much the same as it is today.

Back to Blandford.  The ‘ford’ part of the name gives a clue: it sits on the River Stour, and there has been a settlement here since Anglo Saxon times.  It had established itself as a market town by the thirteenth century.  The word Forum was added by the 16^th century – it means market in Latin.  

As well as being a market town, Blandford was well-known for very fine lacemaking, and later, wool-spinning and button making.  With the advent of the turnpike between Salisbury and Dorchester in 1756, the town’s prosperity increased as a result of travellers staying over at the newly built coaching inns. 

Like so many other towns, the livestock market ceased in the 20^th century (I used to love walking past all those little piggies in our hometown when I was a little girl.  If I was good, and quick, I was allowed to stroke them).  There are still outdoor markets in the town and indoor markets in the corn exchange. 

There are three museums in the town:  Blandford Town Museum, Blandford Fashion Museum and the Royal Signals Museum (which is actually outside the town at the military base).  That’s quite something for a town of Blandford’s size.  And it’s other claim to fame: Inspector Frederick Abberline, known for his part in the Jack the Ripper investigations, was born here. 

© Susan Shirley 2020