Martinmass And Armistice Day.

It's the feast day of Martinmass today.  Also Armistice Day when the Great War ended.

Martinmass was the Funeral day of Saint Martin of Tours.  He is the patron saint of beggars,  drunkards and the poor.  Martinmass was also the end of the gathering in of the harvest.  It was a time for feasting and celebrating during the Middle Ages to celebrate Autumn and preparing for Winter.   Martinmass beef was made from cattle fattened  and salted for this time.

Goose was traditionally ate on this day and it was also the time of the hiring  fairs for farm labourers.  Nottingham Martinmass fair used to be held for eight days.

An old Martinmass  saying:

"Ice  before Martinmass,

Enough to bear a duck.

The rest of winter, Is sure to be but muck."

Another Song About The Berlin Wall.

The old mental jukebox (Neil Peart phrase) began playing in my head today.  Yorkshire  Heavy rock band Saxon composed a song in 1988 entitled: For  Whom The Bell Tolls.  It was penned a year before the fall of the Berlin wall.  So it was incredibly prophetic.

The title is an expression from a John Donne sermon.   He said that because we are all part of mankind,  any persons death is a loss to all of us.  "Any man's death diminishes  me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bells toll; it tolls for thee".

Ernest Hemingway  wrote a book about the Spanish Civil War with the very same title.

We watched the excellent Simon Reeve BBC Americas documentary  again  last Sunday and it showed the wall between South America and the USA.   So much for the land of the free.

Here's Biff and the lads:

I saw them once play live.  A brilliant band..

More Of My Records Nostalgia.

I was looking at one of my Barclay  James  Harvest records the other day.  It's called: Berlin. A Concert  For  The People.   It's a recording of a free concert the band gave to the people of Berlin in 1982.  Apparently  there happened to be 175000 people in attendance and goodness  knows how many were listening on to'ther side of the wall.

Tomorrow is the thirtieth  anniversary  of the wall coming down.  I think the Berlin song is very apt.  Enjoy one of the finest bands to come from Lancashire.  The Beatles were another one.  Enjoy!

Car Boot Sales Thoughts.

Have you ever been to a car boot sale?  Nobody ever sells one do they?  A car boot I mean.  I used to spend every summer Sunday morning getting up at six to travel to some MONSTER car boot sale in Cheshire or North Wales.  I think the devil must have invented the car boot sale.  They must be the biggest reason for the decline of church attendances in recent years.  Not to forget people like a certain Church of England bishop doubting that God actually existed.  Which is something similar to the manager of Tesco announcing through his tannoy to a packed supermarket of shoppers:

“Don’t buy anything from us.  Go up the road to Sainsbury’s their stuff is far tastier and cheaper!”  

 Car boot sales are great places to get a bargain.  It’s also a good place to buy something that doesn’t work.  I have bought a couple of vacuum cleaners from a spiv with a decorating table in the middle of some farmer’s field. They looked the part and a  great state of the art house cleaning apparatus.  Until you get home that is.  You plug your new Hoover into the socket and end up with more sparks than a rocket launcher.     Or better still, it is like the parrot in the Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch, it is well and truly (answers on a postcard) f.....d.  Still not to worry.  You only paid twenty quid each for them ! 

Never walk round a car boot sale with small children in tow.  Pharisee car booters will have got up at the crack of dawn and placed toys on the ground just at the right height for little Billy or Jill.  So there you are looking at some interesting books and your child suddenly does it’s Mussolini impersonation:

“I want dat."

Or in other words:

" I demand this toy”. 

You then tell it not to be silly and you don’t need another action man tank.  Small child suddenly takes on its theatrical mode, that it usually plays in the supermarket at the pay point where they keep the TOFFEES! Or under the clothes in Marks and Sparks throwing it self around like a Dervish or somebody being attacked in Jaws.  

Your child goes absolutely well and truly ape shit!  You look in a wing mirror of a car boot seller’s car and see that you have just gone totally grey.  There is only one thing to do in the situation.  You hand over your beer tokens and attempt to walk through the multitudes carrying a Barbie doll, Wendy house, space hopper and a chopper bike.  Forget the gardening books.  Somebody bought them when small child went ballistic!

Those were the days!  Have you got any car boot sales stories?

Looking At Old LPs.

Regular readers will know we are serious collectors of a myriad kinds of stuff.   Be it old plates, antiques, plants (house plants or the garden variety), books, CDs and yesterday I looked at the old vinyl records we have collected over the years. 

The wife's  are typically immaculate  and pristine whilst  mine have the scratches, finger marked and dog eared album covers.  The wife's  are mainly Chris De Burgh, Evita and Super Tramp records and mine are heavy rock and a few Christian records.  Wonder what happened to my Stranglers records?
 I use to go to Evangelical churches and to Greenbelt Christian festival...?

This was in my late teens and early twenties. 
Friends moved away and I drifted gradually away from the Christian scene but I kept some of the records I collected.  They are like so many of my old books.  I will probably never read them or listen to the records but they are friends that I like to keep.

Any road or any way.  I found an old Nutshell record in our collection.  They are an English band from the seventies and eighties and l think you might like one of their tracks.  It was playing on my mental jukebox yesterday.  Then I went  over to good old You Tube and found the very track.

Does anybody remember Nutshell? Did you ever go to Greenbelt?  I went to Odell and Knebworth Greenbelt festivals.

Hope you like it?

Bunnykins Rabbits Bath Time In A Tin Bath...

Tasker was showing everybody his Peter Rabbit Christening plate on his blog yesterday.   I said we had a Royal Doulton Bunnykins plate.  Here is Mummy rabbit giving her babies a bath in a tin bath.  The plate was made in around 1936.  We have had it over twenty years.  It's got a slight chip on the edge of the plate on the back.  No doubt somebody had placed a a wire hanger on it to place it up on the wall.?   Maybe they chipped it on the tap washing it?  It's  gone through the second world war and goodness knows what else? Think we only paid a Pound for it.  They make decent money now a days. Over twenty Pounds.  But we won't  be selling it.  Have you bought any charity shop or carboot sale bargains recently?

Jerusalem In Japan.

It's  the rugby union  World Cup final tomorrow  morning.  Hope England win.  It's not rugby league, cricket or 1966, but it will still be a wonderful achievement to see England win the World Cup for a second time.  No Johnny Wilkinson to kick it to victory this time.

I hope they play my old mate William Blake's Milton composition or Jerusalem the hymn by Sir Hubert Parry.  It's far better than God Save The Queen.

The hymn mentions Jeus coming to England's  green  and pleasant land with his uncle Joseph of Arimathea.  They visited Glastonbury (the town not the music festival,  Stonehenge and Cornwall.  He also mentioned  the 'dark satanic mills'.  He must not have liked the Industrial Revolution.  Can't  say I would of either!


Any way her is another version of the great hymn:

Good luck lads!