A Sussex miscellany

People from Sussex - and, indeed, the county itself - are sometimes referred to as Silly Sussex.  But Sussex folk will usually retort that in this case, 'silly' is a corruption of 'selig', a Saxon word meaning 'blessed' or 'holy'.  Even the county name - Sussex - is based on the Saxon language and means 'the kingdom of the south Saxons'.

Both Sussex and Kent were, in days of yore, the main part of England where smuggling took place.  Brandy, tobacco, silk and all sorts of luxuries were brought across the narrow strip of water from France.  Boats would arrive at isolated beaches and the goods would be loaded onto pack horses to be carried inland to the gang's hiding place, sometimes a good many miles away.  There were numerous armed battles between the 'gentlemen' and the Revenue men.  Rudyard Kipling captured the scene well in one of his poems:

If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse's feet,
Don't go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street,
Them that ask no questions isn't told a lie.
Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by.

Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark -
Brandy for the Parson, 'Baccy for the Clerk.
Laces for a lady; letters for a spy,
Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by!

The coat of arms of East Sussex

The coat of arms of the old county of Sussex and the new (relatively speaking) counties of East Sussex and West Sussex all feature a mythological bird, the martlet.  This is a bird similar to a swallow or martin - but without feet.

Several English counties have what are regarded as "their" songs but most of these are not really about the county.  There's Ilkley Moor for Yorkshire, for example.  But Sussex has it's own song, the chorus of which is:

For we're the men from Sussex, Sussex by the Sea.
We plough and sow and reap and mow,
And useful men are we;
And when you go to Sussex, whoever you may be,
You may tell them all that we stand or fall
For Sussex by the Sea!
Oh Sussex, Sussex by the Sea!
Good old Sussex by the Sea!
You may tell them all we stand or fall
For Sussex by the Sea.

The South Downs were famous for sheep grazing and before so much was put to the plough it was not uncommon to see a huge flock of sheep watched over by a shepherd and his dog.  (The Old Bat's great grandfather was a shepherd on the Downs.)  They had their own way of counting: one-erum, two-erum, cock-erum, shu-erum, sith-erum, sath-erum, wineberry, wagtail, tarry-diddle, den.  That actually took the tally to 20 as the shepherd would count pairs.

I make it den sheep in this picture.  What do you reckon?

How would I measure up?

There has been an amalgam of things which have led me once again, as has happened on numerous occasions in the past, to ask myself, "What would I have done?  Would I have found somewhere deep inside me the sort of courage, the daring, that so many of my father's generation displayed?"

I once had the distinct honour of meeting Major Pat Reid.  Major Reid had been a prisoner of war at Colditz, where he served as the British escape officer until his own, successful escape to Switzerland in 1942.  I still have two of his books, The Colditz Story and Latter Days at Colditz.  The first tells of life in Colditz Castle and of his escape, while the latter tells of the last three years of the war at Colditz.  Both make fascinating reading and were the basis for the fictional film The Colditz Story (1955) and the BBC television series broadcast between 1972 and 1974.  We have been watching the DVD of that series lately, there being little else worth bothering with on the gogglebox.  Those DVDs form part of the amalgam.

Another part of the amalgam was reading blogs written to mark the recent Memorial Day in the USA.  We here in England don't have such a day other than Remembrance Day on the Sunday nearest to 11th November - unless it be 11th November itself.  (It just so happened that Memorial Day this year was only a very few days after an English soldier had been hacked to death in Woolwich, London.  One of the "alleged" assailants even made an impromptu speech to a passer-by's mobile phone, his hands dripping with blood.  The Help for heroes web site crashed afterwards as so many people tried to make donations.)

At about the same time, there was a memorial service to commemorate the longest battle ever fought, the Battle of the Atlantic, which lasted for almost six years.  And not long before that had been the commemoration of the dambusters' raid.

Today, of course, is the anniversary of D Day.  I have visited the invasion beaches and Pegasus Bridge as well as Arromanches where there are still the remains of a mulberry harbour and St Mere Eglise where an American paratrooper got caught on the church spire.  I very much doubt that I could have found the courage to storm those beaches or scale the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc the way they did 69 years ago.

I am so very thankful that I have never had to measure up to what my father's generation had to endure.

Today, the anniversary of D Day, each of the more than 9,000 graves in the American War Cemetery at St. Laurent will be decorated with two flags - the French Tricolor and the Stars and Stripes.

 Photo by Erin, aka lapoussine35 at http://lapoussine35.wordpress.com.

Dated trivia

Summer, we are told, officially began last Sunday.  Not that I have the foggiest idea how or when it was made official, or by whom.  Still, there you have it - summer starts on 1st June.  Not that the weather clerk is aware of the fact.  Or, if he is, he is ignoring it.  No, that's not quite the case.  The last few days have been gloriously sunny (although the weather report for Brighton in the Daily Telegraph called it partly cloudy) and temperature yesterday just around the corner from our house actually hit 21.5 degrees.  Celsius, of course, not Fahrenheit.  (And when did centigrade become celsius?  And who decreed that it should?)

Brighton Lions Club joins with the Friends of Withdean Park in organising a small fair called the Lilac Lark on the second Sunday in May, when the lilac collection in the park (previously the national collection but the council can't afford to keep it up to scratch) should be in full bloom.  It wasn't this year.  In fact, it is only now just about at its peak.

It's a bit like the rose we have not far from the kitchen window.  It's a rambler with buds that start almost orange, blooms that start off a deep peach and then slowly fade to a pale yellow.  The variety is Maigold, and there is usually at least one bloom open on my brother's birthday, the 8th May.  With luck, the first bud might be open this weekend, almost exactly four weeks later than usual.

But is summer starts on 1st June, how come Midsummer's Day is 24th June?  Does summer really last just six weeks?  Which leads me fairly well to the trivia I promised in the title.

It used to be the case that everybody knew the quarter days, the important days on which people took up new tenancies and so on.  These were Lady Day, 25th March; Midsummer's Day, 24th June; Michaelmas, 29th September; and Christmas Day, 25th December.  It was easy to remember on which day of each month the quarter day fell.  They were all in the 20s and the number of letters in the month's name was the same as the second digit of the date.  Five letters in March, so Lady Day is 25th March.  Christmas is an exception, but everybody could remember Christmas Day.

Back in the dim and distant past, the new year started on 26th March - goodness only knows why, but it did.  The problem was that the Julian calendar, even though it allowed for leap years, was still not quite accurately aligned with equinoctial times so in in the 18th century, the Gregorian calendar was adopted.  That year, the dates between 26th March and 5th April inclusive were dropped.  So it was agreed that for financial purposes the new year would henceforth start on 6th April although for all other purposes, the new year would start on1st January.  This has caused - and still causes - confusion as some dates between 1st January and 25th March could be, for example, 1752 under the old scheme but 1753 under the new.  But does it really matter?  It's just a piece of generally useless trivia these days.

Here's a picture of some of the erstwhile national lilac collection, together with a horse chestnut in flower.

My guilty secret

No, that's not right; "guilty" is the wrong word.  Perhaps "shameful" would be better, and I'm not sure that even that is the word I really want.  But whatever.

I have recently switched on the television a few minutes before the start of the programme I wanted to watch only to catch the last minute or so of a programme about people who are compulsive hoarders.  These people just seem to keep anything and everything, from newspapers to bottles, from bits of cars to . . .  well, anything at all, really.  It reminded me of the neighbours of my late mother.  He would go to car boot sales every weekend and bring back all sorts of rubbish which he stowed in cardboard boxes.  Those boxes filled the hallway so that people had to pass through sideways, lined the stairs and completely filled two of the three bedrooms.  In the front room there was a passage to one armchair (his) with a view of the television.  She had to sit in the kitchen.

And there, but for the grace of God, go I.  There, I've admitted it: I'm a hoarder.  I don't go out of my way to hoard things, but I have great difficulty in throwing away some things.  You know, that length of wood which might well come in handy one day, or the half a tin of paint which I might need to use to touch up whatever it was I used the paint on (only I've forgotten).  I put paintbrushes in jars of white spirit and then forget all about them but still don't get round to throwing them out.  And I must have hundreds if not thousands of odd screws - if only I knew where they are.

For some inexplicable reason, I never throw out a map.  OK, so maybe the reason is not quite inexplicable.  I like maps; I can spend many a happy hour with an atlas, exploring the world in my imagination.  But I really cannot see a lot of merit in still keeping a 1963 road map of France.  If it were just, say, Paris, it might be different.  After all, the streets in the centre of Paris, the part that tourists visit, are hardly likely to have altered their positions during the last 50 years, whereas new major roads, especially autoroutes (as the French call their motorways), are springing up all the time across the country.

And I have several CDs that I never play because I don't actually like the music on them.  So why do I insist on keeping them?  And all those tape cassette thingies?  I don't even have a working tape player now - unless, of course, there's one in the cupboard behind the armchair . . .

One of these days I really must take the bull by the horns and make a clean sweep of things (if you will pardon my mixing of thingummies).

Meanwhile, would anyone care to buy a pair of axle stands?  There's only a little rust on them.  Or maybe an Amstrad 1512 computer?

~~~~~

Casting my mind back to whenever, this is Ribeauville, a small town in Alsace, north-east France.

What shall I do today?

I retired a little more than 11 years ago.  (Yes, I know that makes me old.  Tell me about it.)  Shortly after that momentous day, my (also retired) next-door neighbour told me, "I give it three months.  Then you will wake up in the morning and ask yourself, 'What can I do today?  How can I fill all those hours until bedtime?'"  That was, as I said, 11 years ago and I still have never asked myself those questions.  You will have noticed, I hope, that the title of this little piece is "What shall I do today?", not "What can I do today?".

I have always felt sorry for those people who have been so involved in their working lives that they have no time for hobbies or other interests outside the job.  They are the people who, when they retire, find time dragging.  I am convinced that this is a major cause of them turning up their toes within a year or two of their retirement.

Maybe I was less dedicated to my job than some of those people but the fact remains:  I still have plenty with which to occupy myself.  Sometimes, indeed, there is just too much.  Luckily, that is not really the case today.  I finished off and sent out the June edition of the Brighton Lions' newsletter last week; I have printed out 100 menu cards for our Charter night dinner and dance this coming Saturday.  And that is a bigger job than it might sound.  Each menu card is personalised with the name of the attendee on the front and his/her choice of menu on the inside.  That's the easy bit as I use the mail merge facility in WordPerfect.  But then each card has to be fed into the printer by hand - twice, inside and outside - as the card doesn't feed properly otherwise.

So, what shall I do today?  Well, the grass could do with being mown and the wind has deposited a fair amount of rubbish in the front garden while the dustmen have been on strike.  Or I could make a start on the redesign of the back garden that I talked about quite a few days ago.  And then it has been suggested that I could update the video I made some years ago for the Lions' web site.  This was done using Photoshop Elements and even if I say so as shouldn't, it wasn't bad for only my second effort.



Or maybe I could make up a new one using photos of the South Downs and various sound effects?  Oh dear.  That's the trouble with today's world - decisions, decisions, decisions.

60 years ago today . . .

. . . a young woman was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the Union of South Africa etc etc.  This clip shows part of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations last June and illustrates the affection in which she is held.


I am so glad I was born an Englishman.

My entrance music

It started with Suldog and spread through Skip.  Both have posted clips of the music they would like to be played whenever they enter a room.  Now it's my turn.

This actually was my entrance music long, long ago.   At the time I was a member of a darts team and when we entered a room to take part in a competition, we whistled part of the Grand March from Aida, by Guiseppe Verdi.  I have watched and listened to several clips on YouTube and this is the one I like best, "our" bit starting at the 3:39 mark.