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Oh god, no, the Pencil Museum is epic! I love it! Been there so many times. (Also the attached museum shop which is also the factory shop for Derwent for anyone into art supplies). I still remember as a kid at school in the 60s/70s, everyone rushing to be the pencil monitor when the new tins of...

I miss the Rope Museum at Hawes.

Certainly summat we here could keep a weather-eye on? Although I suspect a lot of that this time - now we're a couple of years on - has been dissipated, as said upthread, into weird conspiracy theories about lizard people, space lasers, politicians drinking babies' blood, "Big Pharma" starting...

I dunno if any studies have been done on this. I know it certainly seems to have been the case in my family, though - women reading the cards (playing cards, apparently), scrying in the fire and crystal balls (according to my dad who knew them all in later life - women who'd lost sons or...

I can't remember what I thought now, but knowing me, and despite me being well up on mythology from an early age (thanks dad), I bet I thought it was a reference to Peter Pan... Which is creepy but on brand for what we now know of the BBC at that time.

IIRC, many of the "lost" words are things like certain animal and plant names. But where we don't know them, we can sometimes take an educated guess from German or maybe other Germanic languages (my favourite is "flying mouse" for "bat"). Then again, there's times where there's a word, like a...

Has a weirdly Gerald Gardner feel to it...

Yes, my only knowledge of WW1 was to do with the very precise bits of the war as they concerned my grandad (who survived) and his brother and brother in law, who didn't who were in Yorkshire regiments and in the Royal Artillery (trench mortars). Inniskilling seemed very precise and out of my...

This reminded me of when we went to a parents' evening at college for my son with atypical autism. He was doing an Art BTEC and one of his teachers said to us - seeming quite surprised - that he was good but he wasn't a "savant". To me that still had connotations of "idiot savant" and to come...

I have a similar thing with numbers. In my head, I "see" a number correctly but if I try to say it or write it down, it comes out garbled. I also used to do simple sums backwards and stuff like that. It took one teacher finally sitting down next to me and watching me do a division sum to figure...

Talking of when artistes didn't appear in person... Husband told me several years back that we had one of the best nights out of our lives one Thursday night at a local folk club in Birmingham where one of Dexy's Midnight Runners turned up and we were singing with him all night. I have zero...

Ah damn missed that - now I'm trying to think where else it might be possible to find that word. It's a big problem with Old English that we sometimes have only one incidence of a word...

It looks to be a possible word for "devil" or "demon" kind of - and I'd doubt it was coined by Wulfstan (his own name , "Wolf-stone", is a coincidence and just a standard native name). The fact he's using it to signify some sort of demon doesn't preclude it being also a more literal wolf-man...

Babies! Both of them look the picture of health (son's seizures had only just started and he hadn't yet lost his muscles, so ostensibly, to a stranger, a scan for ill health - like you might think if you looked at an older person, for example - wouldn't be likely. Baby scans would be a better bet?)

Sort of deserved...

Tell that to Alisson! https://www.liverpoolfc.com/news/first-team/434363-watch-alisson-becker-s-winning-goal-against-west-brom

The "wer-" in "werewolf" is Old English though, so it's at least 1000 years old. Out of interest, just found it in the Bosworth-Toller Anglo Saxon Dictionary (I'm such a nerd its my favourite browsing. Quote appears to be from the Canons of Wulfstan - an Archbishop of York who died 1023...

I'm re-reading Mort at the moment so am pinning my hopes on Death just greeting you and sending you on to whatever you believe in. So those who want an eternity of Cliff Richard on a cloud singing "Summer Holiday" get that. But I don't.

There are no words for how much I Iove this. Unless those words are about the pedestrianisation of Norwich.

Recently got my friend to recount her UFO experience, which she told us years ago. She's from Maine and it's very Stephen King, in a way. Just growing up somewhere slightly off the beaten track and in her childhood (so this would probably be early 1970s) falling asleep on the sofa downstairs...

My kid has an official diagnosis of atypical autism and we were just saying today how he is easily the most sociable person in our family... He does get exhausted when he gets home at night from an entire day of highly effective masking but walk through town with him, it's like you're with...

Channelling Degsy Acorah! But with added conspiracy theories. "I think you are a bunch of prats!" LOL. That'll scare the "demons". Did he do a lot of headers when he was a footballer?

I had my fortune read by a romany lady out of sheer curiosity, years ago. (I could cold read myself when I do Tarot - if I'm not getting anything, so am aware that's a thing). One thing she said really stuck. She said "You work with colour." I'm not an artist and didn't have paint (or dye) on my...

Our neighbour (we get on with her really well) casually asked husband what our Ring doorbell was capturing as she was thinking of getting one. He said it gets all of our drive, most of our front garden, and at one point, a bit of her drive. She said she might get one as well. Following week, I...

I'm avoiding asking the cards if Liverpool are gonna win the League, tbh. If I pull 3 of Swords for Jurgen Klopp, my heart will break. ETA: I've been doing an experiment, pulling a single card on an app, before games. Really should correlate all the results - card pulled v outcome of match. I...

Anyone who's met my husband might agree I married in Inanimate Object...

Was he Raptured?

Yes, I was loving Uncanny right up to the episode with the woman off whatever TV show it is they're currently promoting... If I'd been a producer, or Power That be and had heard that episode played back - I'd have trashed it and never aired it. And then was super disappointed to see they're off...

In the Vale of York, in 1833, (middle of nowhere) a Methodist woman declared she was going to be Raptured on August 1st to prove that god existed and people made it a sort of cynical, hilarious, giant picnic. A couple thousand flocked to a very small village and made it a sort of fun day trip...

So true. Same here. And I always say I "don't believe in" astrology then catch myself saying: "Oh yes, he would do that - typical Scorpio." So like it or not, on some level, I've bought into it even if I think I haven't. But numerology does seem like the ultimate in made up BS.

Yes, when we lost a load of hens to a fox (killed them all but only took one), my dad blamed himself for his crap DIY (fencebuilding) skills and the fact he'd forgot to check the little sliding door thing in the hen hut was fully shut, which allowed Reynard to get in. It's your own bad...

Don't forget Robin i'the Hood, too! (And Odin going about in disguise, wearing a hood).

Yes, lay and the actual ones, I think. Although only those who worked with the wool trade or co-ordinated it would leave some orders, to travel about. Also, differed at different times - as time went on and some orders or monasteries got less strict to the rule of St Benedict, I think, they...

I have a vague memory of them being closer to the time but maybe still decades after..?

True. And my mate was brought up catholic so monks might be the first thing to spring to mind when he saw whatever he saw. Would be a standard medieval outfit (and undyed, like a monk's, if you were poor). Country people still wore cloaks well into the 19thc too, if they were working class (did...

Anyone who thinks UK hunts are doing what they claim "trail hunting" - probably doesn't live in the countryside... They all want prosecuting like your standard person would be, under animal cruelty laws, even when they claim to "accidentally" kill a fox. Sabs are using drones now to document...

Fascinating links, thank you! I'd forgotten the bypass opened in the late 80s, which narrows down the timeframe a bit as I was first told this story somewhere round 1998 or 9. And I forget when my friend had lived in Sheffield (it was before I knew him) but it would have been a few years...

Update: Just went to check online and my old friend is still invisible. I'd dearly love to find him again and am certain I could find him if he had a overt social media presence as his name was unusual. He was adopted though and used the surname of his adoptive family at that time, so I'm...

I've always taken the view he was either a conflation of various unknown zealots or just totally fictional, tbh. The whole thing is too problematic in terms of just hard, cold textual analysis.

Ah maybe I conflated "Uncle" Merry with Zacky The Gypsy! Easily done. I did really enjoy those books.

I'm not even clicking on them!

I work with a lot of raw fleece and get asked how to go about scouring it, from time to time. Someone new to it was panicking about finding "fleas" (sic) in it and I tried to explain to them, you need to worry far more about residues from a recent sheep dip far more than you need to worry about...

I had a series of Enid Blyton Nature Books in the early 1970s, which I loved. Although they'd be well dodgy now. I seem to recall summat about "Zacky the Gypsy" who (IIRC) taught little kids about nature..? Unless that's a fever dream.

Or tripe.

It would be a bugger to nail him to the cross if he was hunchbacked, though...

I wonder if those of us more rubbish at sports and games are also more easily taken in by April Fool's jokes...

My parents kept poultry so I had the opposite experience of, when I had eggs not from our own hens for the first time, wondering why they were so tasteless. I swear different breeds' eggs tasted differently as well. My favourites were the marans' eggs...

It's so obvious 1 is the suspect.

The day we qualified as (primary) teachers, final day we ever went in to uni, they had union reps come in and one of them said "Never hug a child to comfort them even if they're hurt or upset because it could be misconstrued." and went on to say essentially, as a teacher you have to think of...

When Linda wrote: Got to admit, I don't know if she's (a) deluded or (b) being sarcastic.