Tag Archives: Home Guard

Plans and Plausibility

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Boiling the ingredients

Well, I did make he cauliflower soup I was planning, and it went well. The situation at the moment is that I can get a cauliflower for £1.20 or a large cauliflower for £2. You get more than twice as much cauli if you order the big one so it’s much better value, as long as you don’t mind cauli for three meals.

I have not yet got round to the pickled eggs because I can’t face the thought of peeling all the eggs. I need 12, so I will add at least three more to allow for breakages (and possibly a few more so we can have sandwiches) and it becomes a mountain of eggs to peel.

But I did settle down to do the writing plan. So far I have 93 things listed, and probably still have another 20 to do. It includes some new forms I have tried before, and makes a regular feature of magazines I have only tried a few times. Allowing for sloth and disorganisation and rejection, I can probably manage to keep up the numbers, and if I keep up the quality I can probably get the same results as this year despite the loss of a couple of magazines. At that point I ask myself why I didn’t try harder last year.

When I remember why, I despair about my memory. I was ill at the beginning of the year, and Julia was injured. Strange how easily I forget. The key is obviously to stay healthy. I was going to try that anyway, as five days in hospital is not the sort of experience I want to repeat. It’s a Burns sort of moment here – “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley, / An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, / For promised joy”

Before the addition of Stilton cheese

That sums up the pain of planning – things often go wrong. However, what is certain is that if you don’t plan you will end up with nothing but a pile of regrets. I’ve done that often enough. I wonder what I will be saying at this time next year.

Other than that I spent much of the day watching TV as I couldn’t find the enthusiasm to work while Julia was out wood turning, I then sorted out various medical things, including appointments (my blood clotting is now back on course and I am back to monthly testing) and insurance. I had been putting off the insurance. I was, as I feared, trapped in a labyrinth of customer service bots and had to give my information four times before they connected me to a human. Even then, it didn’t go well, though it is at least sorted. and I don’t need to worry about it.

Brooches from WW1 – cost 1 shilling and 6 pence in 1914.

The latest two articles on the website of the Peterborough Military History Group are a summary of military sweetheart brooches (where I noted a typo and several places where I could have written better) and one on the Home Guard training school at Osterley Park. It was quite an impressive place – set up by an ex-member of the International Brigades and associated with George Orwell. That led me to browse the International Brigades and George Orwell, then into his diaries. The bits I read are much more historic than my equivalents. He was writing during the Battle of Britain, though he still managed to discuss his income tax affairs in one entry, so even well-known diarists still have trivia in their diaries. It was a pleasant interlude, during which I discovered that James Robertson Justice (Sir Lancelot Spratt in the Doctor films), once played professional ice hockey between the wars, fought in the International Brigades and was invalided out of the Royal Navy with a shrapnel wound in 1943. And this was just the tip of the iceberg of the life of a man I always thought of as a supporting actor in comedy films. Time spent with Orwell and a network of Wiki links, is never wasted.

I am now going to send Christmas cards to my cousins. I always think I should sprinkle them with wit and good cheer, but will probably settle, as I normally do, for expressing the hope that they are staying well and will have a good 2026. I normally start thinking in November, and finally get round to it about now – close to the last posting date. Such is my life.

Badges on Mother of Pearl discs – WW! and WW2

Quite a Good Day

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I’m on Page 42 of Failed Haiku this month. I still have difficulty seeing a three line poem as a poem. It’s a senryu, by the way, slightly fewer rules than a haiku but still three lines. You can also write them in one line, but that requires more skill. This is all part of my positive thinking mode – I decided to make sure I got more haiku/senryu practice. that’s the good thing about monthly magazines – instant results. If my positive thinking had said “write sonnets” it would take three to six months for the results to filter back. Traditional poetry magazine can be a bit slow.

There would also be the problem that it would take me months to write one. I’ve only ever finished one sonnet. It took ages and it wasn’t very good, but it was14 lines and it did rhyme in all the right places. Even Shakespeare had to start somewhere.

It was a reasonable day at work – we had some decent orders on eBay, a couple of good customers in the shop and we bought a few bits and pieces. Not a spectacular day, but a much better one than we’ve been having recently. We even had some nice emails from happy customers. The owner had a family event on and needed to be home by 4.00 so we knocked off half an hour early. I sat down in the living room to read one of the new poetry magazines that had arrived (I’m researching new venues for publication) and that was how Julia found me when she returned home 45 minutes later. Well, I was in the chair, though technically I was dozing rather than reading. It was a very dull poem.

Home Guard Bomb Disposal  Arm Badge

The header picture shows the last pre-decimal halfpenny of 1967 and the new decimal one of 1968.  The tiny ½p is a fraction of the size of the pre-decimal ½d, but actually worth more.

The badge at the bottom of the post is an arm badge for the members of the Home Guard who qualified in Bomb Disposal.. It’s a far cry from Dad’s Army. During the war, 1,206 men of the Home Guard were killed on active service, most of them as a result of their work with unexploded bombs. The recipient’s daughter brought it in with some other bits and pieces as nobody in the family wanted to keep them.

Never such innocence

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Despite all my moaning and mention of boredom I’m having a reasonable time at work and, let’s face it, the money is enjoyable. After 25 years of precarious self-employment I’m just starting to relax with the idea there will always be money at the end of the month.

Here are some of the things I’ve been working on recently.

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The first one is a railway whistle – a traditional ACME Thunderer, as you can see, with the “LMS” stamp of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway. It came to us with a number of other bits, including a pair of First World War Medals, a membership card for the LDV, which was the forerunner of the Home Guard, and a nasty looking bomb or shell splinter.

Home Guard Membership Card 1940
Medals, card and shell splinter
Ouch!

The whistle disappeared in the post and we were just getting ready to reimburse the customer when, according to a note he sent today, it appeared. It’s taken a month. Such is life on eBay.

Private Mobbs served in France at the end of the war and hasn’t left much trace of his military activities, but, despite being in a reserved occupation, he was prepared to give up his nights and days off to train with the Home Guard to defend the country all over again.

The next photographs show poppies on coins. The commemoration of the Great War is becoming increasingly mawkish as time goes on, and the recent centenary celebrations have made things worse. Everybody, it now seems, is an expert on the First World War, and everybody has an opinion. I have my own opinions about many of these opinions, but I’ll keep them to myself. All I’ll say is that Blackadder Goes Forth is a comedy, but many people treat it like a documentary.

Falklands Crown 2014
Falklands Crown 2014 mounted on postal cover

 

This is a crown issued by the Falkland Islands. The Falklands are not strangers to war, with a major naval engagement there in 1914, as well as the more modern war.

UK £5 2017
UK £5 2017

 

The second is issued by the UK, the first time (2017) that the UK has issued a commemorative of this type, though other Commonwealth countries have done so.

The story of then poppy as a remembrance of the Great War is an interesting one, and although we tend to think of it as a British thing, we owe it to an American academic called Moina Michael. She took the poppy on board and popularised it, and wrote a poem of her own in response to McRae’s famous In Flanders Fields.

They are poems of their time, and are probably not quite in line with modern taste, so the poem of the day is Larkin again, with MCMXIV.

 

A day in the sun

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As we’re away for a few days I’m converting to travelogue mode for a few days.

It’s been a pleasant day today, with the sun being bright and warm as we drove through Cambridgeshire. By the time we reached Suffolk it was genuine shirt sleeve weather.

We’d started later than I intended but the A1 was relatively uncluttered and we made good progress until we passed Peterborough and took the A14. By the time we reached Huntingdon the traffic was already slow, and things really took  a turn for the worse a short while later, as the queue slowed to a crawl and several white vans flung themselves into my path in order to overtake a funeral cortège.

I hadn’t really planned where to break the journey but decided on Thetford – I haven’t been there since the late 70s/early 80s and thought, after looking it up on the web, that it merited another visit. The earlier visits, to see a friend who moved there for work, seemed to revolve around spartan pubs and grim takeaways.

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It has changed over the years,  they are building an ambitious new complex by the river, and the town generally looks brighter. Some of the pubs have been painted and a few new food types have crept in (chilli dogs and Lebanese) – but I managed to avoid the temptation to test any of them out.

It’s a struggle for small towns these days so it’s good to see some optimism and an absence of empty shops.

The charity shops have multiplied over the years, as they have everywhere, and there’s a Polish grocer and a Bureau de Change, which I’ve seen before but not in a town so small. It’s not the first time there’s been an infusion of foreign culture into Thetford. The Vikings gave the town a tough time in the 900s and 10,000 Londoners arrived from the 1950s onwards. I don’t want to offend either Scandinavians or Londoners, but I’m not sure which I’d rather have.

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Thetford has three museums, we tried to visit the Dads Army Museum but it isn’t open until next Saturday. Poor planning on my part. Jones’s lorry is exhibited in another museum in town and there is a J. Jones butcher in town – offering Walmington sausages and chilli dogs. What with one thing and another (including looking in charity shops and taking pictures of the Tom Paine statue and St Mary the Less we ran out of time.

In case you were wondering, as I did, why the Tom Paine statue is gilded, it is because Napoleon said that every city in the universe should have a golden statue of him.

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