Personal Blogs

In our little seaside town we have an annual Teddy Bear race ('Ready Teddy, Go!").

It generates intense competition. There are two rival camps: one lives up the hill above the town, the other near the beach.

Every year we hold our breath. Where will the winner be from?

Last time it was a very close run thing, won by a Shore Ted.

There's an office for budget responsibility. Seems tough to pick on these little birds.

Corporal punishment. Now there's a wacky idea.

"I've got a coleslaw on my lip."

This is a perfectly reasonable thing for a person to hear. It's the name of something. Unless you know coleslaw is the name of a different thing why would you question it? It's really close in spirit to the Lady Mondegreen.

One of our salesmen went to negotiate a contract in the Baltics. He made a mistake over the price, but it couldn't be altered, because it was set in Estonia.

I've being reading in the New Scientist about the (rather romantically named) Opposite Birds. These evolved from dinosaurs at about the same time as the ancestors of modern birds and coexisted with them for millions of years. They had feathers and must have been good fliers.

Then came the mass extinction of 65 mya. Of all the dinosaurs only modern birds survived. You might have thought that being so similar the Opposite Birds would have lived on too. Mysteriously they didn't and it's quite hard to understand why.

Here's a rather nice reconstruction of an opposite bird. If you look closely you'll see it has teeth.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shanweiniao_cooperorum.jpg

Auntie Florence was so cold and distant. We kids nicknamed her "Ice Flo". 

She was married to a giant of a man known as "Titan Nick".

How those two ever got together I just don't know.

A man and a woman:
Both in black.

Meet again after many years.
Under umbrellas:
By a grave.

They had parted not knowing
That time always has
The final word.

Her shirt was o the grass-green silk
Her mantle o the velvet fyne
At ilka tett of her horse's mane
Hang fifty siller bells and nine.

A little while back I was given a crotal bell. I'd never really thought about it before , but there are two basic bell plans.

The first is the flared, open-ended bell.

This is the type seen in church towers, handbells in Victorian school playgrounds, Liberty bells, and so on. But there's another kind, quite familiar from jester's caps, Morris dancers' legs, and kittens' collars. These are smaller bells, with crimped ends. Where a flared bell has a clapper, such "crotal" bells just have a "pea", retained within the bell but free to rattle.

Millions of these were made in medieval Europe. At first they were cast it two parts, which were then soldered together, with the pea inside. To make them look more fancy a variety of simple decoration was added, which evolved over time.

As technology advanced people saw that the bells could be cast in a single piece, open-ended, then the pea introduced and the end crimped. However to make them look and feel like "proper" bells the makers gave the bells a little equatorial girdle where the soldered joint would have been in the good old days. You can see this in the photo.

Decoration continued to change over the centuries, until about 1800, and these crotal bells are very easy to date from the stylistic features. Mine is from about the time of Shakespeare.

Why were so many crotal bells manufactured? Not of course because there were millions of jesters or Morris men. It was at least partly because where carts and horses moved about at night, in town or county, there was no lighting on vehicle or road. Bells gave audible warning of approach.

My bell isn't siller, like the one on the Queen of Elfland's horse. It's copper alloy. But it still rings with a silvery and magical sound.