Frou Frou Friday

You might want to double click this to see what made me smile when it came up on my FB feed. Hope you have a lovely weekend one and all.

Arilx

Thursday madness.

[image from Pixabay]

"You're mad, bonkers, off your head...but I'll tell you a secret, all the best people are!"

This famous quote known to many is, of course, from the pen of Lewis Carroll. This mad old bird has scheduled a post for tomorrow, but is having a mini blogging break. I've been running on near empty for a few weeks now and am in need of a brief breather. Back soonxx

Arilx

Stones

Recently Mr GBT and I attended a talk given by a local archaeologist in which he reviewed the findings in the district for 2017. There's a massive ongoing housing project here, so the archaeologists are called on site to record the area before everything is permanently erased. It had always been assumed that there was no Bronze or Iron Age occupation this far inland [evidence points to the dwellings being on the coast], but we now know this not to be the case as post holes and circular features indicating roundhouses have shown up. People have been living and farming here for millennia.

At the end the chap who'd overseen the project asked if we had any questions. I asked him simply what he considered personally to be the best find [the soil conditions are not good for preservation here]. After a moment's consideration he replied it was a stone he'd found in the spoil. It was shiny and at first he'd thought it was just a bit of broken glass. He showed it to the on site specialist who told him that it was a worked Paleolithic stone, but showed further Bronze Age workings on one side which had altered its shape yet again. He himself had found it in the Iron Age ditch and he said  the idea that a small number of people had been attracted to this one stone and then lost it, only for it to be refound later and treasured once again with that connection right back to our ancestors he found just incredible.

This exchange has put me in mind of the latest Reading Club book I've just completed.

It's a non fiction book [very short] about the author's search for inner silence in our noisy and distracting world. With a very simple format of short chapters and an easy, accessible style of writing, Erling Kagge is able to explain his ideas is a light, but informative way and it certainly gave me lots of food for thought. Having learnt about the dopamine loop I now understand why I lose so much time pointlessly twonking about on the internet if I'm not mindful of my usage. For that reason alone I've now removed Yahoo from my phone [Facebook and Messenger were taken off on an earlier cull]. I enjoyed the book and the varied anecdotes he told by way of illustration, but the one which springs to mind is the reaction of the Americans who had been holed up and isolated at their base at the South Pole for months. One Christmas somebody smuggled stones in for everybody...when you have been surrounded by ice and snow for anything up to a year and been denied the sight of something so mundane and everyday as a stone the childlike wonder of something so "simple" is reignited. I borrowed my copy from the library, but it really is worth a read if this kind of genre is your thing.

For me realising just the sheer breadth of colours and variation of shape of the stones on Clovelly beach last summer was enough for me to stop and take the photo at the top. I didn't bring one home as I reckoned the memory would be enough. People have clearly been doing this very same thing with stones over a very long time!

Arilx

Pepper

[image from Pixabay]

I suspect I might be a bit of a nightmare when I'm out with friends and loved ones...I'm that person who always stops to read notices or further investigate anything which catches my eye....if it proves its worth then I'll go even further and take a photo. Some of my best finds have come to me this way....further investigations when I'm back at GBT have led me down all sorts of unexpected avenues and provided me with all sorts of stories.

It's from this habit I learnt last summer that at one time dockers had their pockets sewn up to stop them from helping themselves to peppercorns when unloading the boats. It seems incredible that something we consider so everyday now could at one time have been so expensive. With that little nugget it would be a shame not to dig a little deeper and share a little more about these shrivelled little berries.

Pepper and the trading of it has been with us for a long time. It's been used in cooking for more than 7000 years and when the Visigoths sacked Rome back in the day they not only demanded gold and silver in ransom, but a further 3000lb of black peppercorns. In the Middle Ages a man's wealth was measured by his stockpile of pepper....incredibly it was worth more than silver in weight! It remains the most traded spice with Vietnam being the biggest producer.

It would seem it's a highly versatile product which has seen it being put to use in many different ways during history. Ramesses II had peppercorns inserted into his nostrils as part of his mummification. Here's a small selection of some of the other things you might like to try....

A teaspoon of ground black pepper added to your laundry stops colours from bleeding and fading when you wash them.

Pepper can deter ants.

Put pepper round your plants to stop pests.

It has many health benefits including being an aid alleviating tooth ache and indigestion.

Being a simple soul I just use it in cooking. My absolute favourite is grinding black pepper over fresh pineapple [others swear by strawberries]. Take it from me it's delicious!

Arilx

Pot luck

Why, you might well wonder, is the dotty old bird showing us a picture of a pot which has clearly seen better days?!! I'm delighted with my latest piece of free treasure which has been rescued from a client's garage where it was destined to be taken to the tip.

Allow me to rewind. Last week I was chatting to and admiring a smaller version of this pot which was sitting on her kitchen side. She revealed that she had a bigger version, but unfortunately it had got badly burnt on the bottom at some point and was now no longer fit for purpose. She was delighted to hand it over when I confided that I had a cunning plan.....

As of this week I've volunteered to do additional recycling sorting for Sussex Green Living. We get given a lot of plastic tops which are muddled in with other things or not suitable for the Terracycle Brigades we run. With a weird penchant for sorting and being a bit of a neat freak, this new role not only frees up others, but I can do it at my leisure and will be able to ensure that it all goes in the right waste streams rather than being sent to landfill. Some will be hived off for the Aircare programme, milk bottle tops or others with specific codes get sold onto a commercial company and the money helps a local special needs charity [TYM has done voluntary work for them] and the remainder goes to Lush.

My new pot will be the perfect storage container for the Lush tops and it's been a double luck whammy because the lid is the perfect fit for another pan which came from a bootsale years ago and turned out to be more useful than I could ever have imagined. At the moment I use a metal tray to cover it, but without a handle it burns my fingers!

Signing off one very happy womble. Repurposing in action!

Arilx

Frou Frou Friday

Once you've heard Mr Kay's alternative lyrics it's difficult to unhear them!

Hope you all have a smashing weekend!

Arilx

In my element.

As one with a fascination with and a natural affinity for the ancient sites in this country, it's been a real boon to find there is a whole series of short programmes about this very topic available on Youtube. They're quite light in style, but a good one for starters on the topic of our megalithic landscape. Hanging around on archaeological groups on social media has its pluses!

Arilx