Bargain Hunting at the Antiques Centre

One day last week we had a trip to one of the large antiques warehouses in the area and I bought a few items to bring home with me.

These came from more than one stall, but there's a 78 rpm record - regular readers will know I'm partial to them - four 45 rpm E.P.s, 28 postcards and one other item that we'll have a look at later.

The 78 rpm record is one that I've coveted for quite a while. Anyone who remembers children's TV from the days of Black & White TV would recognise this straight away. And I wouldn't mind betting that the song and exact words are going through your heads at the moment!

Robin Hood, Robin Hood riding through the glen
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of men
Feared by the bad, loved by the good
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood!

The 78 records made of shellac were very brittle. They broke if dropped or sat on and in the 1950s they came to be replaced by smaller records made of vinyl. Smaller because the spiral of the groove was tighter and required a smaller stylus that even now many people call a needle.

They were very hard to break, but sadly for the collector were very easy to scratch. And it's not always apparent that they might be damaged in a small area enough to make the needle bounce out of the groove into a different part of the spiral. Unfortunate for me because despite a close look at them in the shop, they all "jump" at some point.

But just because they jump now, doesn't necessarily mean they are designated for the bin. I'll have a go at washing them first, taking care not to wet the labels. Years of dust and finger grease, not to mention lumps of sticky toffee being dropped on them, sometimes means that the damage is not a scratch but a build up of material causing a blockage inside the groove. Fingers crossed!

The postcards are a real mix. There are comic cards and picture postcards ranging from the 1910s to the 1970s. Some are from our own country and some, like this 1954 card of an erupting Mount Vesuvius in Italy, are from abroad. Some have been posted and some have been bought as a collector's item.

The other item was a late 1920s photographic album containing 117 family snaps ranging from 1930-1932. The majority are labelled across a corner in fountain pen with the year and the location.

Sadly, none of the people depicted is named and there is nothing inside the album to say whose it was. However, I imagine many of the photos will scan well and clean up and we'll take a look at them on this blog in due course! Come back for a look at some point!

The Nottiff of Sheringham

Monday 1 October 2012. We have finished journeying up and down the North Norfolk Railway and decided to have a look at what else Sheringham has to offer.

I was a touch surprised to see a pub called the Robin Hood. I didn't actually go in to see whether there was any claim to connection with the famous outlaw of Sherwood Forest, but perhaps it was a drunken mistake as per my title at the top!

The town clock has been built onto a shelter with a sign that says it was once the site of the town's water supply and possibly the stocks and pillory.

By water supply, this means a well. Few town wells were what most people would think of with a handle to winch down a bucket. They were mostly puddles some of which were defined by stone or brickwork but at which you would normally stoop to fill your bucket or whatever you had brought.

Some delivered clear water, others brackish green or brown water with a generous share of pond life. Tadpoles are easy to fish out, microscopic life forms including bacteria are not... The word "possibly" is fun as well isn't it? As in "possibly the site of the stocks and pillory... but possibly not..."

Down the main street towards the seafront, the Lobster seemed to have been in the wars. Covered with bullet holes and a shell hole, it turned out that these had been painted on in honour of a 1940s night!

At first glance though it did seem particularly appropriate that the pub was on the corner of Gun Street!

Joyful West's Seafood Bar stands on the other corner. Now I have never been a fan of seafood I'm afraid. Raised some 50 miles from the coast in Rochdale, seafood was not a family staple foodstuff in the 1950s and 60s of my childhood. Fish came from the chippy and was cod, hake or haddock and if we ate fish in a "posh" restaurant it would be plaice. Salmon came from a tin and I never even tasted tuna until I was 30. Shrimps, prawns and most definitely things like mussels, crab, lobster, oysters, squid, and scallops mostly remain (the exception is prawns) if not downright poison at least under the mental heading of probably-tastes-so-putrid-I'd-puke!

At the end of the street right on the seafront is The Two Lifeboats pub. The beach is one of those where tons of huge rocks have been spilled to protect the coastal area from the sea. Practical and comparatively cheap I suppose, but looks bloody awful. But it seems to be getting increasingly common more's the pity. Perhaps they will look ok in a few thousand years when the rocks have worn smooth by the sea?

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King Arthur's Round Table

Strange that only a week ago I mentioned King Arthur as yesterday I had an email from Switzerland, where there is to be an exhibition called King Arthur and his Knights from April through to October 2008. The exhibition is to be a joint venture between Schweizerisches Institut für Kinder- und Jugendmedien (the Swiss Institute for Children's and Youth Media) SIKJM and Museum Aargau and will be shown simultaneously in two venues: Castle Lenzburg and Castle Hallwyl in Kanton Argau, Switzerland.

The organisers wrote to me, asking to use the photograph shown here of the henge earthworks known as King Arthur's Round Table at Eamont Bridge near Penrith in Cumbria. It appears on my Stone Circles web page (using web space no longer available). I took the photograph on slide film in 1985 and over the 22 years of its existence I'm afraid it has attracted a great deal of dust and grime. Anyway I cleaned it up as best I could and sent the largest scan I could and for good measure sent some more recent photos taken in better weather which were a bit sharper.

We think of King Arthur and his knights as riding around in medieval armour, because the main stories about him were written (and the majority made up) some 600 or so years after he would have lived and they were a bit - how should I say - modernised by Geoffrey of Monmouth, to extol the virtues of 12th aristocracy. He introduced most of the characters that we associate with Arthur, including Merlin, Uther and Ygerne and even the associations with Tintagel and Avalon. A bit like historians of the future taking the film Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves as the basis for their understanding of 13th Century England...

It's Wednesday, It Must Be Nottingham...

So if I got lost in Leeds then how did I find Nottingham? Easy - it's the home of Robin Hood so just follow the arrows...!

Truth to tell there are two Premier Travel Inns labelled "City Centre" here but I did manage to find it fairly easy (only one U-turn). Apparently the X-Factor tour is here tonight so the waiter told me as I finished my meal so there's a fair number of visitors in Nottingham.

I thought Leona Lewis really deserved to win this year, she has a superb voice and a copy of her single was on my Christmas wish list last December! It will be interesting to see if Simon Cowell gives her a decent bit of publicity - he's not exactly done the last two winners proud... I've heard Shane Ward mentioned only a couple of times since his first single.

So tomorrow is another Change Management Workshop. The Leeds one was a success, though the delegates were unusually quiet - not necessarily a bad thing and perhaps caused by a fair number being from the same institution. I seemed to race through the morning's material but that gave more time to sort them into groups to prepare for the afternoon practical session. The feedback was excellent (thank you!) so as I said - not necessarily a bad thing! Thanks also to Marianne who managed all the installation of the simulation software whilst I delivered the presentation in the morning session. Tomorrow I'm back with Clive, who even now is driving up from Great Yarmouth where he's been breakdancing on the end of the pier in the light of the local lighthouse... dance a bit, the light moves on, take a break, the light comes back, dance a bit, the light moves on...