This winter’s Light Night will be in January in Burslem.

Some of my pictures from previous Light Nights in Stoke-on-Trent…

I see there’s another playlist of free videos, kindly released to YouTube by Byron Machin. Peak District History 2 is in addition to the playlist I previously noted on this blog.

The new videos offer another entertaining 120 minutes or so of roving the Staffordshire Moorlands and the Peak. In this case the viewer encounters: Sywthamley & The Roaches; the fisherman Izaak Walton & Dovedale; Springtime Wildlife & Wildflowers; The Eyam Plague; Croxden Abbey; and The Normans & Robin Hood.

In the Sywthamley section Byron gives a spirited full recounting of the plot of Sir Gawain, while standing in Lud’s Church. Definitely worth a listen, but skip this long section if you don’t want plot-spoilers for Gawain. If you do listen to his recounting of the tale, note that he misleadingly implies something that’s not in the original…

19:08: “Gawain heads down into the […] gigantic chasm covered in mosses and lichens and foliage [and] looking towards the very end of the chasm he sees there — taller than life — the [spoiler removed]”.

This tweaking serves to align the tale with popular local notions about Lud’s Church. But to do this Byron’s narration of the tale here conflates, distorts and also slightly invents, compared to the original text.

One also has to be cautious about his occasional sprinklings of seasonal ‘fairy lore’, as it sounds very dubious to me. I wonder where he’s picking it up?

Filmmaker David Lowery (Pete’s Dragon, A Ghost Story) is to make a serious film of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The movie industry press report he’s signed on with respected film company A24. Some reports speculate the movie will be a revival of a former Terrence Malick (The New World) project, which was quite advanced but had to be abandoned by Malick. A full-on Arthurian Malick Green Knight would have been quite something.

But now Lowery (above) is picking it up, seemingly to make it rather than just to give an old project a brush down. Hopefully he’ll steer clear of a trendy shift into the modern day or to some post-apocalyptic setting. If his take on the movie does get into production, and is authentic, then I’d hope it might even be filmed on location in Wales and the Staffordshire Moorlands.

Hey, I might even sell a few of my new Gawain book to the production team. That’s happened before, actually. I once had an order from del Toro of 12 copies of my book on Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness, back when del Toro had a small team in early pre-production for his planned mega-movie adaptation of Mountains.

If you want to read Gawain before the movie then steer well clear of anything ‘Armitage’ and his modern hipster slang. Instead, for a readable introductory experience with the story go for the Brian Stone Penguin Classics translation of 1959. This is also available to borrow as an ebook for free, on Archive.org.

In the Stone Gazette, Campaign for R. J. Mitchell to appear on new £50 note.

Looks great. Though I’ve been a bit dubious about this ‘call to nominate’, as I suspect the final decision will be political. They may even already have someone lined up who ticks all the boxes.

Locally, our scientist can’t be Sir Oliver Lodge, great as he was — because he also wrapped himself up in a whole lot of spiritualist nonsense for decades. To use him would be interpreted by the literal-minded outrage-junkies as an endorsement of spiritualism, and journalists desperate for click-bait would then stir up a unwanted media ‘debate’ and hoo-haa about it.

But R. J. Mitchell is a strong choice. A bit too much of an engineer rather than a scientist, perhaps, in terms of what they seem to want on this £50 note. But he should certainly be put forward strongly, in the hope he might be filed away for use on future notes.

It would also be nice to see Staffordshire’s Erasmus Darwin so honoured, at some point in the future.

There are now more than 2,000 pictures on Postcards from Stoke, many newly colourised and repaired.

Byron Machin has just posted his Peak District History: A Landscape History of the Peak District series on YouTube for free, and with a playlist. At a rough calculation the total running time is about 120 minutes.

Just keep in mind that a chunk of the stated ‘Spring Customs’ lore is rather dubious, by the sound of it. But he’s fine on the geology, industrial history, botany, railway history and similar.

I’ve never heard of this one before. Music in the Five Towns 1840-1914: a study of the social influence of music in an industrial district. From Oxford University Press, no less, published in 1944. The ‘Five Towns’ being Stoke-on-Trent. Looks like there might be an opening here for someone to write a 1914-2014 sequel to the same standard and format, and then re-publish the original with the new book to form a two-volume ebook set.

New on Archive.org as a free audiobook is H. G. Wells’s book Personal Matters (1897), short essays on various personal topics from Choosing a Wife to House-Hunting to How to Stay at the Seaside.

One of these takes place in Stoke-on-Trent, and recalls his time living at Basford as a young man: “How I Died”.

In response to the “uneducated cavemen” slur on Stokies, heard about in the last few days, I went looking for a suitable image which might perhaps be adapted as a riposte. But, in the end, such leftist ignorance probably only deserves to be ignored.

But along the way I did find a fascinating subset of ‘the imaginative illustration’ type: the prehistoric visualisation of early man’s history. Many appeared more widely, it seems, than just in books. They also appeared on things like collectable cards and stamps…

There are also many such in large-format, in outstanding children’s picture books such as The Story of Man (1960).

If I could afford to be a collector of originals, rather than a curator of digital copies, I’d consider making a collection of the best of such illustrations.

Incidentally, one example shown above is of collectables given away in chocolate wrappers. People of a certain age commonly associated such cards/stickers sets with cigarette packets and Brooke Bond tea packets. But you have to wonder if modern chocolate manufactures are missing a trick, when it comes to what little collectable cards might be placed inside the wrappers of their non-kiddie products. Perhaps they might not be a set of collectables, but rather be communicative — the card could be stamped with a pre-paid postage mark, and thus encourage the good old-fashioned writing and posting of picture postcards. By having the Post Office track where the cards were sent from the company could build of a ‘heat-map’ of England showing where their most dedicated engagers are. And all without pestering their buyers in any way.

“Has the Green Man found a new haunt in the Potteries?”, a new Bill Cawley article on Stoke-on-Trent Live.

See also the Archaic Stoke-upon-Trent photo-set.