Shorter & Sons ceramic cruet set, from Stoke-on-Trent.
There were various other surreal items from which to enjoy your fish and chips from…
I wonder if there’s enough of this sort of thing out there, for the Potteries Museum to put on a “Surreal Stoke” exhibition of the best of it? Start with the strangest of the Longton Hall pottery, and hipster teapots of the 1760s, and work forward. Some of the Woods of Burslem teapots should probably be in there.
Coming in August 2020, and now pre-ordering, Pecsaetna: People of the Anglo-Saxon Peak District.
I’m definitely not one for prog rock, especially not at album length. But I couldn’t help but be intrigued by a new concept prog rock album in that style, and seemingly with a tilt toward the Peter Gabriel end of the spectrum. The concept here being the friendship between Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, with a track at the end which evokes their legacies.
The album The Bardic Depths has been getting great reviews including (apparently) a glowing one from the main prog rock magazine, so don’t be put off by the strange choice of cover art.
A lecturer at Hillsdale College in America, I see Brizer also has a new 17-lecture series online, Mythology and Western Civilization. The first part surveys “the ancient to the medieval” and the second part focuses on J.R.R. Tolkien.