There’s a new page on this blog, “Blog-to-ebook”, being a handy way to read the best of this blog as a 55,000 word ebook. Articles and posts are linked, and are collected by theme or location.
… etc. If I were to one day format it for print, I’d add various other articles of local interest, which have appeared elsewhere. Many would also be polished and expanded.
New to me, a 2018 book of new poems by Potteries poet Arthur Berry, “found among his papers”. Still available.
Standards are everywhere plummeting in what now passes for newspaper journalism, but the decline comes home when even the Financial Times doesn’t know the difference between an “antiquarian” and an “antiques dealer”.
From Boston, Michael Grasso at We Are The Mutants reviews Alan Garner’s The Voice That Thunders. Garner being the local fantasy writer of Alderley Edge, just a bit north from here and over the border from North Staffordshire. And his book being one I was unaware of, a collection of…
“sixteen essays, prepared lectures, and newspaper columns that return to the mythic themes that Garner’s more than half-century of novels explore”
It was issued back in 1997, and has been available in Kindle since 2014. The review adds…
“The collection is in effect an expressionistic autobiography”
Interesting. I dug out the contents list…
As such it seems like a shelf companion to Garner’s recent autobiography of his childhood, Where Shall We Run To, also available in Kindle ebook form.
The opening page of the 1930 Historical Pageant in Stoke-on-Trent…
EPISODE ONE
EARLY BRITONS URGED BY THEIR ARCH DRUID TO
RESIST THE OCCUPATION OF THE ROMANS
UNDER SUETONIUS PAULINUS AT
STOKE-ON-TRENT, 58 A.D.
Scene: A local moorland district with Druid grove in background.
Period: 58 A.D. [A large Roman force is marching through England intent on destroying Mona, the island of Anglesea, holy site of the Ancient Britons].
THIS scene is a tableau intended to convey the beginnings of early life amongst the inhabitants of North Staffordshire during the Roman Occupation.
Enter crowd of early Britons, men, women and children who collect around the sacrificial stone. The chant of the Druids can be heard in the distance, and they enter, led by the Arch-Druid, Druidical Priests and Bards. The Arch-Druid stands on a huge stone or boulder in front of the oak grove with the armed Britons seated and standing in from of him, and the women and children around.
ARCH-DRUID:
“Princes, Noblemen and Britons all. Dark times have overwhelmed our land. The proud legions of Rome are within our gates, sworn to make Britain a Roman province and Britons their slaves. We long ago gave freely of our art and wisdom to the tribes of Latium, to-day their offspring swarm here as locusts ravenous to devour us.
Our fathers taught the noble Greek the craft of smith and sophist, and he in turn taught Rome. The Roman heel crushed the gifted Greek and made him serf, and now the heartless horde, with their ruthless arms seek our ruin also — heedless whether by force or fraud.
It was but yesterday they despoiled fair Siluria, took her chiefs in bonds and butchered them to make a Roman holiday for their mob by their muddy Tiber. They robbed our kinsmen from the high Alps unto the sea. The flower of our manhood fell by the Rhine and Rhone, fighting the Roman whelps for right and home.
Mona [Anglesea, holy site of the Ancient Britons] itself with its holy temples, where all our tribes assemble to light the sacred fire at the birth of each new year, is in dire danger….”
There was also a sixpenny Handbook…
