Hey Blog! Book review time again.

The book I am reviewing today I have possessed since I was four, and was living in Barbados (the most eastern island in the Caribbean) which is a little lump of coral not much more than a million years old. However, I went through the phase almost every child goes through growing up, and that is to be supremely interested in dinosaurs. I heard a couple of small people in a park yesterday playing a game where there was a lab and dinosaur fossils – not certain, but I expect the game was that one of the fossils had woken up! I was convinced that there had been dinosaurs on Barbados, even though the last mass extinction that killed them off was around 64 million years before the isle’s head poked above the waves, so I tried digging in the garden. I didn’t find much of interest, but I’m sure it gave me a lasting hobby and interest in dinos, and my interest in palaeontology (the study of prehistory) would eventually lead me to archaeology (the study of human history). Anyway, my big brother gave me a book for my birthday, I think it was, and this book is still with me, even though the spine has fallen off and there’s not much more than a few bits of webbing holding the front cover on! However, I take that to be a sign the book has been extensively loved.

Dinosaurs: a children’s encyclopedia is the first thick book I ever got. I still can’t know all of it, as the facts it contains span from the beginning of life, to the evolution of humans. It also discusses evolution, the construction of eukaryotes (multicellular organisms, yes, you are a eukaryote!) continental drift, the atmosphere and climate, relative size, the formation of fossils, and all that before even reaching the creature information! This information is presented in fact file format, with basic information such as when the creature lived, where it was found, what habitat it lived in, and how big it was. Then the paragraph or two of information says extra notes, and any other information from prehistory or when it had been discovered.

The book covers weird creatures from the dawn of life on earth, such as Hallucigenia, the thing with either spines or fleshy tentacles for legs, and the other for back decoration; and things like Echinoderms, the group of animals that include starfish, meaning the family that began in the Cambrian Explosion (when living things went through a huge boom in life, causing millions of fossils to appear) is still around today. It details insects, gastropods, giant dragonflies, ammonites, and all that before getting to the vertebrates. In here, the book tells of fish, such as the megatooth shark (probably the most terrifying predator of all time – it had jaws five times the size of a great white!) amphibians and reptiles, and then, in the next section, dinosaurs. All the common names, such as T Rex, Diplodocus, Velociraptor, Compsognathus, Stegosaurus, Pachycephalosaurus, and many more, as well as the less well-known ones, are in here; though seeing as we don’t yet know all species alive on Earth right now, and the dinosaurs existed for about 180 million years, it’s impossible to know all the species that existed in that time. We usually find only the bigger ones, as anything small is less easy to see, and less likely to have been preserved.

I used to have a special relationship with one of the species above – yes, I am referring to Dippy, the Diplodocus at London’s Natural History Museum (relationship not that I was engaged to a dinosaur, but I was friends with it). We had telephone calls across the Atlantic, and he once came over for a visit – I spent about a month piling up leaves in a corner of the garden ready for his visit! I don’t know how he got there; he must have either inspired the story of the Loch Ness Monster but in the middle of the ocean, or flown over on a few Quetzalocoatluses, Quetzalocoatlus being the largest known pterosaur. The former of these, the mythical monster that lives in the loch at Ness, is said to be a different type of creature, a plesiosaur/pliosaur, both water-dwelling reptiles with very sharp teeth, the main difference being plesiosaurs had extremely long necks and pliosaurs were in the same family but had shorter necks. It has been swimming around for about a thousand years, though recent developments in sonar and other systems have all failed to locate it. The latter is a type of flying reptile, with wings almost identical to bats but unrelated to bats or birds. They might have hunted like gannets, diving into the sea, or they might have been more like land-dwelling birds. I am 99% sure that discoveries of pterosaurs inspired the stereotypical western dragon, but it is more likely that a different ancient species inspired the stereotypical eastern dragon. Either way, these flying reptiles ruled the skies for a bit more than a hundred million years, before the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period drove them all extinct. WARNING: that was 65 million years ago, and some experts think we’re already overdue for the next one!

I really like the book as it is so useful for even more than dinosaurs, but all prehistoric life. Because it spans such a vast time frame, and contains so many facts, descriptions, and interpretations, it is my go-to book for anything related to this area. It’s essential to learn about evolution, and mass extinctions, so we can prevent any more of the world’s weird and wonderful life forms becoming extinct. I feel that I wouldn’t be anywhere near so knowledgeable about dinosaurs without this book, and I can pass on that knowledge to others – someone asked on a group chat I’m on the other day what species of dinosaur she thought a fossil was, so although I couldn’t give an accurate answer, my idea was the same as hers (Compsognathus)!

One of my aims is to find a large(ish) fossil one day. So far, I have a few pieces of coral, a sea urchin or two, a small piece of fossilised tree, and not much more! However, we don’t live near the sea, so it’s less likely to find much. However, I’ll still keep digging in the garden!

RARRRRRR………

Hey Blog! This post is focusing on something I started in January but have not told you about – until now!

The Wildlife Trust is an organisation dedicated to preserving and restoring our natural habitat. Part of this is the active fieldwork, going out and doing stuff for the benefit of nature. The other part is connecting with people, particularly those who are going to do the bulk of the tidying up of the planet – the ones who will inherit it! Those are the small children who can be introduced to how wonderful it is to help those we share our planet with. Therefore, the trust has set up branches for young people, which include Nature Tots (preschool age), Wildlife Watch (primary school age to first few years of secondary), and Junior Rangers (teenagers). I am a member of both the Whistlestop Wildlife Watch, which Mum runs, and the Avenue Junior Rangers, however it is the second of these I am going to talk about, because on Good Friday I went to help at a public-facing family event!

The Good Friday event was open for all families, and was set up so that people could move around the field and visit every activity. There was more than just the Junior Ranger group there, but we were the only stall run by young people. Only four members of the group came on the day, one of whom was me, one of whom accidentally cut his thumb and went home, one of whom only stayed for a few minutes at our stall, and the final one was another home-ed person who I knew once and I haven’t seen since half a million years ago (AKA a couple of years before the pandemic).

The activity we were doing with the young families was a bird feeder making activity, making apple bird feeders. These are very simple. You simply core the apple, tie a knot in a piece of string to make a hanger, then poke a stick through the middle of the apple and through the loop in the string and there you have it! (You have to take care not to ram the corer into your hand, and not to slash yourself in the thumb when you’re holding it.) You hang the feeder up in the garden, and the birds perch on the stick to eat the apple. An optional extra is to poke some black sunflower seeds in the side, with a tiny hammer, for example the Kit Bailey© Certified Willow Stick Square Lashing Hammer™, which is a totally invented device made of two bits of stick tied together in a cross shape with a simple square lashing. I created a makeshift one when the group leader said we should have a miniscule hammer, and they worked, so I made a few more.

Quite a lot of people came to the event. We barely stopped from the point when the first family came over till late in the afternoon. There were only a few times when we could take stock of what we had left in the way of materials, but we had 60 apples at the start of the day, and by about 1-2 o’clock these had all run out! We then turned to making wooden bird feeders.

We used a brace-and-bit to make these feeders. This is a manual drill device, with a metal pole bent in a trapezium shape with a drill bit at one end and a knob at the other. You turn the handle in the top part of the trapezium and it turns the pole. The pole turns the drill bit, and the drill bit drills the wood. This cuts through the wood surprisingly fast, that is if the drill bit is sharp! Making this design of bird feeder, you drill four holes in two thin disks of wood, three of them in each piece in a triangle shape, and sharpen three sticks. These you push through both disks in the triangle shape, and tap down with a mallet. You then tie a piece of string through the other two holes, and stuff the thing with a couple of fat balls (bird food). You can also use wool, for nesting material, or anything else that birds may need. One of the people who made these was only two, but she still made most of it, though I had to finish off one or two of the holes and tie the string. Her dad afterwards complemented me on how I had handled it! It was a fun day, and I would like to do more public-facing events with the Rangers in the future!

Hey Blog! This one is going back to the very thing that gave this blog its name – the Shed!

To start on a very unusual route, the Welsh Scouts have a badge called the Dragon Award. You have to camp out at least once every month of the year to get the Bronze Dragon Award, and then you can continue and get the Silver, but I’m only doing the Bronze at the moment. I have done camps in most of the autumn months and in January with Scouts, and I also camped out over into my birthday, albeit only a few miles away! I am planning to finish the award this year, so I decided to camp out on the last night of March (the only night left after the rest of the month had gone by), which meant I had to use THE SHED! This is the first time I have slept in it (though I didn’t get much sleep) but as I said to Mum and Dad when I went in, “This is what I built it for!”

There isn’t space for a bed in the shed, so I had to use the hammock, which is very useful. There is however one difficulty with sleeping in a hammock, which is that it is curved, and once you’ve been lying in it for a while it’s not comfy to have your spine bent! For this reason, I spent the few hours of sleep curled up and trying to lie sideways to flatten the hammock. There is also the problem of some of the hammock being tight, and some being loose, so you have to be careful not to fall out if your head is in one of the sags! Then you have to deal with the sleeping bag sliding along because your head’s too heavy, but despite this it was a lot of fun, and I recommend it to anyone who has a shed! I made sure I was armed in case of burglars, with my club and half-whittled wooden letter-opener lying handy!

I took my phone, the keys to the house (in case there was an emergency), and a couple of magazines out to the shed. The secret password to let my parents in if they wated to was “Bed-in-a-Shed”. I created a makeshift land-based sailboat simulator when I was learning to sail, the tiller of which I have since modified into a latch for my door, which is really useful as it can only be opened from the inside and therefore I can choose who to let in – for instance, only those who knew the password! They didn’t use it, but I did sneak back into the house in the middle of the night to fetch my branded Home-Ed-in-a-Shed water bottle as I felt I needed a drink. By morning I was up in time for the Dawn Chorus, when all the birds wake up and sing, and then went back to sleep again for about an hour (difficult with the sunlight starting up). Then I went in. I had a plan to spring an April Fool on my parents, seeing as it was April Fools’ Day, but unfortunately they were up, so I couldn’t.

By completing my March camp I have got all months except April (which I have a plan for), May, June (which I also have a plan for), July, August and December completed for my Dragon Award. Yes, that is half the year not done, but is the glass half empty or half full? It’s up to you to decide.

To all those shed owners, I totally recommend camping out. It’s worth it. I could hear the frogs in our pond croaking all night, there was a dawn chorus to listen to, and if I had been up a little earlier, I would have seen the sunrise. One of these days I may go back out there, but for now, I hope you enjoy your shed!

Hey Blog! This post is unusual, as in this one I’m going to be explaining something I have been trying to explain for more than a year on Home Ed in a Shed – what home-ed is really like!

This post is really for those who ask us every time we go out what we do if we don’t go to school. I can’t answer for everyone, as every child is different, and one of the benefits of home-ed is that learning is totally child-specific. All of the families I know do things in a different way; some follow the school holidays, some follow workbooks and never do anything else, some just let the kids chose their learning. I’m aware that like any system people have conflicting opinions on what is the middle, but I’ll say it anyway: we try to stay in the middle if we can, taking breaks over roughly the same period as schools – but one of the advantages of this kind of learning is you can go when nobody else goes on holiday when it’s cheap so we don’t follow the terms exactly; learning what would be expected by college/university age, but going in detail about whatever interests us. Mum teaches me some things, and I do online classes for others, a few I do on my own, and occasionally I do totally my own thing like whittling in my shed or writing a crazy story with my friends. This blog is one of those that I do on my own, though Mum occasionally suggests a topic to write about.

I must state here that it doesn’t have to be a mum who does the learning with the child. Though it’s only mums who do it around here, Dad occasionally helps with science when Mum’s head starts hurting or I haven’t got on in the day and she wants some time out. Dad is the one who did welding with me in the garage over lockdown, who built the Home Ed Shed with me, and who I have long and complicated conversations with in the car when going places, with subjects ranging from how freezers work to how original Alice in Wonderland is!

To come to the most commonly asked question put to home-ed families, “How do you do your exams?”, as we choose to stay out of the school system we have to pay for our own education, including exams. Unfortunately they are very expensive, and I have not done any yet, though I will be starting a one-year GCSE-level study on Environmental Management from the amazing tutor at Humanatees in June. Also, contrary to most people’s belief, we do in fact go out with other children, and don’t stay home all the time. I am lucky to be living near Belper, as there is a brilliant community of home-ed families there, which we hang out with quite often. Unlike most of my friends, I also go to so-called ‘after-school’ things, such as Scouts and cricket, though I am the only home-ed kid there. It does feel like I’m a bit different, true, but then they all go to the same school so it would be like that.

Home education is very varied, as the child can choose the subjects it learns about, though I have to do basic maths, English and science. The fact that you can learn in a home environment is comforting for many people, so it’s hardly surprising that most of the people I hang out with are neurodiverse, with ADHD and Autism being the most common. I wouldn’t be surprised if I have the former of these, though we have not checked. On the whole, I would recommend home-ed for anyone who likes things that are not covered in the school system, is interested in being their own person, and is willing to do what society doesn’t like – that is, go against the norm and be a home-educated rebel, forging your own group of friends and your own identity. Hope to see you join the group soon!

Hey Blog! This post is about two things, and one often inspires the other! Welcome to a blog full of… floral poetry? Poetic florality? Let’s just say flowers and poems!

I can’t believe it – end of March already, a quarter of the year gone! This means spring is springing; the “toad season”, when amphibians are on the move (requiring dedicated volunteers to go out and help them cross the road) is in full swing; and for the purposes of this post, the first flowers have bloomed. Snowdrops from January are nearly finished, and daffodils are at their height. Bluebells will be along in April, filling my local wood with a carpet fit for a faery queen, or for you to go and marvel at. There is nothing else in the world that does what bluebells do, but they are fragile; just treading on them can knock them back a whole year, though they can still spread though bulbs. These beautiful plants are also poisonous if eaten, so don’t let your toddler in unsupervised!

All the flowers mentioned above have all had poems written about them, but a poem written about one of them is especially famous. You might have guessed – yes, Grandad, it is Daffodils by William Wordsworth. Wordsworth, born in the 1700s, was at one point Poet Laureate – which leads on nicely to what comes next!

The current poet laureate is Simon Armitage. He is probably one of the most pressured poet laureates in history, as he has had to write poems for both Queen Elizabeth’s funeral and King Charles’s coronation, besides others! The most recent of his poems is one titled Plum tree among the Skyscrapers, and tells of the journey through history of the Plum tree (Prunus domestica), as she ‘travelled for years’ and ‘now here she is … in a city square’. For the full poem, see here. In response, I wrote my own poem, inspired by it, and I thought you might like to read it:

Hawthorn

Green-leaved boughs in summer,

To the russet fruits of autumn,

Grey-green thorns in winter,

And the white blossoms in spring,

 Fruit and thorns are one and all,

To the faery tree we sing.

.

Of ye who stand before the gate,

Are any like to thee?

In maiden white yet the thorn of light,

With lichen and soft moss of green,

Guardian of wrong and right,

Daughter of the May Queen!

.

Green-leaved boughs in summer, etc.

.

Creeper of the hedgerows,

Prickly and gnarled,

All along the field side fence

Branches old and worn,

Stunted with the weight of years,

Old when I was born.

.

Green-leaved boughs in summer, etc.

.

Blossom flourishes like snow,

In hedges old and lawns,

From beside a fieldline wall,

Drifting petals softly fall,

Circled with a crown of thorns,

Ancient Spring and Lord-of-all!

.

Green leaved boughs in summer,

To the russet fruits of autumn,

Grey-green thorns in winter,

And the white blossoms in spring,

 Fruit and thorns are one and all,

To the faery tree we sing.

I like it as it tells of past and future, and connects the two. It’s meant to be sung, but can be spoken. And of course, it’s all about the hawthorn blossoms, which are beautiful flowers. The ‘gate’ in the poem references the gate to the underworld, which the tree stood at in mythology. They have a strong connection to the faery folk, hope, and Christ’s crown of thorns was said to be made of it. Apparently, the DeLorean company got bad luck because they cut down a hawthorn tree to make room for a factory – maybe they should have made a cutting, thereby keeping it alive, and appeasing the faeries! Also, you can only cut of the wood in May, but remember, don’t kill it!

I hoped you liked this. Look out for flowers, be careful with the faeries, and read poetry. See you soon!

Hey Blog! For the second time in a row, this is another environmental issues post. This time we went to Derby Museums, for a nationwide project known as Wild Escape.

My Dad works in Derby, so we hitched a lift with him to get there. There were, however, five hours between arriving at 8 and the workshop at 1. This was the perfect time to go into the Book Café, a very nice café in Derby where there are most of the cakes you could come up with and a friendly atmosphere. We sometimes do this when we go to Derby, and it’s always fun. We had a drink each and read our books, and then I had a ‘Bakewell Blondie’ and Mum had another coffee. This meant she was absolutely buzzing while we were walking to the museum.

At the moment Derby Museums are hosting an art exhibition on the work of the 18^th century painter William Hogarth. While we waited for the other families attending the event, we popped in and had a look. There wasn’t much time, so we will probably go again, in which case it is likely to end up on this blog. However, we went down and met the member of the museum staff who was running the event, and when everyone had arrived, we started.

The first thing on the agenda was to go around the nature gallery and find your favourite animal. This could be because you had similar personalities, you looked something like them, or anything that meant you liked them. I chose the badger, as we share some personality traits and they are nice animals. Everybody chose different things, for instance someone chose a mole, another a red squirrel, another a kingfisher. We then did a poster making activity. There were four different poster subjects – badger, fox, wildcat, and hedgehog – and we had to make a poster with what we already knew and the knowledge they provided on printouts. There was one twist to this – we had to make it with only five words. Or less. I got the badger one – lucky, I know quite a lot about them and was able to include quite a bit of what I knew. If you want to know more about these stripy mammals, see last year’s ‘Badger Badger Badger’ post in which I talked about these amazing creatures in lots more detail.

Once we had made our posters, we went along to the activity room. In here there were four strips of cloth that we had the task of painting to make banners for the Wild Escape on Earth Day. This is when all the animals in the museum go out and “escape”, to remind us of the question “What would they do if they could?” Would they be able to get to their own habitat? The answer, with all the habitat loss, is probably no. However, in Derbyshire, badgers and foxes, and even hedgehogs, would almost certainly find somewhere, though probably not wildcats! But as the museum is in the city centre of Derby, the question is more “Would they be able to cross the roads safely or not before they got there?”!

When we had finished painting the banners, it was time to wrap up and go. It was certainly fun, though, and if I am free, I would like to go to the escape on Earth Day!

Hey Blog! I notice that it has been a very long time since I updated you on this story, so here it is: The Story of the Box!

The trinket seller’s vending box

The trinket seller took the box, and kept it for a long time. He stood on pavements, and alleys, and gained quite a reputation. For almost twenty years the box held trinkets, watches and knives and imitation jade ornaments and fake pearls, and two removable shelfs were made in it, to hold all these items. Most of his customers were sailors, getting things for their loved ones at home, or poor people trying for a bit of glamour when they went out to dance. In time, the box was used at his home, to put clothes in, and even afterwards, when it was used for its proper purpose again, it still smelled faintly of mothballs. His children knew it as “Dad’s chest picked up at the hotel” but it was mostly referred to as “Dad’s trunk”. When his eldest son came into the trade, the box passed to him, which was ironic as he had bashed and dented it several times when he was quite young! Many times he demonstrated the sharpness a hatchet, or clasp knife, by carving a gentle line on the lid of the box. A number of cuts were picked up this way, and in time, the board on top had to be replaced. However, this did not help the lines on the decorative edging around it. One day, he told everyone that he would sell a great quantity of items on the same day next week. He duly bought a large amount of trinkets, and sold them for a big profit. While counting the cash, he observed a man with three anchors tattooed on his arm coming fast towards him. When he reached the spot, he asked if he had anything left to sell. As the trinket seller did not, he said so, and the sailor was just turning to go, when he said:

“That your box? Fancy selling ‘er to me, three doubloons and a stick o’ baccy to go with it for ‘er?”

“Why, yes, I’ll sell, but keep your tobacco, I can do without it. The box was my father’s, to be sure, so take good care of it.”

The sailor assured him he would do so, and the box changed hands once more, on a long, long, journey that would take it many times round the world, taking with it some cuts and several scratches.

Hey Blog! Just a short one this week, partially as there is another one coming today and partially as this small post has a big topic to think about – get ready to dive into the biggest issue humanity is facing at the moment: the environment!

To start with, a few facts: There are just over 8 billion humans on the planet currently. That’s just one species. You’re probably one (unless you’re a fully independent robot, cyborg, other intelligent primate, alien, or any other proven or unproven creature – in which case, please tell some scientists!), one of 8,000,000,000 individuals. Insects, on the other hand, make up 80% of all known species on earth. An estimated two-thirds of all moth species are unknown to science, (and many other different types of animals still have entire other unknown branches of the family tree) yet the weight of all the chickens on the globe outweighs all the other bird species combined. These may sound completely unrelated, but they are all in my opinion stupid facts that should not be true. If we don’t value nature enough to give it the capacity and space that it needs to survive, it will be like what I heard on the radio today – not the “enough soup to break the universe”, but enough biomass of chickens to cause a mass extinction!

I also think that climate change is one of the, if not the most important problem we’re facing at the moment. This is because the climate is something that will last as long as the earth, and we are not. Therefore, as humans, we have a duty to put the future first, so that what comes after us will also be able to enjoy this planet. We should not be power-hungry nitwits who only care about themselves, we should be kind, sensible and considerate to all that come during and after us in the history of Earth (another fun fact – ding ding – notice I said just Earth there? NASA says we should call our planet “Earth” rather than “the Earth”: I don’t think you say “the Mars”, do you!). I myself think that there should be a Chivalric revival: it’s a pity it went out of fashion, as it told people how to behave properly, though you might think totally differently!

So, there you are, some things to think about. I would say “please send your comments in to tell me what you think”, but unfortunately, I can’t. However, you can think about them on your own, and try to prevent the earth becoming a second, rather unbeautiful Venus!

Hey Blog! Last week I turned thirteen, and on Saturday I had a party to celebrate. So that’s what this blog post is about!

Last year, I also had a small party, but we booked the woodland hut in Shining cliff woods and had a play around there. This year, we decided to have a party at home, and had been planning it since early February. Mum had found a murder mystery party game – pizza themed – and had ordered it. On Saturday, the day of the party, I was kept out of the playroom till Mum and Dad had set the room up. This involved all the junk being shoved upstairs and left in the bedrooms, where no one would see it; the tables being moved, and covered with tablecloths; and the pinboard having crazy pictures of the friends who were coming with their faces superimposed onto clipart pictures. The hallway had a supposedly dead body stick man drawn in masking tape, who was covered with the carpet until it was time for the game.

All my friends who came were in costume, and looked very good, considering that one had bought theirs that morning and most, including mine, were constructed in a hurry. I, for instance, was Michael Angelo, an artist, wearing black trousers, white vest and open pale shirt. Mayor Fiasco, the mayor, had his dad’s suit, and a (watch) chain of office. Mario Carta, the Swede-talion plumber, was in his sister’s dungarees and a red shirt turned inside out. Don Cannelloni, a lawyer-turned-crime-boss, was in a black suit and dark sunglasses, and Lolita Cannelloni his ‘daughter’ was in a white floral dress, with hair ribbons, high boots and stripy tights!

After all the guests had arrived, the ‘body’ was found under the carpet, and the suspects were questioned. With only five guests, picking any one of them meant you had a 20% chance of being right, so higher than a full game of Cluedo, which has six suspects. Next, we all went into the kitchen and received one piece of paper. If it had a cross in the corner, you were the murderer, and the number at the bottom told us the order of confessions. The detective then told us what was going on, and told us to look for the murderer. This was done by asking and answering questions, which were set, but we could choose who we asked. The answer was sometimes different depending on whether or not you were guilty, and you answered according to the truth.

Most of the guests couldn’t pronounce cannelloni, including one of the Cannellonis themselves, instead saying “insert surname here”! Two or three tried an accent at the beginning and gave up, while Mario Carta kept coming in and out of the accent. I however kept going all the way through, though it did descend into a bad Scottish accent in the middle – Lolita was threatening to hit me (I’m not sure if this was real or not – it’s hard to tell with her) if I kept on with the Italian one as no one could understand it! We had a great time, going through everything except the confessions while eating the starters, before the pizzas arrived (thank you very much Dominoes!). After dinner, in which between five people, three large pizzas were reduced to one half and a bit, the confessions were read out. I was number five and the murderer! I kept that secret well, didn’t I? (snigger). Most people thought I had been using the accent to hide the guilt but no – that is actually how bad my Italian accent is. It doesn’t help that all the guests have lived in deepest darkest Derbyshire for their whole life, whereas I am a bit of a globetrotter; you don’t get many Italians round here!

I absolutely loved the evening, and would certainly recommend it to any and all party-planners. It helps if you have two amazing parents to do furniture logistics and provide tablecloths, crazy party outfits, and a noticeboard with funny pictures, so a massive thanks to Mum and Dad – you are amazing! xx. Also, you must have really good friends to invite. And who knows what I might do next year?!

Hey Blog! This week we’re going mystical and even some undead! Welcome to a blog with vampires attached!

The supposed original vampire was the famous Count Dracula, the titular villain of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. This was a dark character, who slept in a coffin full of Transylvanian earth, drank people’s blood, forced others to drink his blood, and tried to turn people into other vampires. Horror? Dark? Gothic? Yup, all three! However, this wasn’t the first ever vampire to set foot on the world stage – vampiric tales had been going around for many years before ever this undead nobleman got into literature, but Stoker was the first one to properly lay out the rules of vampires – aversion to sunlight, shapeshifting, blood-sucking, telepathic control, terror of religiously blessed items, connection to bats, and some connection to the devil. Though vampires had curses, dark magic, and great strength, a few things – crosses, garlic, sacred bullets, maybe some mountain ash (otherwise known as Rowan, this is my wand wood; see post Wild Woods and Wands, Feb 22) and a stake through the heart, would all weaken their powers/kill them. However, this is not a book review, and instead, it’s about a play!

This play was a spoof of Dracula, by the Ambergate Players, called The Vampire Strikes Back. We went with a friend’s family, as they also wanted to come. It was in the traditional panto theme – loads of jokes, funny lines, and a totally different plotline to the original. This was all about the treasure of Vlad the Impaler – the supposed Dracula from the novel, though this has never been confirmed – and his descendants, vampires every one, and their hunt for the treasure!  Not only that, “the most powerful of them all was Count Dracula”, who wanted to find the three keys to open the treasure box. These keys alone would open the box and give Dracula the wealth he so craved. As usual in pantos, there were silly lines and jokes, e.g., rhyming lines such as mistaking “empire” or “higher” for “vampire”; or being attacked by a bat – a cricket bat! The plot was that Dracula had been terrorising the local village, attacking people with cricket bats, hypnotism, and blood loss (sucking out their blood), and the heroine Sapphi (and her “rapid vampire hamperer” weapon) was trying to confirm it was actually Dracula, so she could attack him. The interval had the best bit of the evening cake (rocky road for me) and drinks, as in all the best performances!

As for whether it all came right in the end – well, I can’t say “read the book” (I haven’t actually read Dracula, but I might one day), so Yes, it did. Thankfully at noon sunlight shone down the chimney, and the characters were able to use a mirror to reflect it back onto Dracula. But he wasn’t gone forever – as this panto was The Vampire Strikes Back, could it be Return Of The Sapphi next? (See Star Wars Titles The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi for where I got this idea from). Anyway, if the players do another next year, I will probably go!