Hey Blog! Today it’s all about a watery sport I do every week!

Swimming is an exercise, very enjoyable, useful training, and a key to higher sports such as sailing. It’s the oldest aquatic sport, though wasn’t considered a sport until very recently. Essential for all budding mariners, swimming is awesome!

What is swimming? Basically, swimming is moving through the water using your own body’s energy while in it. So doggy-paddle, front crawl, breast stroke, or any other style works – even if you’ve only just invented it! I started swimming in Barbados, which is an island in the Caribbean, so the beach is never very far away and the water is warmer – ideal conditions for wanting to swim! I apparently didn’t like putting my head under water when I first swam, but I was only three at the time.

After leaving Barbados, we lived in Ghana, west Africa, for a year, but we didn’t swim in the sea as, unlike Barbados, the sea was dirty. Swimming lessons did not continue very long, so the next time I was part of a proper swimming group was in Derbyshire, where I live now. I go to the Arc, Matlock, and am currently learning with the best teacher I have met there. If you go or have gone swimming, you’ll probably remember there are several stages in this country. I started in Swim England Stage Four, and am now in Stage Nine/Ten. This is partly because I was seven when I started here, and am now twelve, which both enhances my strength for kicking and pulling, and also means larger lungs, so I can go underwater for longer.

My favourite stroke is and was always breast stroke (the frog-kick stroke) but I have got far better in back crawl and front crawl. The latter was my least favourite stroke but is not anymore, partly because I tried out flippers (the best swimming invention EVER) and partly because I learnt butterfly (in my opinion the worst stroke ever). My bag (Details of making in post ‘The Great Bailey Sewing Bee’) shows how many awards I have done and shows my journey from shallow to deep water:

Though pool swimming is good to learn with, it’s not what I’m aiming at. Nor, probably, is the Olympics. More like going back to the Caribbean, where the journey started, and go and dive off my favourite catamaran – Cool Runnings*!

*Cool Runnings Barbados – I totaly recomend them if ever visiting the isle! Website https://www.coolrunningsbarbados.com/ .

Hey Blog! Last week I went to see a performance by a theatre company of good pedigree – the Chamberlain’s men!

Wednesday evening was interesting. We went straight out as soon as Dad came in, waiting only to pack the picnic, and drove to Chatsworth house, north of Rowsley. This is where I went to see the sculptures in July (see Splendid sculptures, super-sized breakfasts, and spectacular Chatsworth! for more on this). It was the country house of Bess of Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury, and is now in the ownership of the Dukes of Devonshire. Posh stuff. But this performance wasn’t indoors, it was outdoor theatre – apart from a bit of interactive outdoor theatre, the first I’ve ever been to! It was just getting towards dusk when we started our picnic tea – and then the play began!

What do you see when you hear the word Shakespeare? A stage full of actors, some scenery, a dagger and a basket of roses? Something like that! The Elizabethan playwright William Shakespeare wrote his plays for his company, The Chamberlain’s Men. At that time, all parts were played, or acted, by men, or boys for the female roles. The most valuable things the acting company possessed were the costumes, and the scripts, which were tailored for the players of the company, though could be played by others if they suited. Some of Shakespeare’s most famous works are the Tragedies Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet and the Comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, though he wrote Histories too. Queen ElizabethⅠpreferred The Chamberlain’s Men above all other theatre companies, and her successor JamesⅠbrought them under his patronage and they became known as The King’s Men. The modern ‘Chamberlain’s Men’ take their name from this ancient theatre company, though, unlike their predecessors, they have a website: https://tlcm.co.uk.

The play we saw was As You Like It. This is a comedy, about three rivalling sons, a banished duke, his daughter, her best friend, and the fool, with – typical for a Shakespeare comedy – a generous dollop of love. It is from this play that the famous line, “All the world’s a stage, and men and women merely players,” (© William Shakespeare, 1600s – did they have copyright back then?!) comes from, referring to the philosophy of life. It is also this play in which the song ‘It was a lover and his lass’ first appeared. There are only seven actors in the company so there was a lot of costume changing – made even harder by the fact that the main female character masquerades as a boy during it! It was a truly magical experience, with the sun setting over the house, and sitting on your own chair like people would have done when the company went on tour from the Globe, listening to Shakespeare’s words. I have had the recommendation that if you read nothing in your whole life but The Complete Works of Shakespeare you would still be an educated man, so it’s obviously worth watching Shakespeare!

I follow in his footsteps too. Shakespeare was an actor in the company he wrote for, and I am also in a drama group, though I haven’t written any plays for it yet! We’re going to do some ‘Shakespeare shorts’ in the autumn, so long as covid doesn’t stomp on our plans… I think it’s worth watching Shakespeare, the most famous playwright in the English language, and possibly the world, to learn and feel the four-hundred years between us shrink to nothing, a bridge over which we can see and hear.

Hey Blog! On Monday I visited Cresswell Crags to do an ancient form of art and survival technique I’ve wanted to do for as long as I have been interested in archaeology!

Before I go on about what I did at Creswell, I said last week that I would give you the latest news about the bronze axes this week. Well…

They both worked perfectly! The first one to be taken out was solid, as in it had no hole where it could be secured to the haft, therefore only needed a two-part mould and was easier to make. The second, a socketed axe, where the haft is in a socket in the axe head, needs a three-part mould (both outside sides and the inside) to create the hollow in the middle. This is far more tricky! But AncientCraft obviously knew what they were doing, as they both came out looking bright golden brown.

This week on Monday I went up to Cresswell Crags. This was, in the Ice Age (Lower Palaeolithic) and slightly later into the Upper Palaeolithic, an important site for hunter-gatherers of the time, who took shelter in the gorge which it is situated in. The caves are of international importance for their rock art, which includes a stag, an ibis, and many other animals, though, of course, we can’t say exactly what the artists meant by them! However, we were not going inside the caves, but staying in the visitors’ centre where AncientCraft was doing the workshop I was attending.

I suppose I had better tell you about AncientCraft. It is a business founded by Dr. James Dilley in 2009 dedicated to educating people about their prehistoric connections. They run workshops for children and adults in flint knapping and bronze casting, all over the UK. The website is https://www.ancientcraft.co.uk/ where you can find out about all that they do and buy replica finds. These are not exact copies as the flint or bronze they are made from will be different, but the techniques they are made by will be the same. Or, you could make your own – like I did!

The workshop I was doing was a children’s introduction to flint knapping, making a few bits and pieces like scrapers and blade flakes. To knap, you simply get a large chunk of flint, a nodule, and then take a stone and split it. When you have a piece that is flattish on one side and convex on the other, you turn it so the flattish face is facing up, tilt it slightly down, take a pebble (beach pebble works well) and hit the flint flake about a centimetre from the edge. You should get a small flake of flint to come off. If you want your flake to look nice and flinty, use an antler’s base to hit the very edge of the large flake. This removes a long flake which goes far into the convex side, which should remove the cortex, the white outer bit. I don’t live in an area where there are many bits of flint (in fact there are none, except for the imported garden chippings!) so I’ve never been able to knap much. However, this workshop made a change! My best piece, a scraper, is pictured below.

Flint knapping is an ancient skill developed before the first Homo Sapiens ever stood on the planet.  The oldest indirect evidence of stone tools is in Ethiopia, 3 and a half million years ago. If you’re surprised that’s earlier than humans, then welcome to the club! To put it in perspective, if the history of the universe was a 90 minute soccer match, we humans would only have been playing for a quarter of a second…! Flint tools, however, would have been on the pitch a little longer, but not much.

I think flint knapping is a truly timeless thing to do, as no one can remember its start and it is still being done. Yes, doctors occasionally use flint as it is completely sterile, and can be made sharper than surgical stainless steel can be! Not to mention the many craftsmen, re-enactment groups and experimental archaeologists who are forever whacking rocks with other rocks or antlers to make precisely worked, beautiful and extremely sharp tools, which also have a mystic, old-time feel of spiritual rocks. This feeling dates back to the age when having a few pebbles and a flint nodule, plus knowing how to use them, could save your life, and it is this feeling I think which inspired me to want to start knapping. Now I’ve done quite a bit, I want to keep going even more, and make some truly sharp, spectacular, and smashing stones!

Hey Blog! Last Saturday I went up to Bradford to take part in an event that involved a forge, sheets of fake gold leaf, a timeline spanning a Neolithic flint scraper to some pieces of pot made in the last few centuries, and Bradford industrial museum. Yep, an archaeology project all about metals!

This event was run by the CBA (Council for British Archaeology) and was for my age group, so was ideal for me to go to! It was to give people a taster session of YAC, to get people interested, and give them an experience of archaeometallurgy (archaeologist’s code for the study of metals within the branch of archaeology). I am already a YAC member (See A Dig into the World of Archaeology) so I went for the excitement and experience. We had to get up early so we could drive the 80km to Bradford, which is near Leeds, before it started at 11am.

The name of Bradford Industrial Museum tells you exactly what it is. It’s in Bradford, it’s a museum, and it’s about the industry of Bradford, one of the big Northern industrial towns, along with Leeds and Sheffield, although these were not the only ones. However, although we who took part in the workshop didn’t go around it all as part of the event, the workshop took place in the upstairs rooms. After letting our parents loose in the world being dropped off we sat down in the Horse Emporium and received the rules for the day. Then we sere sorted out into two groups to take in turns doing the two activities. We went to the top floor in a proper old-fashioned lift with two doors to get in, no glass, and railings: you could see the walls going past! We then arrived at the fifth floor where there were two rooms in which the activities were to take place.

The first activity was a timeline one. There was a table, and on it had been placed a timeline and a large group of artefacts from various different periods. There were coins, a polished stone axe head, brooches, the flint scraper, and many more, and our job was to sort them into the different periods. This activity was run by two people from the Portable Antiquities Scheme, the bit you go and talk to when you find several coins or anything made of gold or silver that’s over three hundred years old: this constitutes as a hoard or treasure. One of these people who were teaching us about identification of artefacts by period was my local finds liaison officer (not that I’ve ever contacted her in the past – I’ve never found anything of value!). I have watched every available Time Team episode (Time Team is a programme from BBC 4 which was all about archaeology, it finished nearly ten years ago but came back this year to an awesome welcome) so I have some identification techniques. I managed to identify almost all of the items I picked, and date them accurately!

After going down to lunch, which was awesome – hats off to the caterers – and watching AncientCraft setting up their mini Bronze Age forge, we went back up the five floors. I took the stairs this time! We were now doing replica gilding. Gilding is an art form all of its own, though it would probably come under metalwork. We were replicating an Anglo-Saxon brooch, though not made with metal. The way you gild is by getting a base of metal, though we used clay, and then applying size to it. Size is gilder’s speak for glue (all these professions have secret codes for normal things, don’t they?!) and therefore means getting it nice and sticky so you can put gold leaf on top of it. In history, there have mainly been two types of leaf you can gild with – gold leaf, which is the more common sort, and silver leaf, which is rarer. Gold can be beaten out so thin you can see through it, but you don’t want to see through it with gilding. After applying size, you get a sheet of the chosen metal (we were using imitation gold) and drape it over the top. Then, with a brush, you tamp it down, and put more on in any bare places. Repeat until there are no bare places left, and you have gilded your object!

The last thing in the day was to go and see AncientCraft bronze casting. They were making two bronze axes, one socketed, one hafted. I’m not sure whether he had ever done the casting in a bronze mould (the type of mould he was using), and was saying that they could both break when he took them out, which is always a possibility… I will be seeing AncientCraft again next week so be here again next week to hear the latest news!

Hey Blog! Wow, this summer is busy! It’s also had some late evenings, which is great (apart from me being too grumpy to get on with my lessons the next morning) as sometimes you see things which you don’t in the day – especially if it’s wildlife watching!

On Friday last week we went badger-watching in a local Wildlife Trust reserve. It was around 9 o’clock before the badgers came out, but we saw either two or possibly three of them! I hope they enjoyed the handfuls of peanuts that we had put out for them. On Sunday we travelled to a different reserve in anticipation of glow-worms, really insects, where the females are flightless and their abdomen glows, while the males fly around, attracted to the light. Unfortunately we didn’t have quite so good luck that time (Badgers on Friday – 2, Glow-worms on Sunday – nil)!

You may be wondering what all this has to do with a book review. Well, the link is nature, as the book I am reviewing today is Diary of a Young Naturalist, by the Young Naturalist himself, Dara McAnulty. It is quite a recent book, only published in 2020, but has already won several awards for its stand-out, beautifully worded, and passionate information. The nature activist and TV presenter Chris Packham has described it as “really, really special,” which shows you what a good book it is!

The diary, which is split into the four seasons, details a year of difficulty, hope, and of course, wonderful, magnificent wildlife! It was written in 2019 and covers Dara’s 14^th year, a year of upheaval – the McAnultys moved house, school, and natural surroundings, which made Dara feel overwhelmed by the clutter of packing boxes and new, different smells; it was also the year Dara felt his first sparks of activism for nature coming through.

The book is mainly about Dara’s encounters with the natural world. These range from travelling to Scotland to look for goshawks, to observing birds at his garden bird table. He also details a visit to Rathlin Island where he watched puffins, gannets and other seabirds, and at home he remembers finding frog spawn in the garden pond. At his new home he details time spent sitting in a hammock in the garden, where he says he can find time to think and concentrate on what his social life and ordinary life are throwing at him.

Dara writes in a unique style, described by some as “poetic prose” which demonstrates exactly how it feels – though it’s prose, it has stunning poetic imagery and texture. Most books just stop at 2D imagery, but Dara goes deeper, into 3D and then detailing what happens over time.

Dara says in the book he feels like an imposter: “Just one single act of walking out and I’ve been crowned,” he says, meaning he doesn’t feel he deserves all the praise for his championing nature. However I think that it’s that act of choosing to walk out for nature that is all too rare, which makes it even more valuable. I think he probably feels like it shouldn’t be necessary to praise the few who do this, it should be more like something everyone should be ready to do.

Dara is autistic, and so is the rest of his family apart from his dad. Dara explains that he sees the world intensely, and this provides a vibrant and extremely emotive background for the story. It seems that so many of our nature activists have that strength a feeling  – a need to preserve what we have, to keep connected to where we come from. I do not have a diagnosis of autism, but sometimes I think my brain works in a slightly different way to most people, and I can really connect to what Dara writes. I feel that same sense of, “What can we do? I am only one person, and the entirety that one person can do is inspire others to help them, until there are enough people to complete the task.” I feel a real thrill that nature is alive and there to explore. Does a tree forget its roots? No, of course not. So why should we forget our roots, our history of being part of nature? In fact, why should we think being part of nature is history? It is now! It is nature that will always be able to win through, nature that will enable us to combat the climate crisis and other problems; solving nature will be the first step in getting to a solution.

It doesn’t matter who you are – from a professor in an office block to a hermit in the arctic tundra to a boy writing a blog at his desk in Derbyshire, I think we all should be ready to read this book at some point in our lives! It lets you feel – as if you’ve suddenly stepped into the autistic, determined, and fizzing-over-the-top brain of Dara, whose life is shared through the book. It’s the kind of book you need to read, as surely as evolution will carry on through the years. A book of seeking, finding, hope, despair, and interconnectivity with nature.

If you want to find out more about Dara, go to https://daramcanulty.com, where you can find out all about him, his book, and his blog Naturalist Dara, which he did before writing the book – should I write a book too?!

Hey Blog! This week I’m going to revisit something I talked about in a very old post: Music!

If you go and have a look at my post called Focus on Music, which I did on 5^th Nov. 2021, the fourth post on this site, you will find out about how I started to play the piano and what I had been doing then, so I’m just going to update you on what I have done since. I am still learning with some of the same books as before, but instead of being at Grade 2 standard, I’m now playing at the higher Grade 3 standard (so my teacher says) and therefore I am playing more advanced pieces from the Grade 3 syllabus book for 2021 and 2022. However, I have also been learning pieces in different ways. For example, once I started by using a copy of the piece with some of the notes blanked out; this helped me to focus on learning the tempo and the hand movements between chords. Another way of learning is to write the notes out with your own notation after just watching a video and listening to the notes. It is that method by which I learnt one of the pieces I am comparing today.

The first piece is called Clowns, and is by Kabalevsky. Kabalevsky was a Russian composer born in 1902, and is famous for the Comedians suite, a bouncy, fun piece of music with a feeling exactly like that of what it was inspired by and about: Comedians! This piece is similar, but not part of the same collection. He wrote music for teaching purposes, so it seems likely this is a kind of mini version of Comedians for children to play.

The second piece, which I learned only from a video, is Ecossaise in G Major. (G Major is a scale, where you play eight notes from one key to the key of the same name an octave above, and the G because that’s the note the scale starts on.) This piece is by Ludwig van Beethoven, one of the greatest composers of all time. You’ve probably heard of him, as his third symphony (Eroica) and fifth symphonies are especially recognised. He lived from 1770 to 1827, and was famously deaf for his later life. Though you might think this made him unable to play and compose, he did, and some of his most beautiful music too!

Here are some of the comparison points I recognised between the two pieces:

Similarities:

• Both pieces are played staccato, meaning bouncy, where the marked note is short, spiky, and separated from the others.
• Both start da-da-da going from low to high pitch.
• Both pieces have a repeat of the first section at the end, this is much more pronounced in Ecossaise.
• Both pieces are played in 2|4 time, the first (2) denotes how many beats in the bar, and the second (4) is how long those beats are: in this case, a crotchet, a ¼ of a semibreve, which is a very long note.

Differences:

• Ecossaise in G Major is obviously in G major, whereas Clowns is in A Minor, but with A Major contrast.
• Clowns is at 132 beats per minute, but Ecossaise is much slower, more like one hundred!

Though I am predominantly a performer and listener, I have composed music as well. A very long time ago, before I wrote the previous post on this subject, I composed a piece called ‘The Kingfisher’; this was my first composition. The latest full piece is named ‘The Otter’ – they’re both river animals, so perhaps I should do ‘The Duck’ and ‘The Grass Snake’, put them all together and call it the ‘River Suite’! It’s unfortunate that I can’t upload videos on Home Ed In A Shed (well, it is possible – it’s just that I don’t know how!) or I would show you all the pieces mentioned, but perhaps another time.

I think music is really important. The word itself comes from the Muses, the deities of the arts and learning, and it is vital we keep this talent alive. Music brings us together, and can heal rifts in relationship, family, and friendship. So if you listen, you can always hear the sound of Music.

Hey Blog! On Wednesday I visited Chatsworth estate and saw the sculpture exhibition that is currently on in the grounds!

Both Mum and one of my best friend’s mum had their birthdays this week, so we all chose to celebrate by going out for the day. There is a very nice café, restaurant and bar all rolled into one on the A6, called Bridge House, which does the most superb food, so we decided to meet there and have breakfast. Dad had got the day off so he came along too. We drove up to the entrance to the restaurant as our friends were driving in, so no one had to wait and we all went in together. We ate outside, and one waitress even said serving us would help her with her 10,000 steps!

I chose a ‘Full English’ which is basically a lot of everything there is for a cooked breakfast. It comes on a huge plate! After breakfast, we drove separately to Rowsley, where we met to continue in convoy. It turned out there were roadworks in Rowsley, and it took us around 30 minutes to get through. However, when we came over to Chatsworth, it was relatively clear and we could really get going! I had never been in the house grounds before Wednesday, but that was even better, as it was all new for me to discover. We were coming along the driveway when we saw three of the sculptures, but after we had parked, we went to an information centre, where you could pick up a map of the sculptures. Then we set off to find them all.

I first went to Chatsworth when some other friends took us wild swimming in the river. That was the first and only time that I have ever been wild swimming in the UK – maybe because the only other place I’ve been wild swimming was in Barbados, where the water is 20°! Chatsworth was one of the seats of the sixteenth century countess Bess of Hardwick, who lived at Hardwick Hall, “more glass than wall” as it was known. Chatsworth has a giant water fountain, which we didn’t visit, but I have seen it going from the main road – it is MASSIVE, and shoots water a whopping 60 metres into the air! This year the grounds are the site of an exhibit of sculptures called Radical Horizons, and it is these we went to see.

The first sculpture we found was two bears made out of copper coins – expensive! The Mummy Bear had a Baby Bear climbing on it, and I had some fun making bear noises behind it: Rarrrrarrrrrrr! Next was Mermaid rising out of a pond, then a kind of plane-banana-jellyfish thing, and a spiral of stones which you could climb on. There also a sculpture of three moths, which looked a bit like bees and a bit like butterflies, and another of five pillars made out of gin bottles. The best one was a turning pair of wings, with a ring in the middle so you could hold on and ‘fly’ with them. We walked all the way along the river to a winged, spiked, sabre-toothed dragon-like thing, then over the road to a rust-coloured head, and after that back up to the moving winged horse.

Inside the house gardens was a group of crow statues. We each found ‘our’ statue: as they were all different, we found the one the most similar to our personality. Here is mine:

The day ended with a picnic, which we all contributed to. Actually, it was one of the best Wednesdays we’ve had together, I think!

Hey Blog! This week we’re turning the clock back even further from mediaeval history, and going back in time to the Viking period!

Last Saturday was a YAC (Young Archaeologists’ Club) day, and we were booked to go to the Viking festival near Derby, but unfortunately no one apart from us was able to make it. As the group ticket booked for YAC could not be refunded, we had the chance to invite friends, and we arranged to pick up one of my friends, and her mum, on our way there. I chose to go in Viking dress (picture at the end).

The Vikings were a group of peoples from Scandinavia, in north Europe. They were warriors, farmers, traders, raiders, settlers, seafarers, discoverers… the list just goes on and on. They lived around the end of the first millennium A.D./C.E., and roamed half around the world. They went deep into Russia (the Vikings there were known as the ‘Rus’, which is probably the source of the name) and also inhabited Iceland, Greenland, and even got to America, albeit only reaching to the very eastern edge, and became the first Europeans to do it – you lose, Columbus!

The Vikings also conquered half of England, the half that became known as the Danelaw. At this time, England was split into Saxon kingdoms, the most famous being Wessex, as that was the one over which Alfred the Great reigned. It was Alfred, in fact, that arranged the Treaty of Wedmore and Chippenham between the English and the Danes. Mercia, just to the north, was split in half when the Danelaw came into force, with Vikings controlling down to Derby and Repton, its Viking capital. As I live in the Danish half of Mercia, I have an extra period in the ground that I can dig up! Later, their descendants conquered the whole of England at the Battle of Hastings, where the Normans won. Can you see the Viking root of Nor-mans? Yes, the Norman William the Conqueror was a descendant of the North-men, some of the Vikings who invaded France. It’s said that the leader of another hoard of North-men took a small bar of silver from the city gates of Paris as a souvenir!

Entry to the festival involved a long off-road drive along a dirt track, but it was worth it, and super fun! There was a small pond, which they were floating boats on. Unfortunately, we didn’t go on the boats, but I probably could have sailed them with a few more deck hands (see Ahoy There for more information)! Then there was a battle ground, an arena for fighting, and rows upon rows of tents – I don’t think the camp of the Great Heathen Army (865) could have looked more Viking! The only difference was the unauthentic portaloos, which prevented the more traditional stinking pit of a camp, with only a few cesspits! About half of the tents were re-enactment tents, with people doing old crafts and showing how they would have lived in the Viking times.  The other half were traders’ tents. These were all full of interesting things, one, for example was a metalworkers’ tent; other tents held cloth and clothing; more had trinkets, bracelets, necklaces; some food; another leather; one furniture; then yet more covering several of these things. I bought a pewter pin in the shape of a sword, which completed the Viking outfit perfectly!

At the end, we bought ice creams, and went to see the battle. It was rather fun, but I wouldn’t like to take part – the commentator said re-enacting old battles was about half as dangerous as rugby! However, watching it was incredibly exiting and rounded off a perfect day!

Hey Blog! Last Sunday I went up to the village of Bolsover to visit the castle, and witness the knight’s tournament just outside!

Bolsover Castle is an English Heritage site. The castle you can see today is 16^th Century, built by the Cavendish family just before the English Civil War, so if you were hoping for an ancient mediaeval fortress you aren’t quite right. More like elaborate tapestry hangings, painted ceilings, and a dressage arena – the same man who built the house also invented this horse display skill. However, there was a castle built there in the mediaeval times, most likely complete with swords, bows, lances, siege engines and the rest. You can clearly see why they chose the site the moment you come up to the wall behind the “little castle” – you can see for miles! Certainly enough to see any army that seems like wanting to attack your stronghold, at least. We had been round the castle bits before, with a home-ed group, but on Sunday, there was a special event going on just outside the wall. The first thing we saw when we came in was a stilt walking jester, juggling clubs. Yeah, I know, I couldn’t do that, but wait until you hear the next bit!

Inside the gates were a number of tents, set up to the right, with a fence dividing the tournament and fighting arena on the left from the public area. We went to the excellent café and I had a hot chocolate with cream and marshmallows (totally unrelated to mediaeval history, as they didn’t have squirty cream out of a can then and cocoa beans weren’t brought over to Europe until the fifteen hundreds!). Next we went to the numerous tents full of weapons and armour which you could try on and handle. The armour certainly didn’t fit, but then I don’t suppose children aged 12 went into battle in full armour unless they were in the royal family!  The weapons tent was a lot more interesting – I went in and the person guarding it to make sure some child didn’t come wandering in and then terrorise everyone by hacking at them with a massive great big sword in there said, “Pick a sword, and I’ll tell you what it is and why it was used.” Perfect! The one I chose was a hand-and-a-half sword, one where you are meant to fight with one hand and a shield, but can throw away the shield and use your second hand if needed. Here are some photos of me with the sword:

The first contest in the tournament was archery. There were four teams in the tournament: blue, red, green and gold. The squires shot for their knights in archery, and the blue team won. Then everybody moved off through the red doors into the castle and watched the jester, who turned out to be a fire-eater as well… That was crazy. He not only ate it, he also drank some flammable liquid, and then blew it out over the flames, and it went up in a huge cloud of fire. I don’t wish I could do that, as it probably tastes disgusting!

After a good half hour of fire eating and fire breathing, the show finished and we could go back to the tournament field and have our picnic while waiting for the next contest to start. This was sword-fighting in duals, where you made the opponent fall or lose his sword. Then you had to call out for the defeated to yield, and when he did, you had a victory. Back through the red doors again, and apparently the jester/fire-eater/stilt-walker/juggler/fire-breather is also a comedian, as he put on the funniest and craziest show that included making a tin of baked beans vanish by eating it, unicycling, fire-breathing standing on your head, and a lot more. Then came the first part of a falconry display, with a barn owl, lanner falcon, and Harris Hawk.

The third part of the tournament turned out to be another series of duals, first where each of the knights fought another over a bar, trying to hit the other’s head, then the same but with three lives each before one goes down. These lives were designated by feathered crests, and when all had been toppled the knight was ‘crestfallen’. Did you hear that penny drop?! Crestfallen means disappointed, and so knights are when they are ‘crestfallen’. The green team won this round. The second part of the falconry was with a goshawk, second Harris Hawk, dog (to drive out prey for the hawk to catch) and the best of the lot – a Gyrfalcon, a King’s status hawking bird. They are white with black specks, and look beautiful – a kind of fiercer hunting Hedwig!

The final part of the knight’s tournament was the grand melée, the free-for-all where knights and squires fought their opponents to win the tournament. The gold team won this, and the prize sword, making them the winners of the tournament. The red team’s squire, however, was knighted by the knight marshal, appointed to keep order over the knights. All in all, it was an awesome day, full of history and fighting and comedy; the only possible trouble being I wasn’t allowed to keep that nice big sword…!

Hey Blog! For the whole of June the Wildlife Trusts run a campaign to get people outside and enjoying nature. It’s called… 30 Days Wild!  So that’s my focus for today!

30 Days Wild is a simple, accessible, family-friendly and fun program. Since it started in 2015, around two million people have joined in, which is great! You don’t need to have books, a bird hide in your garden (Though the Home Ed Shed doubles excellently as just that!) or even know a blackbird from a robin. Basically, anyone can take part, as all you need to do is complete one “Random Act of Wildness” every day. These can range from rescuing a bumblebee to seeing an orca off the coast of Scotland, and everywhere in between.

Today, my ‘Random Act of Wildness’ has been seeing a weasel (the smallest mustelid in the UK, as long as a thirty-centimetre ruler) cross the road in front of us, but that’s not the kind of thing you get every day! Usually it’s more normal, such as getting close up to cormarants and house martins while out sailing on my RYA level 2 (look at my post “Ahoy There!” for information on that) or watching BBC 2’s Springwatch, which finished last night. Springwatch is a program dedicated to bringing viewers “the best of British wildlife”, which they often do with a lot of funny models and jokes along the way. This year, the best has been Chris Packham’s bubble-blowing cardboard abdomen made to show how froghopper babies, also known as spittlebugs, make their own cocoons – pushing air through anal fluid, which quite literally means blowing bubbles out your bum. Wish I could do that! Although the two are not related, all the presenters of Springwatch support 30 Days Wild, as it inspires young people to be a part of nature, not a separate entity. I too believe this is important – we must use nature to fix our crisis, both climatic and economic, and if we do not know nature, we cannot use it.

If you wish to take part, go to https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/30dayswild, where you can find how to join in. Unfortunately it’s after the first of June, so you might be a little late, but you can always sign up for next year. In your order pack you will get a wallchart for recording what you do and a packet of seeds. The seeds are for planting to attract pollinators, one of the most important types of insects. Did you know pollinators do for free what would cost billions of pounds a year?! Or that we’ve lost thirteen of our UK bee species since 1900? All the fruit we eat is directly related to pollination, and the loss of any pollinators is deeply worrying both economically and environmentally.

I hope everyone is taking or planning to take part in 30 Days Wild, as we need to take care of our planet, our nature, and ourselves.