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.

Hey Blog! I hope you had a great Jubilee weekend – it’s not often we get to witness something like that! This week I want to talk about making projects, projects made with a few odds and ends, which can be super fun and inspiring!

Crafting is an amazing experience. It can be done with as little as masking tape, glue, sharpies, and bits and pieces found around the house. However, most people have a little more than that to make things out of. I’d like to share with you a few of the crafting projects I have been doing recently, starting with… Bunting!

A few weeks ago in Maths is Everywhere! I said I was starting bunting for my shed. Last Sunday I completed it, and hung it up. I needed to bang in four extra nails to hang it on, two in the middle and two at the ends. I had bought the fabric a few months ago, and cut out the pieces a month later, but I only got down to sewing it these last few weeks. It required cutting out two pieces for each triangle of bunting, then sewing them together, tying off the ends, trimming the point, turning them the right way out, ironing them, then sewing them on to specially bought bias binding tape, and tying it to the shed. It was hard work, and took a long time, but nowhere near as hard as if I’d had to do all of it by hand, as people used to before sewing machines! However, if you have a shed of your own (not that it’s any better than the Home Ed Shed, of course, unless it’s a multi-story treehouse with zip lines, fireman’s poles, mounted crossbows, and an internal slide going down to a secret underground bunker!) I recommend considering some fabric ornamentation similar!

Last Wednesday on our ‘Day out with friends’ we went to the White Peak Distillery, in Shining Cliff Woods. This is a business making gin and whiskey, and though the products are rather expensive, I have it on good authority that their gin is very good! They have also worked with the Wildlife Trusts; one such time was making a gin using the invasive species Himalayan Balsam, which helps to get rid of it. However, much as Mum would like, we were not making gin, rather going back to what the distillery building was used for in the past – it is an old wireworks! In this session, which was run by the first home-ed family we found when coming to the area, we were making wire leaves for an exhibit about the heritage of the area. It was really exciting, and I found that using craft wire to make things out of is a lot easier than using the heavy-duty garden wire I had used in the past! I made a sprig of seven rowan leaves, which will has been added to the ever-growing branch of various leaves and twigs. Wire like the stuff that I was using here costs a little more, but can be used for many things once bought.

I have also been using wire in another little project I have been doing. Last week I told you all about sailing, and so I thought I would make a model boat. However, Laser Picos (the type of dinghy I was sailing in) are a little different to the boat I am making, as they do not have halyards (ropes to raise the sail) as the sails are bound to the mast, not the boom. This is where the wire comes in – the halyards are put through loops of wire. The boat is to be made out of leftover balsa wood from another ship is made, but this project is not finished yet.

The final piece of work on craft I have done lately is not even started, but is worth mentioning. I am attending a craft group that is making puppets, and at the end we will perform a play with our puppets. The first session was all about doing several designs and choosing a design out of these. Hopefully at the end of the set of meetings I will have a finished puppet and be ready to show it to you!

Hey Blog! This week I did something I started last year, an awesome chance inspired by Arthur Ransome’s famous books ‘Swallows and Amazons’! 

In 2019 I did an event with Scouts called Activation, a yearly one-day event overlooking Carsington Water in Derbyshire. You get a taster session of each activitiy you pick, and one of the activities which I picked was dinghy sailing. After this I was introduced to the Swallows and Amazons series, a collection of stories about children sailing in boats on a lake in the aptly named Lake District by the author Arthur Ransome. Someone wrote of the first book: “Watch the effect of the first hundred pages on your own children. If they want no more, send for the doctor!” and it really feels like that! I was so thrilled by ‘Swallow and Amazons’ and the subsequent books, the one thing I really wanted was a chance to do sailing like the Swallows and Amazons did. It was planned for 2020, but when the pandemic hit it wasn’t possible to take the course. RYA Stage 1 sailing had to wait for 2021.

My first course was a very interesting learning curve. I had read up on theory in the RYA’s Start Sailing guide, but not done much practice – basically, all I’d done was the taster from activation, and being on the catamaran Cool Runnings in Barbados, not doing the sailing (apart from the brief periods when we were allowed to have a go with the wheel, and that once when I hoisted the mainsail!). This meant that it was OK for the shore part, but the actual sailing part I found a bit scarier. I remember thinking “Wow, I’m sailing on my own!” at the start. However, I was fine until I was doing the capsize drill and tipped the boat over the other way when I had just righted it – I admit I freaked out. Because of this, I was nervous before going on the Stage 2 (the recent course) but by lunch time, everything was normal!

Both my sailing sessions have been at my local water body: Carsington Water in the Peak District. This reservoir was built in the 1980s, and is the 9^th largest reservoir in England, so there’s a lot of sailing room! The sessions were also with the same instructor from Carsington Sports and Leisure, though different participants were on each one. In the first course, we learned rigging the boat, basic sailing and tacking (turning the boat from going left across the wind to going right across the wind by turning the bow through the wind) from Beam Reach to Beam Reach – that is, 90° away from the wind. A Beam Reach is one of the ‘Points of Sail’, directions towards and away from the wind. It is worth noting here that you cannot sail right at the wind: you need to tack. This is done by going on a zigzag course towards the wind. In Stage 2, we learned tacking Close Hauled to Close Hauled (another of the ‘Points of sail’, at an angle closer to the wind than the Beam Reach) The 5 Essentials, onshore and offshore winds, and even Gybing (sometimes spelt with a J, this means the same as tacking, except you turn the stern through the wind instead of the bow). It was SUPER FUN, and must have shown in my face as apparently I came in grinning like the Cheshire Cat…! If you live anywhere near the sea, a lake, a wide river… I totally recommend going on the water, as the list of places to go sailing is endless.

After you can sail in all directions regardless of the wind, you are allowed to take a boat out on your own. Our instructor said at the end of my last course that he thought we could all achieve this, so hopefully Dad (who used to do dinghy sailing ages ago) and I might just be able to go out on a boat each. I hope this will happen this year, as I am eager to sail again!

Hey Blog! Last Friday I went on an “educational trip” down to Hampshire, Wiltshire, and London. The reason? Going to see Stonehenge, the most famous henge in the UK, and probably the world; and its related exhibition at the British Museum!

We went down to see my big sister on Friday, which was relatively exiting, apart from a couple of queues on the motorways. We spent the night in a Premier Inn and then, with my sister, drove the next day to Wiltshire to go and see Stonehenge. It was incredible to see these grey stones on the landscape, and know they were the famous stones I had been wanting to see ever since I got into archaeology. You could feel the power of their heritage, the feeling that so many people had respected, enjoyed, put effort into and been inspired by them. It is a place of Kings, for example Charles II went through them while fleeing the roundheads; many artists and writers, including Turner and Hardy, painted and wrote about its landscape; frequent archaeologists, admirers like me, but no Druids or aliens. Sorry.

Conspiracy theories about Stonehenge are wild, wacky, and imagination catching, but don’t help with scientific analysis. Most archaeologists now agree the “henge” part (the bank and ditch around the outside of the stones) was built c.3000BC, in the mid Neolithic. A henge in archaeology is a ditch external to a bank, but the word “henge” was originally used to refer to the “hanging stones”, meaning the lintels over the trilithons at Stonehenge. Actually, Stonehenge is not a henge – the ditch is external to the bank. Inside it when the henge was constructed were post holes which current research suggests held the bluestones now within the trilithon horseshoe; this sarsen horseshoe inside it was set up later, around 2500BC. However, setting up vertical uprights around Stonehenge was not new: in the Mesolithic, around 7000BC, at least three timber posts were set up. As yet, purpose and later influence remain unknown, but it is likely these were the reason for the construction of the Cursuses, two monuments constructed about 500 years before Stonehenge. One is 1.7 miles long – you can imagine the work and dedication that must have gone into making it, so what was its significance?

Stonehenge is part of a UNESCO world heritage site which extends all the way up to Avebury, another stone circle. This the largest in stone circle in the world, a massive 1088ft. Seeing as we were close, we chose to go over and see this as well. If anything, it was better than Stonehenge, as we got to touch the stones (it’s all cordoned off at Stonehenge!) and really appreciate the monument the way our ancestors might have. This is truly a monument on an extremely impressive scale: the ditch was 9 metres deep and the bank was nearly as high, so when they were together, from the inside it would have looked impressively tall!

On Sunday, me and Mum took the train into London, and went to meet our friends, who were coming in on a different train to meet us. We took a quick pit stop to have a picture with the Trafalgar Square lions, and then headed to Platform 9&3/4 at Kings Cross, where we had arranged to meet. Platform 9&3/4  is the portal to Hogwarts, the school in the Harry Potter books. These days, there is a shop right next to it. I wonder what the staff would say if Harry walked straight out of the archway into the queue of people waiting to have their photo taken – I expect wizards and witches have to go there at night to avoid the crowds and use Harry’s invisibility cloak to get past the security cameras, then pop through the portal to the platform and wait until the Hogwarts Express arrives. After looking through the shop, we went to one of London’s parks to have lunch. As I am used to parks as quiet spaces with not many people, this was exceptionally busy. Straight afterwards, we walked to the British museum to see the Stonehenge exhibition. This was probably the most interesting exhibition I have been to in my life – there were so many interesting artefacts, with so much detail, time and mystery. I found that a symbol I thought I had created, a triple spiral, like the one at the end of this paragraph, was in fact a Neolithic symbol, though what it stood for is unknown. There were the remains of a headdress that had been found with a woman who seems to have had a condition that caused trance-like states, gold hats that looked like witches’ hats (maybe they were, and Hogwarts is just the latest instalment of training grounds for witches and wizards?!) the only borrowable monument in the UK: Seahenge; and the Nebra Sky Disk, the earliest known record of the heavenly spheres. I don’t say this often, but if you live ANYWHERE in the UK, then I totally recommend going to see it. The rest, as they say, is history!

Next day, me and Mum went to the Natural History Museum in the morning, as the others had something else they wanted to do. We said hello to the blue whale, which has replaced Dippy the Dinosaur L and then found our way to the Our Broken Planet exhibition. Whereas the Stonehenge one was the more interesting, this was the absolute top inspiring. If you take my advice and go to see the Stonehenge exhibition, then I encourage you to do a double whammy and do both. It has sadness, hope, and anticipation.

I will be going to London again sometime soon, to see Dippy, who is having a special exhibition of his own, so watch out for future posts!