High Ham and Somerset – Page 7 – For the fainthearted . . .

The 375th anniversary of the Battle of Langport

Three hundred and seventy-five years ago today, I know where men among my forebears stood.

“We were on opposing sides in the Civil War,” laughed a local man. It seems his family had supported the Crown, whilst our family were Commonwealth people. Cavaliers versus Roundheads: ours had not seemed the sort of family who would support the beheading of a king, but which family did?

An uncle confirmed the tradition of the two families having stood on opposite sides at the Battle of Langport in 1645, “but we would have …

Solstice van

A green and white bus that had been converted to a camper rolled slowly northward on the M5 motorway this afternoon. The side and rear windows were hung with cream-coloured curtains. The number plate was an “N” registration – “N” the first time around. The bus was forty-five years old.

The bus resembled the many that would have gathered in our home area at the time of the summer solstice. It was unmistakably a hippy vehicle.

The hippies who gathered in June each year were like exotic beasts to the …

Sounds from the television

Nice weather for ducks by the electronic music duo Lemon Jelly was played on BBC Radio 6 this evening. It is an unlikely recording, Twenty-First Century music intermittently overlaid with a familiar baritone voice singing,

All the ducks are swimming in the water
Fal de ral de ral do
Fal de ral de ral do

Although it made the Top 20 in the charts, it is an unlikely recording. An online search revealed that the singer sampled in the song is John Langstaff, an American singer and broadcaster.

Discovering that …

Killing us slowly?

The cancellation of Bridgwater Carnival in November can seem a detail of the current crisis, something without a great significance. For the thousands of people who participate the cancellation represents the loss of an activity that brought them together for countless hours on evenings and weekends throughout the summer and autumn.

The carnival season is a major feature of social life in Somerset. Dozens of carnival clubs around the county spend the summer building floats and making costumes. The result is a memorable evening’s entertainment, completely free for the tens …

Snap happy history

A school trip to the Baltic in 1974 brought the disapproval of my paternal grandmother: I had used seven rolls of film to take photographs. The visit had included Copenhagen, Malmo, Gotland and Leningrad (as Saint Petersburg was known at the time). Seven rolls of film had meant eighty-four photographs, the sort of number of pictures someone now might take in a day with a smartphone. Cost was, of course, the issue: my grandmother disapproved of how much my parents had to pay for the developing and printing of the …

Looking for Hobbits

A white Citroen Berlingo overtook. A car for all sorts and conditions of people, flower-shaped decals in green and purple across the back of the car suggested the driver might be of a more bohemian inclination than the average motorist on the M5 motorway.

The hippyish impression created by the flowers was reinforced by a sticker on the rear of the car, below the middle of the back window. “Not all those who wander are lost.”

The words are from JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, they are written by …