The Lych Gate honours the fallen from this parish in both World Wars of the last century. Remembrance Sunday, when the Last Post is played at the memorial, is always the closest Sunday to Remembrance Day itself: the 11th of…
Month: November 2019
Christmas Mini-Market
I don’t know for sure how long the Mini-Market has been going at Allendale Village Hall, but I’m pretty sure it was initiated in Nora Handcock’s time. That might make it nearing 20 years of Mini-Markets. Brendon Jackson re-posted, or…
Upcycling: a new buzzword
Hearing this word more frequently these days, I asked Google what, precisely, it might mean: upcycle verb gerund or present participle: upcycling re-use (discarded objects or material) in such a way as to create a product of higher quality or value…
Apprehension in Sparty Lea!
It was on Sunday past, but we’ve only just got the goss about the police action in Sparty Lea. Carrie drove through the thick of it, on the way up the Sparty Lea bridge, but more details have come to…
Through the tunnel of doom
Margaret Stonehouse, current President of the Allendale Lions Club, asked me to light the fire this year, to my great delight and slight queasiness. What if the thing took off with a whoosh and a roar, and I was still…
Bonfire Night!
The Allendale Lions haven’t seen a better photograph of the annual bonfire and fireworks than this one, but who knows, tonight’s event may yield up another. But it was a wet miserable day yesterday to be finalising all the details….
The Joy of Editing
I don’t come by editing naturally. Rather, I fall in love with the words as they emerge, and feel loathe to mess with them thereafter. Always have done. But I learned, as a graduate student in the biomedical sciences, that…
The things we share . . .
. . . keep us together Television is great fun as a shared experience. Throughout most of the last half of the 20th century, television was a shared family experience, but now in the 21st the sharing seems to be…
Building the bonfire on Baynes field
I’d never have believed it, if I hadn’t helped out on the work in previous years, what a long and laborious procedure it actually is to create the Bonfire Night. But usually I’ve started to help with the shifting of…
Liz Conway, Bookbinder
Regular readers of the diary may recall the appearance of some pages of the tourist guide called ‘The Roman Wall District’ a couple months ago. A very tatty and bedraggled copy, we wanted to refresh it for convenient viewing by…