Today I am muchly loving the cheek of the awesome Firda and her highly entertaining and completely head-destroying Blogger-parody. And if that bores you, then there’s always discovering how Google uses pigeons to rate a page’s relevance.
When you start work at the BBC you are given a temporary pass. They take a really unpleasant photo of you with the world’s cheapest digital camera and edit it so that it makes you look like you’re gurning, then they laugh and show it to their friends before printing it onto your pass. I’ve seen them do this. It’s true. The best thing about the pass is that if you’re very special you get given a little clip to put it onto your belt which includes this little mechanism so that you can pull out the pass on a little retractable cable and then let it go and it wizzes back to your waist. I have had much fun with this already. But the best thing about it is that there actually seems to be a culture involved in the wearing of it. I have been reliably informed that only dorks clip it to the front of their trousers. The hip place to put it is on the right-hand hip…
iBooks are beautiful, but some people miss the various colours that you could make them and pine for something a little more extreme than the pearly white that is currently in vogue. And then again, some people aren’t content just to pine…
Rumour abounds on the net that Mark from Riothero.com has grown a beard. If you have evidence of this, e-mail immediately.
AOL buys Blogs: “You can’t really put figures on this,” one executive told The Register, “but we think we have 78 per cent of the libertarian news blogs, 91 per cent of the ClueTrain Manifesto fan sites, and 59 per cent of all blogging female arts graduates, many of whom are Virgos,” he said. “And the possibilities for vertical integration are endless,” he enthused. “No cat will ever go ill again in America again in obscurity.”
After a weekend in Norfolk I’ve been attempting to get some greater sense of personal and cultural history by researching the history of the village of ‘Belaugh’ where I grew up. This is what I’ve found so far… You’ll have to forgive the quality of my writing. I’m a little fried at the moment…
I returned from my parents’ place yesterday afternoon. I’d spent much of the day poking around the village – my young cousin had found a bizzare rusty Victorian-style hook in the garden which had set me to thinking. Belaugh – the village in which I grew up – was mentioned in the Doomsday book many many hundreds of years ago. And yet there are still only eighty residents and fifty houses. This number has barely changed over the years. And while only the church remains of the really old buildings, there must be traces of one thousand years of residency all around the place.
I haven’t been in the church in years, even though it’s less than five minutes walk from my parents’ house. But my mother suggested I went and had a look because there was a small presentation about the history of Belaugh in it. I went and I looked and I was suitably intrigued and decided to dig around on the net when I got home to see what I could find. And this is what I’ve managed to dig up…
According to one source I’ve foung the church was assembled in the fourteenth century but still has some incorporated Norman walls and the old font.
Two of the best things I managed to find were from William White’s History, Gazetteer, and Directory of Norfolk – one from 1845 and another from 1883.
According to these records, in 1845 Belaugh had twice the inhabitants it does today – a massive 164 residents mainly situated in the village, itself located in the middle of “855 acres of rich loamy land, of which 199 are marsh, 647 arable, and seven plantations”. The Old Rectory – which I believe was recently put on the market for something ridiculous like half a million pounds was valued more conservatively in those days. “The rectory, valued in the King’s Book at £6, and in 1831, at £420 is in the patronage of the Bishop of Norwich”.
By 1881, the population has dropped to 139 – and the church cottages were being rented out for £18 a year. The big news is that someone has noticed the rood screen – which is of particularly good quality (Cromwellians apparently scratched the faces off the figures painted onto it – one classic quote from the time, “The screen hath the Twelve Apostles, their faces rubbed out by a godly trooper.”) – and someone’s slapped a proper high-pitched roof on it, to replace the thatch that had been there before [See a picture of the church today]. Belaugh has always been a fast moving place…
Interestingly the Traffords have a very strong presence in the area then as now…
Belaugh is located on the river Bure and there’s a whole page about the navigable parts of the river which includes several rather glorious pictures.
And to end with a few more images – here’s a watercolour of the approach to Belaugh from Wroxham by boat and a victorian watercolour from over the river looking towards the church.
Additional information: Here’s a bit more research that I found online in mid 2003.
Here’s a map from the late 19th Century (1890 I think). Of particular interest to me is calling the bit down by the ‘unsuitable for motors’ road, “Belaugh Hole”. I’ve also noticed that my parents home isn’t on the map yet, which I could probably have found out by asking them, but hey. It’s not the only empty area though – the area around Hill Piece is empty, and Sunny Haigh isn’t there either, and there are no buildings up on the main Hoveton / Coltishall road. What are there are some building down by the Staithe – obviously pre-existing the current range of buildings down that road. Very interesting stuff…
More pictures:
One of the most interesting conversations on the net is happening over at Powazek.com literally as we speak. Derek’s a well respected community-builder and designer with a long-standing committment to the interhighweb – and he’s started a rebuttal of the current mantra, “The Web’s Got Boring” which seems to be circulating around New Media circles at the moment. You want a rebuttal? Then spot the bloke at B3ta’s Female or Shemale! The web rules. Still.
I got some great spam today – it was for naked girlie videos and pictures. It said that it had pictures of young naive girls that had somehow become captured by the evil porn business. It occurred to me that this was both the most highly self-referential porn I’d ever heard of, and also explains why people don’t really do anything about those who are being exploited by the porn industry and who really wouldn’t want to do it otherwise. It’s because the people who watch the porn don’t really want to believe that these people are doing it for a career. They want to believe that they started naive and were drawn in and corrupted by the horros of an evil industry. I think it must make it seem more sexy.
We take a brief break from stories of Tom’s weekend in Norfolk to suggest that you go and check that Yahoo haven’t signed you up for an infinity of spam missives. They had me, and I don’t recall agreeing to it…
