28 September 2024
Thomas Hardy, who I’ve always found to be a miserable author (with the honourable exception of Under the Greenwood Tree), because he wrote about stupid people doing stupid things: I’ve only recently come to wonder if he was influenced by some psychic emanations from a prehistoric henge that lies under the land on which he built his house in Dorchester.
No signs were visible on the surface though remains of Roman and iron age burials were discovered during its construction. He also found a large sarsen which he called a “druid stone” and erected in his garden.
When a new road was being built near the house in the 1980s, archaeologists excavated a large circular Neolithic enclosure, or ‘proto-henge’, nearly 100 metres in diameter, that was built around 3,000BC, about the same time as the earliest circular (earth) bank that now surrounds the stone circles at Stonehenge.
But the roadbuilders carried on and asphalted the new road before what was left, including the section under Hardy’s garden, was listed and protected as a scheduled monument, now owned by the National Trust. Another dig in 2022 discovered that the site had been in use some 500 years earlier than originally thought; this meant it was built at about the same time that work started on Maiden Castle, one of the largest and most complex Iron Age hillforts in Europe, a couple of miles away.
(It’s thought that the name ‘Maiden’ developed over the years from the Celtic ’Mai Dun’ which means ‘great hill’.)
Perhaps there’s a yet undiscovered henge under Shiptonthorpe in East Yorkshire where people have been getting poison pen letters. More than a dozen letters have been received by different people in the village over two years, and despite police enquiries and many local suspicions, the writer(s) has not been identified. They are possibly inspired by some old argument over the parish hall but they feel personal when they hope the recipient gets “run over by a bus on the A1079”.
I suppose it depends on how sensitive you are, and I’m obviously not. Many years ago, I was volunteering on a helpline in the days before we would terminate calls and a caller said “I hope you die slowly of a painful cancer or crash and kill yourself on the way home”. I naturally asked why they said this because they must know it wouldn’t make any difference to whether I got cancer or crashed and they said “Because it makes me feel better”; to which the only possible answer was “I’m glad something does”.
Not long after that, when I’d refused to follow another caller’s agenda, they said “I’ve spoken to you lot quite often and there are some really lousy volunteers there but you’re the f-ck-ng worst of them all”. They then rang off before I asked them why they kept ringing us if we were so bad.
Perhaps I’d feel differently if I got a poison pen letter from somebody who obviously knew where I live, but I’d probably just think it was their problem not mine and give it to the police.
At least, nobody is yet attempting to assassinate anybody over here (ordinary people aren’t assassinated, they’re murdered). There seem to have been two attempts on Donald Trump, though one the shooters apparently set up the gun and then pottered around till Trump appeared in the right place on the golf course, during which perambulations, he was apprehended by a discharged firearm while proceeding in a southerly direction … (isn’t that how police word their reports?)
While I believe the world would be a much safer place if Trump got out of politics and was left to run his own business down in private, I don’t want him killed because I don’t think anyone should take anybody else’s life. If they really get a buzz out of murder, why don’t they form a gang and kill each other, with a prize going to the last man standing (can you imagine a gang of women doing this?)
“Last man standing” reminds me that the Labour party had its annual conference last week and its new, innovative plans to revitalise the UK can be summarised as
More news came from a United Nations report published last week which says that, even as an election nears in Rwanda, tensions have increased between them and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. DRC ‘M23’ rebels are being supported by Rwandan forces and have attacked refugee camps and other highly-populated areas in the DRC because the DRC has been basing military units close to them. The fear is now that the border skirmishes which have killed and displaced millions of people over recent decades could escalate into a full-blown war between the two countries.
Luckily, the new government has stopped the plans to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda that the Conservatives were proposing, possibly because the Tories thought the M23 was just the easiest way to get from the M25 to Brighton.
What is so difficult to understand about the fact that nobody risks their life to seek asylum somewhere else if they feel safe in their own country? Paranoia?
Recent research by a Dutch team has modified a 2011 study that the average Conservative’s brain has a larger amygdala, which is linked to threat perception, while the average Liberal’s brain has a larger anterior cingulate cortex, a region linked to decision-making. The latest tests found no evidence to support the latter claim but accepted there is a (much smaller) increase in the size of conservatives’ amygdala.
However, this conclusion was accompanied by a ‘chicken and egg’ warning: are people with a greater tendency to paranoia more likely to be conservatives or is growth in the amygdala caused by feeling more threatened?
Does anyone else get irritated, if not actually threatened, when people talk about ‘teams’ such as ‘Team GB’, ‘Team Road Safety’, ‘Team Piddle Brewery*’, ‘Team Smart Parking Company Rip-off Merchants’ etc?
* It’s a brewery based in Piddlehinton near Dorchester
* It’s a brewery based in
Piddlehinton near Dorchester
Lesser Mutterings 