Walking. Gossip. Travel.

Author: admin

  • Bologna – Asinelli (The Two Towers)

    Bologna – Asinelli (The Two Towers)

    Back to October 2011 with these photos, so the quality of the images isn’t particularly good as I used my phone.

    This was when I decided to climb the Asinelli, which is one of the Two Towers (Le Due Torri Torre degli Asinell) in Bologna, the shorter and more leaning one is the Garisenda. The basic concept of these is that families would build their towers tall to show off their wealth and influence, with the Asinelli standing 97 metres in height.

    This image sort of highlights what went on during my little walk up here, which I think it’s fair to say was mild panic and an inability to take clear photos. I’m not sure why I thought climbing this bloody thing was a good idea, I don’t like heights. I probably thought that there was a nice lift, not the most rickety old arrangement of stairs that I found were the only way up. However, I’d just paid €3 to climb the damn thing, so I couldn’t just go back out again.

    This is not what I really wanted to see.

    And it went on for what seemed like eternity.

    About half-way up, there was a platformed off area where I could have a little think about the predicament I had placed myself in. Getting half-way up and going back down seemed to be a poor compromise, so I battled on up.

    This was more vertical than it looks in the photos.

     

    I was relieved to get to the top after climbing the 499 steps…. I’ve put photos of the views in another post and I admit that there were extensive views of Bologna from the top of the tower. Was the climb up there worth it? Hmmmm, probably, but I can’t say I was thrilled on the ascent (the descent was easier, but I was still glad to be back at ground level), but it is one of the city’s icons.

    This review is the most recent on TripAdvisor, and sums up the difficulty of this quite well I think.

    “If you are unfit or have any fear of heights or confined spaces, avoid this tower. The climb is very steep and the stair treads in many places narrow and at an angle.”

    Yes, the treads were narrow and at a complete wonk. Frankly, the civil engineers on this project didn’t take as much care as I would have perhaps liked, although, to be fair, the towers are still standing. I would say that I was fortunate that the tower wasn’t particularly busy when I went, I just remember telling some English-speaking Italians at the top about how brave I’d been.

  • Scottow – Scottow Cemetery (Tadeusz Szymanski)

    Scottow – Scottow Cemetery (Tadeusz Szymanski)

    The grave of this Polish airman who served in the City of Warsaw Squadron (No. 316 Polish Fighter Squadron) is located at Scottow Cemetery, and there’s an excellent biography of this man, Tadeusz Szymanski (1917-1992), at http://aircrewremembered.com/szymanski-tadeusz.html. His record as an aircraft pilot is exceptional, with more details at http://polishsquadronsremembered.com/316/44/Mustangs1944.html.

    Tadeusz married his wife Betty (nee Kay) in 1942, and she is now buried next to her husband.

    The wonderful Imperial War Museum have a photo (© IWM FRE 14842) of Tadeusz, this was taken on 12 July 1944 and he was checking the wing of his P-51 Mustang.

    A photo from the same day (© IWM FRE 14843) of Tadeusz carrying the damaged wing tip from his aircraft.

    The Air Crew Remembered web-site linked above mentions:

    “We knew that he had been a pilot and was rumoured to have invented the technique of flying along side V1 rockets and ‘flipping them over’ with a wing tip so that they crashed into the North Sea, rather than landing in England. However if you asked him he would just shrug it off with a smile.”

    So, this is perhaps why his wing tip was damaged in these photos. By all accounts, this was a heroic individual.

  • Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – Day 218

    Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – Day 218

    The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the current health crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored….

    Nacky

    A short and sweet definition for this word, simply defined by Grose as “ingenious”.

    Google Ngram suggests that there was a surge in the use of the word in the early nineteenth century, but the percentage use is so low that I suspect that it’s picking up Grose’s book. I’ve wondered before whether Grose just made up words in the hope that they were more widely used, something akin to Shakespeare and the words he seemed to create. Either that or it’s some Scottish word, as it sounds Scottish….

  • Norwich – Rosary Cemetery (Richard Andrews)

    Norwich – Rosary Cemetery (Richard Andrews)

    Since I’ve been grounded again by the Government, I thought I’d meander around the Rosary Cemetery located near to me in Norwich, in an attempt to see what stories lie there. It might not be the most fascinating blog content, but it’ll keep me quiet for a few weeks….

    This is the grave of Richard Andrews, and I’m guessing (from the damaged section of the stone) also that of his wife Ann Andrews, the parents of James Andrews whose gravestone is nearby. I don’t feel that I could really tell the story of James, there’s just not enough information I can find beyond when he was born and died.

    Richard Andrews was born in 1786 and I mentioned when writing about their son, James, where Richard and Ann were at the 1841 and 1851 censuses. James was born on 14 August 1814 and died on 18 August 1837.

    I can find details of only one Richard Andrews born anywhere near Norwich in 1786, a child baptised on 12 February 1786 at Great Hautbois church. He was the son of William Andrews, who worked as a farmer, and the christening was probably at St Theobald’s, a church now in ruin. I can’t write with any certainty that it’s the same Richard Andrews though….

    Richard married Ann (nee Long) on 25 November 1812 at Taverham. The actual marriage register, still visible at Norfolk Record Office, notes her name as Anne, but we know from later censuses that the wife of Richard was born in Taverham, and Richard’s home parish is noted as St. Michael Coslany Church, which is where his son was christened a couple of years later.

    Richard died on 11 October 1861 at the age of 75, with this being reported in the Norwich Mercury the week after, noting his address as Lame Dog Road, which matches with the census records. Unfortunately, the newspaper didn’t report anything else about his life, so I feel that this is yet another story where nearly everything of note  is left untold.

  • Colchester – Queen Street Brew House

    Colchester – Queen Street Brew House

    This visit was a few weeks ago, this isn’t a pub staying open during the lockdown…..

    The pub is very well-reviewed in numerous places on-line and there are comments about its quirkiness running throughout those reviews. When we arrived, it also had the most onerous health related rules that I’ve seen in a pub in terms of what they had on posters by the door. They required a face mask when moving around (not required at the time, so they were ahead of the curve here), they required temperature checks, address details and had a complex toilet procedure involving spades. The pub then proceeded to not really enforce these rules, although I’d add that everything still felt safe and they were following what they needed to do.

    I think quirky is an appropriate word for this set-up, which looks like I’ve done it (hence, I approve). It also didn’t serve any obvious point, as customers walked in both directions on both sides, so it more corralled people together if anything. But, then again, it did remind people to be careful and that was useful.

    It’s cheaper than plastic screens and just as effective, so why not? I didn’t buy the round here, so I’m not sure exactly how friendly the service was, but apparently it was all polite and welcoming from what I was told.

    I had an Old Man and The Sea from Mighty Oak Brewing, which I thought was served at a temperature which seemed to me to be nearer to frozen than chilled. It knocked the entire taste out of the beer, there were no flavours evident at all, and I think that’s the first time I’ve experienced that with a beer of this type. There are meant to be flavours of espresso coffee, dark chocolate and dark fruit, but they were indiscernible and the nearest I’ve tasted to this is Guinness Extra Cold (which in itself has rather died away). Rather awkwardly, the pub toasted my rating on Untappd…

    I do know that Mighty Oak Brewing are a decent brewery, they’re local to this pub being from Maldon, and I’ve had their beers at the Hop Beer Shop, United Brethren and the Duke of York, all in Chelmsford.

    Anyway, back to this pub, which was beautifully quirky in very many ways and it clearly had a loyal clientele. It had a community feel to it, with an impressive range of Belgian bottled beers and a number of ciders. Even though some of their arrangements might have felt quirky, it still seemed safe to me, it’s all rather different to what the chains were doing at the time. So, I think I quite liked this pub and the reviews on Untappd don’t suggest any issues with the beer, so I’ll pop back again at some time as their choice of beer and ciders looked innovative and intriguing.

  • Norwich – Rosary Cemetery (James Andrews)

    Norwich – Rosary Cemetery (James Andrews)

    Since I’ve been grounded again by the Government, I thought I’d meander around the Rosary Cemetery located near to me in Norwich, in an attempt to see what stories lie there. It might not be the most fascinating blog content, but it’ll keep me quiet for a few weeks….

    I found this grave a little difficult to read (and I can’t make out the bottom section), but it commemorates the life of James Andrews, the son of Richard (born 1786) and Ann Andrews (born 1788). James was christened at St. Michael Coslany Church in Norwich on 14 August 1814, a church which is now redundant but is still standing.

    James died on 14 August 1837 (the same date as his christening), at the age of just 23, and he was buried on 18 August 1837, with his death record noting that he was a dissenter. His burial here was one of the cemetery’s earliest, and his family wouldn’t have had much choice as they weren’t members of the Church of England congregation.

    James died a few years before the first national census, but in 1841, his parents lived alone at Charing Cross, by St. John Maddermarket in Norwich. In 1851, they were living on Pottergate Street in the same part of Norwich, this time with Sarah Ann Cordy, who was listed as their 30-year old daughter and a widow.

    By the time of the 1871 census, Ann was still alive, living at Lame Dog Road in Norwich with her daughter, now listed as Sarah Ann Johnson, and her two grandchildren Richard Frank Johnson and Fanny Johnson. This was because, in 1851, Sarah Ann had married a Francis Johnson, from Redlingfield Hall.

    Something has gone wrong in my telling of this story so far, as I don’t know why Sarah Ann Cordy was living with Richard and Ann in Norwich back in 1841. She wasn’t their daughter, so I had wondered whether she had married their son, James Andrews. But, I can find no record of that. Which gives me a problem in trying to picture who would have stood at this spot when James was buried, certainly his parents, Richard and Ann, but I’m unsure who else might have been there. And, I can find nothing about the life of James, just when he was born and when he died (but no knowledge of why he died), a total lack of a story which I find quite saddening. Hopefully, someone somewhere knows more…..

  • Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – Day 217

    Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – Day 217

    The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the current health crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored….

    Myrmidons

    This is, at first sight, a rather exotic definition for Grose, which he notes means “the constable’s assistants, watchmen, etc”. I’m not an expert in Greek mythology, nor indeed do I have any real knowledge about it at all, so I’m reliant on Wikipedia to tell me:

    “Myrmidons were an ancient nation of Greek mythology. In Homer’s Iliad, the Myrmidons are the soldiers commanded by Achilles. Their eponymous ancestor was Myrmidon, a king of Phthiotis who was a son of Zeus and “wide-ruling” Eurymedousa, a princess of Phthiotis. She was seduced by him in the form of an ant. An etiological myth of their origins, simply expanding upon their supposed etymology—the name in Classical Greek was interpreted as “ant-people”, from murmekes, “ants”—was first mentioned by Ovid, in Metamorphoses: in Ovid’s telling, the Myrmidons were simple worker ants on the island of Aegina.”

    So, the meaning used by Grose is entirely correct and appropriate, with it being easy to see how it evolved to be used for the police. Given this word isn’t easy to spell, nor actually that easy to pronounce, I’m moderately surprised to see that it lingered on in terms of its usage for quite so long.

    The word does though have a long history in English, meaning a sub-ordinate or loyal follower and it was in usage in the medieval period, so it’s not a new word coming into the language.

  • Scottow – Scottow Cemetery (Illegitimi non Carborundum)

    Scottow – Scottow Cemetery (Illegitimi non Carborundum)

    This ‘Latin’ phrase was on a relatively recent grave in Scottow Cemetery, and I’ve never heard of it, but it’s apparently in relatively frequent usage. It’s not an actual Latin phrase, just a deliberately badly corrupted version of it, and it effectively means ‘don’t let the bastards grind you down’. The phrase was first during the Second World War and I’m not sure how I haven’t heard of it before…..

  • Scottow – Scottow Cemetery

    Scottow – Scottow Cemetery

    I’m not sure that I’ve been here for over thirty years, this is the combined parish and war cemetery at Scottow. I remember when visiting as a child the slightly confusing nature of the war graves here (more of which in later posts) as there were servicemen buried here from all over Europe, including from the German military.

    The cemetery and mortuary chapel were opened in 1902, I assume as Scottow Church had no more spaces for burials.

    War graves from RAF Coltishall were placed here until September 1943, when space became short and then those who died were laid to rest in North Walsham church. Later on, further military burials returned here and continued to be until the airfield’s closure a few years ago.

    As an aside, it was tradition for new air bases to be named after the local railway station, but RAF Buxton wouldn’t work because of the similarly named town in Buxton. Instead they went for another nearby railway station, choosing Coltishall as their air base name. This is why the air base was never called RAF Scottow, even though the site had previously been known as Scottow Aerodrome before the RAF got there. Buxton and Coltishall railway stations still sort of exist, but they’re now on the Bure Valley heritage railway line which operates between Hoveton & Wroxham and Aylsham.

    A purchase of some more land has recently been made and this is the new cut through into this additional space.

    This is the new space that has been opened up for future burials, which should prove sufficient in size for at least another couple of generations. There’s something quite peaceful about this spot, and there was in many ways even when RAF Coltishall was operating. Perhaps there was something quite appropriate about former airmen being buried so near to the landing strip of a military airbase, but tranquility will hopefully now take over.

  • Norwich – Rosary Cemetery (Edward Nursey)

    Norwich – Rosary Cemetery (Edward Nursey)

    Since I’ve been grounded again by the Government, I thought I’d meander around the Rosary Cemetery located near to me in Norwich, in an attempt to see what stories lie there. It might not be the most fascinating blog content, but it’ll keep me quiet for a few weeks….

    This gravestone commemorates the life of Edward Nursey, who was born in 1864 and this interested me because of the reference to the Metropolitan Police.

    At the 1871 census, Edward was staying (or living) with his aunt and uncle on Unthank Road in Norwich, along with an Elizabeth Nursey. She is also listed on the gravestone and I think this was Edward’s mother. He seems to have been living with another aunt and uncle at the 1881 census, on Surrey Street in Norwich. He left though to work for the Metropolitan Police and the National Archives web-site shows he started work on 12 March 1883 and was warrant number 67553. It also appears that he was briefly a detective in the Special Branch in 1887, just a few years after that had been started.

    Edward is listed as giving evidence at the Old Bailey a few times, including reporting on the finding of a dead child when he was a sergeant at Hampstead police station in 1890. This was one of the most notorious crimes of the late nineteenth century and Edward was a key police witness in the trial of Mary Pearcey.

    At the 1901 census, Edward was working as a sergeant in the Metropolitan Police and was lodging with Henry and Susan Carey at their house at 59, William Street in Woolwich, London. This street is still there, but is now known as Calderwood Street and the properties along it have been demolished over the last 100 years.

    Edward died on 2 February 1903, aged only 39, at this point still working for the Metropolitan Police. And why he died, I don’t know, although he wasn’t killed in the line of duty.