I’ve developed a procedural method of highlighting different kinds of reading – the consistency across documents helps a great deal with writing up. The colours / framework they represent also make the processes of reading more manageable and more engaged at the same time, as I’m thinking, “is this worth highlighting”, I’m also having to think “what colour is it?”.

But for ages I’ve had to rely on a set of sticky labels that I put in notebooks / diaries etc in order to to remind myself of the framework. As I read and note initial bibliographic notes in Zotero, I’ve been thinking how great it would be to be able to change the labels. Thanks to Angie GinGer’s video, I now know how:

1. Install Ethereal Style plug in: https://github.com/MuiseDestiny/zotero-style
2. Go to Settings (in the main setting – under Zotero on a Mac).
3. Then to Style
4. Make sure that, under ‘Reader‘, the box ‘Annotation Colors'(sic) is checked.
5. Close settings and open a pdf document in Zotero.
6. Press shift P. On the video the dialogue for colours opens up straight away. On Mac, or perhaps on later versions of Zotero, this opens up
   .
7. Choose ‘Annotations’ and, yay! There’s a dialogue that enables you to rename colours, and even add new ones (perhaps as sub colours of the main categories?)

Boo was one of the best people I ever met, and he introduced me to so many other fantastic people, interesting, creative, and enthusiastic people like he was, that my life is much better having had him in it. Some of those are the best folk I’ll ever know – Katherine (Boo’s wife), Abi (his really talented daughter), Cheryl, Tom, Ollie, Jono, and so many others. I only know those people because one day I met Boo. Boo did that a lot, collecting great people that he met. He had an amazing talent for getting to know people, not through anything more than being really interested in things, and being able to share that interest and enthusiasm with others.

Boo just did stuff, stuff that he liked. Walking, camping, spoon whittling, board games, guitar playing, survival weekends, games conventions, gigs, festivals, motorcycle riding and probably loads of other things before I knew him. None of this was flashy, or competitive (except the board gaming, he had a shrewd eye and loved to pull off an unexpected victory!). If he found something interesting or wanted to give something a go, he just did. He was the enthusiast’s enthusiast. Since yesterday Facebook has been full of people mourning Boo, and celebrating what they did with him by taking part in these enthusiasms.

I’ve also spent the last 24 hours thinking of all the great stuff I did in Boo’s company. I think some of the best days I’ve ever had have been knocking around with him, laughing and then talking seriously, but mostly laughing. I bet there are 50, 60, 100 people thinking about the times they laughed with Boo, and enjoyed his company in doing all those interesting things.

Once he accidentally got a close family member as high as a kite. At the end of my Stag Do we came home after an obligatory visit to ‘Great Expectations’, Reading’s premier ‘nite-spot’. My relative (I’ll maintain his anonymity) made himself a cuppa and, spotting a tupperware box full of home made cookies, decided to help himself to half a dozen of them to go with his tea. He wasn’t to know that these were special biscuits, made by Boo, with a magical ingredient. But he soon worked it out, and spent quite a bit of time in the back garden, having a huge white out, followed by a nice long sleep.

Boo loved to remind me about the time ‘mild mannered’ me called him the C word after he played a dastardly trick hand during a game of “Glory to Rome”. I should have known he was really poorly when he didn’t laugh at that on our group chat. He loved a pun, and a dirty joke. The last time I saw him was at Robin Ince’s gig last week at the Courthouse in Otley. You could hear his laugh across the room when Robin told us Dame Judy Dench’s favourite dirty joke, about the Vicar who had to give a talk about sex to his local Women’s Institute, but told his wife it was about sailing (the punchline was “he’s only done it twice – the first time he was sick, and the second time his hat blew off!”). I’ll tell that joke often, and think about how much he laughed at it.

Many of those great memories are about music, which was what first made him my friend, and which he was passionate about. I remember sneaking off work with him one day to buy ukuleles, so we could form the short-lived (and short statured) “Thin White Ukes”, who played to mostly appreciative audiences at open mic nights at the Station and Coopers in Guiseley. Then there’s jamming with Tom and Miles and others in his basement, eating pizza and taking turns to play solos until it became too late to carry on without pissing off the neighbours. Listening to his and Abi’s annual Christmas Single, singing impromptu harmonies with Katherine, Boo’s wife, and the perfect partner for him – sharing his gifts, talents and enthusiasm for art and music and other good and important things. Watching him watching Abi play and sing with her big band Jazz group and with the Steelers, with such warm, under-spoken pride at her talents and how she has grown up as a fantastic person, another enthusiast. I’ve delighted in sharing in his delight at her talents and promise.

A lot of those memories will be about gigs – moshing along to The Hold Steady in Sheffield, trudging through mud (sorry Boo, even you couldn’t get me to like festivals) at WOMAD. Even in recent weeks, when he’s not been well, we were singing at the tops of our voices at the Smyths at the Brudenell, and laughing at Robin Ince in Otley. It was very like Boo that within 20 seconds of sitting down at the front, he and Ince were swapping tips on great bands to see live. Wherever you go, if it’s got anything to do with music, you’ll meet someone who knows Boo.

He just loved spending time with people, and helping them enjoy themselves too. My father-in-law still talks about the time Boo got him slightly pissed in Coopers, and got him told off when he and I slunk back in far later than we’d said it’d be, or the time Boo organised a day at the Cricket at Headingley for us all, and my Dad, and we watched the beer-snakes and ate more pizza, in the sun.

He really was a great person to be with, but he also held many things to be important. His family, most of all, as well as his friends. Also, he didn’t have time for bigots, and in recent years it was great to see how annoyed they got when Boo had told them they were a ‘Silly Billy’ or a ‘Silly Sausage’ on Facebook. We’ve all been better off, and better people, for knowing you Boo, and I hope that you knew that too.

We’ve got one last gig booked, the tickets bought a long time ago. In a couple of weeks we’ll go see an event dedicated to the Shipping Forecast. I’ll wear the Shipping Forecast T-shirt like we planned, and have a great evening, in your honour Boo. xx

I’m raising money for Cancer Research and Marie Curie, These charities are both very important sources of research and support for people living with cancer – which almost half of us will experience in our lifetimes in the UK.

In the last few years I’ve lost very good friends, and colleagues to the disease, and I know of many other people who are living well either in the aftermath of, or with cancer.

If you’ve a spare quid or two (every little helps) and you feel that you can contribute, it’ll definitely help me to know I’ve got your support, especially around the 4k mark, when it becomes a bit of a battle of will! I’ll post an update tomorrow to let you know how I got on

https://www.givengain.com/project/ed-raising-funds-for-cancer-research-uk-marie-curie-and-swimathon-foundation-99256

We were trapped in a punishing echo-chamber. As the anger and desperation of those whose inboxes were being submerged in panicked messages grew, so did the number of messages we received. After a few days, some people recognised the trap in which we were caught. They started replying – with messages that ran through various versions of “can everyone please stop replying to these messages!”. These ‘please stop replying’ messages also pinged around in their hundreds – and were joined eventually by a new version, in which people berated people for asking people to stop sending messages to the email address involved.

After some days of this, the emails stopped coming. Weirdly I almost missed them. By this point I had joined a few online groups and twitter threads where people were expressing their amusement at the situation, or amazement at the numbers of emails.

Then the spam started. Somehow (I don’t know how, I’m not a spammer) the whole operation seemed to be a method of harvesting email addresses to sell on to cyber criminals and fraudsters, or otherwise enabling them to get past our junk filters. Since then I have been receiving 10-15 emails a day from a dreadful company of characters, some of whom are famous (Barak Obama’s lawyers and doctors feature heavily, as do various members of the Gaddafi family). Many are designed to be faceless bureaucrats, administrative workers or bank clerks, with anodyne, believable names.

Some of them have come into fortunes by far means, or by luck. They tell me that they are looking for dependable, trustworthy and honourable people to help them keep this money safe, or funnel it into the hands of family in the UK, or to orphans, hospitals or to pay for operations of desperately ill friends, or desperately ill children of friends.

At first I enjoyed the deliberate mistakes and inconsistent or unlikely details (designed, I’m told, to act as a filter to stop the knowledgeable, experienced or savvy recipient from replying, so that only vulnerable “marks” get through). I posted juicy ones to Facebook. My favourite is Mrs Jones the Japanese-Welsh bank clerk, who had married a Parisian before settling in Burkina Faso where she had stumbled across a large quantity of money, which now needs a safe haven in England. My friends and I also chuckled at the General in the US Army who had two different ranks, and used his first name and surname interchangeably throughout the email.

Since then things have taken a darker turn. My inbox is more likely to involve pleading stories of cancer, political danger, or family members at risk. I am asked to “reply me immediately” by imaginary people who are emailing strangers who seem upstanding, out of desperate need. The most effective ones evoke false images: children in hospital, people lying on dock-sides, eyes staring out of the ill-lit insides of helicopters and boats.

I no longer read them, of course. I delete every email that begins “I do not know you” or “dear friends, hello”. But I can’t ignore them. The point is that whilst the people are fictions, these later stories are real, some of them, many of them. There are so many desperate people in the world, and I ignore them, for the most part. I delete them. But the spam swills around, just out of view, lapping at the edges of my inbox.

Skid across the green hedges and out of sight.

The driving wind dries the sighing, rattling corn,

The white ghost of the green life it had before.

A threshold is being passed.

https://blog.oup.com/2015/02/threshold-word-origin-etymology/

At first glance Goring and Streatley looks like the sort of place they take photos of for the front of last-minute airport biscuit gifts. However, it has a much richer history than the postcard picture would imply. Read on for evidence of 10s of thousands of years of human occupation, from the Mesolithic to Iron Age agriculture, a Roman Villa. Moving much close to the the present day, we find an early 19th ‘private venture’ girls boarding school run by a widow, just at the time when the State was about to step in and provide for mass education.

Walking round a bend in the river, into a picturesque complex of bridge, lock, moorings and weirs, I think we’ll be struck by the nature of this place as cross-roads, where the ridgeway crosses the Thames. Rather than a frozen picturesque scene, it is a constant resting point in thousands of years of journeys. The travellers who have been coming through this place have travelled up and down the river and along a track which, when it was first walked, stretched across the North Sea into mainland Europe. When Mesolithic nomadic hunting gave way to transhumance, after the Islands were separated from mainland Europe about 4000 years ago, this track became a path, then a kind of roadway alongside which settled groups lived and traded.

Goring is saturated with evidence of this long history of human activity and settlement. In the village itself there’s a great deal of history poking out above the sands of time – in the buildings where people still live, work and worship. But if we rush along for the chocolate box image we’ll miss some really interesting stuff on the way.

On our walk into the village centre, we’ll pass a couple of fields near ‘Gatehampton Farm’ where, over the last 30 years or so, a series of digs have uncovered evidence of much earlier activity. The view from the ground does not contain any hint of this long history, but if we use satellite images from Google Earth’s archive, dated 2004, we can see something amazing.

The dark lines and circles are evidence of Neolithic and bronze-age settlement. The circles (some double circles) are bronze-age burial mounds, used to honour the dead, and mark one group’s territory from another. The lines are earlier Neolithic ditches, possibly made to drain the land for growing crops.

What you can’t see from the pictures here are the multiple finds in this same area of Mesolithic flint tools. The earliest of these is from around 10,000 years ago when the climate suddenly switched at the end of the last glacial period, going from the coldest to temperatures comparable to today in around 50 years. This warming was accompanied by the growth of grasses and grazing ideal for horses and reindeer – which is what Mesolithic hunters were probably killing and dressing in this area, where these animals would perhaps have been drawn to the water.

Gatehampton is steeped in evidence of human activity. Also in the same place is a large Roman villa. The local South Oxfordshire Archaeological Society have been investigating and then excavating this site every summer since the mid 80s, uncovering substantial structures, including a bathhouse, and interesting finds suggesting wealthy occupants. Overlying the Mesolithic, bronze-age and Roman activities are Anglo Saxon finds, some of which suggest continuity of use of things like grain ovens between Roman and later periods.

Getting into the centre of the two villages, David Ford Nash’s site makes clear the continuing importance of Goring and Streatley as a crossing point, and also tells us about the conflict between the use of the river as a source of power for a flour mill, and as a trade route. Building up a weir created a powerful flow of water to turn the mill, but made it difficult for boats to pass through. Flash locks were used to create floods of water that allowed boats to cross weirs, and there was one in the river here. If that sounds exciting, it was also dangerous. In 1634 a passenger boat overturned in the lock at Goring and 60 people were drowned. A surfeit of liquids remains a real risk to travellers to Goring today – the village’s heritage trail is dominated by pubs.

We’ll cross the river here at Goring bridge into Streatley and past St Mary’s church, which is an impressive 19th C rebuilding on the site of a Saxon church. You can see the tower on Turner’s unfinished painting, above.

If we take short detour along the high street we can find an unassuming white painted house, a grade II listed building known as ‘the Old School House‘ . There are two school houses in Streatley. A later one, up the road, catered for boys and girls of the village and was possibly one of thousands of schools put up through voluntary charitable subscription in the mid 19th Century. According to Lawson and Silver, one of the interacting reasons that 1870 Education Act was passed (which made elementary education compulsory and give it state support) was that these local charities quickly fell in to debt. Whilst it was relatively easy to persuade donors to contribute to the glamour of setting something up, and seeing a building rise, it seems it was much more difficult to continue to raise funds for the more prosaic task of keeping the school going.

So, the school I’m interested in predates both the legislation, and I think also the building of the village school up the road. It is referred to in this, quite faded, record from the 1841 Census. In the late 18th C and to the mid to late 19th C a lot of schooling, in town and country, was done in the houses of women who taught local children basic literacy and often religious instruction from the bible. There’s a lovely but quite old article by Higginson about the impact of such village schools on literary figures and some interesting illustration of how such ‘Dame’ schools were seen by reformers as parochial, ill-informed and often nothing more than not-very-glorified childminding. Dame schools were ‘private venture’ schools – those not supported by charity or endowment. Whilst they were often informal and housed in kitchens or front rooms of widows or elderly women they existed along a continuum. Some resembled small boarding schools, catering for children from perhaps slightly wealthier members of the local and regional community.

I think this school is an example of the schools looking after a wealthier part of the local community. The 1841 Census describes Mrs Sophia Thomas, aged 65 as the head of a ‘boarding school’, in which there are then listed 9 children aged 10-15 and a woman of 40 years, Georginna Head, possibly a teacher employed by Sophia Thomas. Sophia’s will is also available online, and the school obviously served her well, along with investments she made and inherited from her father and husband given the generous bequest of capital (over £1000) she was able to leave to her niece Sophie, in 1857. The purchasing power of that sum today would be about £95k). Her father Joseph gets an interestingly brief mention in the Reading Mercury as a churchwarden, in an advert offering a reward for the return to his parish of an absent father. This James Woodley, had absconded and left abandoned his wife and children without means of support, further suggesting that the Hannington and Thomas family were pillars of the community. I think that what we have here is a very respectable though very small girls’ school.

Sophia’s life was not an easy one. After marrying and moving to live in Wales she had a son who died very young, followed soon after by her husband Mathew. She then returned to look after her father until his death in1810. After this she seems to have opened a school, whether through a sense of educational vocation or as a means of supplementing the income from any inheritance she had perhaps received from her father. As this book by Christina de Bellaigue tells us, the historical record for schools like this is often sparse. Historians rely on memoirs and other biographical records to help piece together a story for a place like this.

In the case of Shophia Thomas’s school we have a few records such as the census from 1841 and 1851, and some newspaper adverts like the one above from January 1839. Her adverts are quite understated affairs, especially when compared to adverts for schools on either side, presenting themselves as establishments for Young Ladies, trumpeting the proprietor’s attention to the morals and health of those in her charge. Perhaps she could not afford the cost of the greater number of words, or perhaps the reputation of Mrs Thomas’s School spoke for itself. The last advert, from the Reading Mercury of January 1841 is the last one we have for Sophia’s school, which suggests that it was soon after the census that the school closed, and emphasises the ephemeral nature of such private ventures. By 1851 Sophia is listed in Streatley still, but this time as a ‘fundholder’ – living off the investments and perhaps some savings that she gathered from her work as a school proprietor.

Next post is a long stretch of countryside, through Moulsford and past an interesting small nature reserve called ‘Tara’s Piece‘. I’ve got no idea what we’ll find in this next stretch…

It’s unlikely to happen this year, as it relied on us being able to get accommodation along the way, and at the moment the hospitality industry is locked down. To stave off the disappointment I thought it’d be nice to do the walk virtually – to use photographs and information from the internet, or the walk guide book and other books I have at home. Along the way I think I might learn some more about the history of the places we would have been travelling through.

We start in Pangbourne, one of those places you drive to on a Sunday afternoon, perhaps looking for good pubs on the riverside. Typical of villages in Berkshire and Oxfordshire, it is the sort of place you don’t really think about as having a history, though parts of it look conspicuously old.

Gelling and Cole’s brilliant book “the Landscape of Place-Names” tells us that “Paega’s Burna”, the Anglo Saxon name, was “the place on the river where Paega’s people live”. David Nash Ford’s interesting website, says the first mention of the place in the record was the grant of Pangbourne from the Bishop of Leicester to King Beorhtwulf (‘Bright Wolf’) of Mercia in AD 851. Beorhtwolf gets a brief mention in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle (A and E), looking in to be defeated by a large force of Vikings who sacked Canterbury and London in his fleeing wake. The Vikings in turn were defeated by King Aethelwulf (‘Nobel Wolf’) at the battle of Acleah somewhere in present day Surrey in that same year.

King Beorhtwulf of Mercia – who owned Pangbourne in AD 851

Pangbourne’s entry in the Domesday book is a good illustration of the changes in ownership of land following the conquest of 1066, and in particular the replacement of English landowners with Norman tenants loyal to William the Conqueror. Just over half the land is recorded as being owned by King William himself, with the rest as belonging to one Miles Crispin. Open Domesday records Crispin as a major landowner, which was not a bad reward for fighting in, and providing knights for William’s invasion of England. According to the excellent website http://localhistorian.uk/qlh-ebook/ Crispin was formerly a landless, obscure relative of the Baron de Bec of Calvados. Whilst not quite a rags to riches story, his rise does help explain why William was set on, and his followers so keen to help with, an invasion that would provide a great deal of land with which to reward feudal vassals.

The village was granted to Reading Abbey by Henry I (AD 1100-1135), and it was the place where the last Abbot of Reading, Hugh Faringdon, was arrested after being accused of sending financial aid to the northern rebels during the Pilgrimage of Grace. This was a rebellious protest against Henry VIII’s closing of monasteries and pilgrimage centres across England. Faringdon had enjoyed Henry’s patronage and strongly supported him in his battle with Rome over his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, but had refused to hand over the Abbey to the King’s agents in 1538.

Individual monasteries and abbeys were closed after evidence had been found (or created) by royal investigators that the monks were not living within their vows of poverty or chastity. Faringdon sought to persuade the King that his monastery really was piously following its ‘rule’ (the instructions and rules that governed the actions and daily activities of the monks living there). Whether he actually was a supporter of the rebellious northerners is not clear. His trial lasted only one day, the 14th of November 1539, and he was executed in haste either the following day, or the day after. His hanging, drawing and quartering certainly quickly cleared the way for Henry VIII’s agents to seize the Abbey and its wealth (https://www.readingmuseum.org.uk/blog/last-abbot-reading).

Before we start off the walk out of Pangbourne, I’d like to mention Ambrose Petrocokino, a late 19th Century explorer and adventurer, who settled in Pangbourne and wrote books with brilliant sounding titles such as ‘Cashmere, Three weeks on a Houseboat’ and ‘Along the Andes’. Peterocokino was surely one of the inspirations for at least one of Terry Jones’ and Michael Palin’s “Ripping Yarns” episodes. One of his journeys was possibly to Japan, where he seems to have developed a love of netsuke. He returned to Britain with a small collection, which are now housed at the Reading Museum.

In Pangbourne itself the river is not very accessible. The walk starts at the station and immediately turns away from the river on the road up the steep hill. This is the busy road to Oxford, the traffic queueing to get across the toll bridge reinforces the impression that most people are just passing through Pangbourne to get somewhere else. Halfway up the hill we will reach a left turn that looks like a driveway, but is the start of this part of the path.

This is the Hartslock Bridleway which leads to Hartslock, a beautiful wooded area on the side of the river, and the only thing approaching a summit on the whole of day one (probably the whole walk). Hartslock reserve is famous for Orchids and butterflies.

Bee orchids attract pollinating bees by mimicking a potential mate. https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/wildlife-explorer/wildflowers/bee-orchid. This picture of an amazing example was taken on the North Downs way, not very far from Pangbourne.

Continuing round the bend in the river we reach the Budapest of Berkshire, the twin villages of Goring and Streatley, which I’ll post about next.