Hey, Let's Tunnel Our Way In To The Prison

Sounds like a plan …

Hell, the wall's only ten feet thick; hand me that unfeasibly small hammer.

And lo, they tunneled their way into the prison to find that it had ceased to be a prison a-hundred-and-fifty years ago.

We've been removing Boardman's floor to reveal the full volume of the keep.

See that door way up there on the right, with the fire exit sign? That's the original doorway into the Great Hall and pretty soon it will be restored to its original use.

You can make out the floor level of the Great Hall running round the keep walls.

And way over yonder, that big dark arched opening is the kitchen fireplace at the other end of the Great Hall. That's the door to the garderobes to the left and above those will be the minstrels' gallery.

That huge stone arch shape was going to support the main floor as part of William Rufus' original build in 1086 but it was abandoned when the east wall began to fall down the mound and was replaced with a massive spine wall (see the first couple of posts in the Norwich Castle link).

Just the other side of the three yellow guys is another yellow guy who's just crawled through the re-opened doorway in the top photo. That will be the main entrance to the archæological display area.

Tim, Gabriela and Erin wander off in search of coffee …

Nearly all the stripping out and archæological investigations have been done; it'll soon be time to start putting the Royal Palace of Henry the First back to how it should be. 

 

More to come … Don't miss it!

Twelve Cellists Play the Chase music from Butch and Sundance … Who Needs A Reason?

Radio 3 played this at me on my drive home just now and it cheered me the hell up. Hope it does the same for you.

Meanwhile, Back in the Land of the Crusty Cumtwang …

There is a bunch of occasionally amusing pedants sequestered in this sceptred isle who name themselves the Plain English Campaign.

Their raison d'être is admirable as they were founded in the dark, Thatcherite years when management gobbledygook conquered the world and sucked all meaning out of sentences.

Their own Gobbledygook Generator is an absolute joy, especially during dull meetings, but their success has led to the execrable horror that is the Microsoft Word "Conciseness" Tool (shudder).

This po-faced piece of crap constantly rebukes me for using English for the sheer joy of the language, nagging me that conciseness would make my document easier to read and suggesting the dullest possible alternatives to pleasurably purple prose.

'Twas reading Nashe that jogged me into this train of thought, when - rather than the plain English of, "King John, in the ninth year of his reign …", our Tom writes, "King John, in the ninth year of the engirting his anointed brows with the refulgent Ophir circle …" Much more fun, I am sure you'd agree.

A couple more examples from the same page; the first a description of the sea battle off Sluys, where our forces, having encountered the French fleet, "there so sliced and slashed them, and tore their planks to mammocks, and their lean guts to kites' meat, that their best mercy was fire and water, which hath no mercy, and not a victualler or a drumbler of them hanging in the wind aloof but was ribroasted …"

Lastly a description of the defensive walls of Yarmouth, "They have towers upon them sixteen; mounts underfonging and enflanking them two of old, now three, which have their thundering tools to compel Diego Spaniard to duck, and strike the wind-colic in his paunch, if he prance too near them."

Forsooth, marry and hey-nonny-no, I feel a distinct temptation eftsoones to commence a Campaign for the return of Elizabethan English. Who's with me?

Friday Morning Wood … Droop

Crusty Cumtwangs - Safe to Use at Work

To save you trawling back through old comments-threads, the byre-yard photo added a nice new word to Katie's scrabble list, but today I found a better one.

Reading Thomas Nashe's "Lenten Stuff" of 1599 - as one does - I came across a corker.

Nashe was one of the Shakespeare, Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe gang of writers, poets and critics who liked nothing better than insulting one another in hilariously OTT purple prose pamphlets. Reading their diatribes is a good source of a Covid-busting giggle or three.

Anyhoo … In the intro to "Lenten Stuff", which responds to a critical pamphlet about a play he'd co-written with Ben Jonson the previous year which got banned and got them both a brief spell in the clink, our Thomas beautifully berates his critics for being "Those greybeard huddle-duddles and crusty cumtwangs" being "struck with such stinging remorse of their miserable Euclionism and snudgery …"

Much as I love "snudgery" my insult of the day simply has to be "crusty cumtwangs".

It actually means "miser" so it's safe to use it at work and I hope you introduce your colleagues to it at your earliest opportunity.

Lenten Stuff is available dirt cheap in the Penguin English Library paperback of Nashe's "The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works" (including some racy porn poetry which got him into all sorts of trouble).

It is actually a satirical piece in praise of Great Yarmouth, which, as long-standing Blogville residents will know is the arsehole of England. Anyone who can refer to that stinking shithole as "ten-thousand-fold delicate paramour of Neptune" and "redoubtable Sophy of the floating kingdom of Pisces" in the same paragraph has got to be worth a read.

Crusty cumtwangs. Use it today!

Where The Hairy Heck Am I?

Or rather, where the hairy heck was I when I took this photograph.

I'll give you a clue; it's at the entrance of the David Attenborough Building …

but then just about every city in Britain has a David Attenborough Building.

Friday Morning Wood - With Added Brickwork and an Iron Cramp

Bugger botox. The older and gnarlier we get, the more attractive we become. Witness the touchy-feely textures on this beautiful byre-yard wall, built in 1830 (from estate records) in the last days of George IV, now home to a whole garden's-worth of plants, moss and lichen and good old creepy-crawlies.

Accidental Art - More Psycopathic Paint Scraper Mayhem

Seascape anyone?

Where We Get Builders' Bum-Cracks

True story …

Wednesday Window - Blue in the Face