The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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8:30am on Thursday, 16th April, 2026:
Weird
Legend has it that an orang utang ran into this tree near our house, where it was frozen in time forever.
8:55am on Wednesday, 15th April, 2026:
Weird
There used to be a large church in Colchester named after St Nicholas. It had a huge spire and dominated the High Street.
It was built by the Saxons in about 1000AD on the site of a Roman building, from the time when Colchester was capital of the province of Britain (a position it held until Boudicca burned it down). It was completely rebuilt in ther 1300s, and then rebuilt and extended in 1875-1876 by Sir George Gilbert Scott, who was the architect of many churches along with the Albert Memorial and the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras station in London. This is when the enormous spire was added.
Attendance dropped off in the 1950s, and the church was demolished in 1955. The land was bought by the Co-Operative Society, which built a department store on the site. The Co-Op ran into money problems in the 2000s, and in 2010 closed the store and several others in Essex. St Nicholas House has now broken up into units, but the original façade remains. In the 1950s, you could demolish thousand-year-old churches with impunity, but in the 2010s you had to keep the exterior appearance of fifty-year-old buildings.
This stone plaque therefore remains on the side of the building, as it was when the Co-Operative Society built the structure:
If they couldn't spell "labour" properly, the store was doomed to fail.
8:49am on Tuesday, 14th April, 2026:
Anecdote
Argh! Bacon fingers!
Co-op carrier bags need better handles.
8:45am on Monday, 13th April, 2026:
Anecdote
A couple of these unmanned kiosks have popped up in the village.
This one is for baked goods; the other, which I suspect does more business because it's near the school, sells sweets.
Both mention that they're monitored by CCTV, to discourage thieves.
Placing the baked goods one outside the pub where the sun will be on it for half a day may also discourage thieves.
9:56am on Sunday, 12th April, 2026:
Weird
Here's another example of Victorians leading the way in the innovative use of modern technology.
7:57am on Saturday, 11th April, 2026:
Anecdote
Oh great. For the past two days, it's felt like a Saturday, and now it actually is a Saturday, it feels like a Sunday.
This retirement malarkey plays merry hell with the days of the week.
8:43am on Friday, 10th April, 2026:
Weird
In the Barnaby Grudge cartoon of the latest issue of Viz, the plot concerns ownership of a mug.
This is the mug:
Hornsea is, of course, my home town.
The fame of Hornsea Pottery lives on!
8:32am on Thursday, 9th April, 2026:
Weird
From one of the Victorian editions of Punch I have on my shelves.
It's uncanny how our forebears could predict uses of artificial intelligence when large language models were 150 years away.
8:53am on Wednesday, 8th April, 2026:
Weird
In those places in the village where the potholes are alarming but there's no available place to put a "hole" sign, some friendly local has taken to outlining the worst ones in red spray-paint.
In another part of the village, they used yellow paint. One of the ones marked thus was subsequently filled in with tarmac, which suggests that the council may have been responsible. They only did the one, though, so perhaps not. The red ones aren't marked by the council, because they're efficiently refreshed every so often with new paint.
In a party political broadcast for the Labour party yesterday, which was intended to address the local elections coming up next month, the Prime Minister spent his time telling us that he didn't go to war against Iran but that the Conservatives and Reform would have done. The Greens and Liberal Democrats wouldn't have joined in either, but he didn't mention that.
Our local TV news went out and about asking people in the region whether they would be voting, and if so, for which party. In the interest of balance, a vox pop was found to support each viewpoint (along with one intending not to vote) , but when asked what the most pressing matter was for them, the answers were universal accross the spectrum: potholes.
Sir Keir Starmer may have correctly figured that local elections are often regarded as a referendum on how well the national government is doing, but that's worth nothing if what really, really gets voters annoyed is a surfeit of holes in the road.
If only there were a tax explicitly created to finance keeping roads in good repair. It could be paid yearly, and be due for every roadworthy vehicle. "Road Tax" would be a good name.
8:26am on Tuesday, 7th April, 2026:
Miscellaneous
The Essex University weekly email shot, imaginatively named Essex Weekly, got around to mentioning that I'd been inducted into the UKIE Hall of Fame. The mention itself wasn't much, but it did link to a web page. I thought this was going to be the UKIE one, but I was wrong: the university made one itself.
https://www.essex.ac.uk/news/2026/03/23/essex-gaming-pioneer-inducted-into-hall-of-fame
As you can see, that award really is more orange than anything other than an orange.
8:22am on Monday, 6th April, 2026:
Outburst
I remember when Easter eggs were shaped like eggs.
Now, they're shaped like Thunderbird 2.
8:27am on Sunday, 5th April, 2026:
Anecdote
We were in a charity shop recently and bought a toy for our grandson. He's a bit young for it at the moment, but I'm sure it will bring him hours of education, or at least entertainment, when he gets older.
So, it's like one of those paper dress-up dolls you can get, but it's made of plywood. Also, you don't so much dress him up as dress him down. You start with a boy, then you take off his clothes, then you take off his skin, then you take off his muscles, then you take off his everything else until he's just a skeleton.
It's ... er ... well-intentioned.
You can remove different individual parts, you don't have to take the whole body to the same level. Want to see what a naked boy with a skeleton head and visible intestines looks like? You can do it.
Here are two simple examples, where I kept him clothed but burrowed into his head.
One looks like Homer Simpson, the other looks as if he didn't put on enough suntan lotion.
You can make great zombies with it, as I'm sure you can imagine. As for the groin area, well my wife and daughter we howling with laughter at what they could do with that, but I didn't look at their creations for fear of psychological trauma.
Quite why the hair stays on until you reach the skull, I don't know. So much for anatomical correctness.
8:26am on Saturday, 4th April, 2026:
Anecdote
Here is a picture of some work being done to a footpath in our village. The surface layer has been removed, leaving an undressed section perhaps two inches deep and maybe four feet long.
Here is a picture of the effect of this on the road.
The footpath was diverted onto the road, with barriers surrounding it. This narrowed the road, so the workers installed the traffic lights. Traffic is so light, though, that most of the time we were left waiting for the light to change but nothing was coming in the opposite direction.
Here is a picture of one of the traffic lights, unplugged by a frustrated resident. No, it wasn't me; I'm law-abiding.
The other one was unplugged, too.
This reinforces my belief that if the space take up by roadworks or whatever is less than that taken up by a parked car, and a car could park where the roadworks are, then you don't need traffic lights any more than you do when someone parks a car there.
8:19am on Friday, 3rd April, 2026:
Weird
Our grandson has a set of wooden bricks with letters and pictures on them. This is one of the pictures:
It looks as if it's some kind of sword-fighting Dalek, but it's not. Apprently, it's a xylophone, a musical instrument the chief purpose of which is to illustrate the letter X.
Personally, I prefer to think of it as a sword-fighting Dalek.
9:06am on Thursday, 2nd April, 2026:
Anecdote
Hey, Sainsbury's: if you put paella rice in a brown packet, people who know nothing about cooking will think it's brown rice. No, writing "paella rice" on the packet isn't enough.
I speak from personal experience here.
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Copyright © 2026 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).