It's cuckoos, buck deer farts and alternative St George's day festivities this month, as Professor Nick Groom looks at the English April... What does a cuckoo sound like? Silly question: ‘cuck-oo!’ So imagine my surprise when a university lecturer confessed to me that she didn’t know and couldn’t recognize this seasonal ... Read More...
England
Ever wondered why the date of Easter is so unpredictable? Professor Nick Groom explains the bewildering mathematical equations required to calculate Easter, and why our day-to-day lives are still to some degree governed by theological arcana... Saturday just past was Egg-Feast Saturday – the time for eating up eggs. The Sunday following ... Read More...
To Liverpool, a foreign island city-state that somehow got itself attached to mainland England. An ‘island’ because, as with the fauna of Galapagos, it has evolved in isolation into something very strange. Let’s start with the voices. It is widely believed that there is a ‘Scouse accent’. In fact there ... Read More...
The above photo shows Lord Uxbridge recovering from the shock of losing his leg - a leg which later went on to become a celebrity in its own right. And so begins another strange Wikipedia article... Lord Uxbridge's leg was shattered by a cannon shot at the Battle of Waterloo and ... Read More...
Professor Nick Groom's book The Seasons: An Elegy for the Passing of the Year is a celebration of the English seasons and the trove of strange folklore and often stranger fact they have accumulated over the centuries. Following his Christmas post for The Dabbler, Nick turns his attention to February... All the ... Read More...
Professor Nick Groom's new book The Seasons: An Elegy for the Passing of the Year is a celebration of the English seasons and the trove of strange folklore and often stranger fact they have accumulated over the centuries. In an exclusive post for The Dabbler, Nick looks at the English Christmas... Hallowe’en, ... Read More...
Pictured above is an old london character - The Greenwich Time Lady, star of another strange story discovered on my tour around the weirder articles to be found on wikipedia... Ruth Belville (5 March 1854 – 7 December 1943), also known as the Greenwich Time Lady, was a businesswoman from London. She, ... Read More...
As well as bringing you the best culture writing in the blogosphere, The Dabbler also gives away a lot of free books. Here's what we thought of a recent choice... We always like it when a book club member who wins a book takes a moment to send in their own ... Read More...
Continuing our occasional series on shops and shopping, Brit takes us to a rather unusual 'garden centre'... The best shop in the Bristol area, and by extension the world, is Chief Trading Post, in Oldland Common. It is, I suppose, a Garden Centre; but Chief Trading Post is a ‘Garden Centre’ ... Read More...
The most memorable and piercing end of term report I received at school consisted of this single sentence: “Andrew’s attitude is a not entirely displeasing mixture of cooperation and sedition.” This headstone-worthy epigram was penned by my A-level history teacher, a Mr Berwick Coates, and blow me if I didn’t ... Read More...
