Symptoms

Get rid of Betty and her blood-sucking clan and I, Symptoms the Terrible Benevolent, could become Head of State; I could only accept the post if it came with full executive powers. The county would be in a better place then.

Oh dear, here we go!

Another great venue for mass punch-ups in the mid to late 60s was the Market Place Club. Every week they had live groups on in the upstairs hall ... it was a tanner transfer paid to the old guy who sat at the bottom of the stairs (girls were let in free of charge). Anyway, the rock bands would play, the girls would get onto the wooden dancefloor at the front and do their stuff around their handbags (yes, they DID dance around their bags!) and all the blokes would be getting their pints in at the bar at the rear of the hall. During breaks everybody would sit at the rows of tables between the bar standing area and the dance floor. I remember the place was ALWAYS packed. Then somebody would get pushed or be accused of 'tapping-up' somebody's girl then it would all kick-off ... these were proper punch-ups. The Peelers would be called and they would come storming in thumping anybody with reach ... those captured were dragged outside and given a good tuning by the boys in blue. Happy days.

Yep John ... my Granny always called them "Steepy Peas" - farters is what us lads called them. I don't think I would have dared to call them farter peas in front of my Granny.

Another attraction for us lads (once the 'juices' had started to flow through our bodies) was the Fan Dance Show. Sucked in by the amazing paintings outside the attraction and by the fine words of the barker we paid our tanner to get in. I'm sorry to report that the lady doing the fan dance didn't look anything like the ones on the external mural ... oh, and she was so fast with the fans that nothing was revealed. Our 'juices' went unsatisfied!!! The Shows usually ended with a mass brawl ... one year it was so bad that a candyfloss caravan got knocked on its side (with the gadgy still inside) when all the Peelers charged. Brilliant fun to watch.

At the Picnic it was ALWAYS the Shows on 20 acres. My favorite was the boxing booth where all the so-called 'hard' local lads fancied their chances against the inhouse pro. Up they'd get for the three rounds and end-up getting a proper hiding.

Maggs, make sure you bring it inDAWES at night or somebody'll nick it.

Have a look here for the 1871 British Geological Survey of our local pits ... all the details of the different strata and where the coal seams are and the depth of everything. There's also data on how the pits relate to each other ... same seams, etc. You can zoom in and navigate across the chart to read the details. www.largeimages.bgs.ac.uk/iip/historicmaps.html?id=1003563

The problem really lies with a generally casual approach to bio-security on many farms and the 'underground' movement of stock (which is rife). Farms are covered in dung (especially yards and sheds) which is often not cleared effectively or regularly, many sheds and pens are well past their best with broken side panels and roof coverings which allow vermin to easily enter, animal feed is often stored insecurely which allows vermin to contaminate it, and so on. Offending farmers need to get these things organised before badgers are killed. I visited farms in Blighty for the best part of 40 years and was often shocked with how scruffy and unnecessarily dirty and unhealthy they were - hardy suprising that infections in herds is so commonplace.

There's always something satisfyingly tactile about a SLR body, something sadly missing from the plague of smartphones most folks use. The other advantage for people of a 'certain age' using an SLR is you can use the viewfinder without first having to don the specs; and the viewfinder is great in bright light when all you see in the view sceen is reflected glare. My only gripe about all these digital photos people take is they usually don't exist as hard copies and so are likely to be 'lost'. Good management seems to be the key ... regular review, back-up storage somewhere, and printing out the decent snaps for all to see. I still love my old Canon A1, complete with motordrive and lense collection ... something reassuring about analogue technology. Mind I do have a Sony digital SLR but it isn't the same ... no smell of chemicals, glow of red light, the magic of the image firming-up on wet paper.

My Dad loved jam & bung (cheese) sandwiches ... he said it was an army thing. I still have the occasional banana sandwich with demerera sugar but always between rough-cut brown crusty bread. It's decades since I last had white sliced bread (I would have been a poor student in London) but fondly remember chip sandwiches. But nothing beats white Cheshire cheese with a dollop of Gentleman's Relish* smeared over it, then held in place between thickly buttered crusty brown bread. Yum! * Gentleman's Relish is a type of chutney and not some iffy Victorian sex game.

Keith, I was tempted to have a look at that stuff but thought what's the point ... I just know what their demonic ranting will be about. The trouble is that these types of swivel-eyed crackerjacks and their fairweather followers seem to be gaining in influence to a frightening degree. You can't listen to a news broadcast without some 'foundatation/thinktank/BigGgroup/pro-lifewhackjob' being allowed to spout bile in the name of balance. What's worse is the shyster politicians always seem to kow-tow to these pressure groups. Just look at any group wielding power in our so-called democracy and you'll find the clammy-hand of folks like the pinch-faced presbyterians* on the tiller ... look no further than ACPO (the boss cops' cabal) or the NAHT (the boss teachers' cabal). I don't have a problem if folk need the crutch of religion to lean on but don't let them use it as a banner to march behind whilst treading on the views of the majority. OK, I've now drawn a large target on my back and await the arrival of the Crusaders ... *this represents a pejorative code for all intolerant religious groups ... also it scans better.

Or the KKK.

KeithL wrote, "... - a little kitty found its way to my house last year and decided to stay - now it is a huge black and white beast which weighs a ton." The Beast of Bedlington perhaps? Spread the story far and wide and maybe Bedders will be the new Bodmin.

Being a devout and practising atheist I think these Humanist bashes are the way to go out - I've been to a few recently and they were refreshingly upbeat affairs. The God bothering jobbies are so predictable by comparison.

Golf ball ... depending how big it is - NSA perhaps. They have eyes and ears everywhere!

The Forum's resident Guardianista cannot be wound up. GGG knows full well that this Guardianista is happy that the English language should be used in all its full majesty and should never be censored (apart from self-censored maybe). However, that right to colourfully declare what most right-thinking folks see as offensive, must come with the expectation to be challenged by the 'forces of reason'. The hypocracy of the Spanish is amazing when you consider that they were historically the biggest perpertrators of vicious world-wide military colonisation, even worse than the Brits. They even today have a couple of colonies in North Africa, namely, Ceuta and Melilla. Oh, and let's not forget the Canary Islands.

Yes ... but I'm not sure if it's available for nowt.

Here's a photo I found of the wash being done in a barrel ... the poss-stick can just be seen in the old girl's hands

Looks a bit like the 'town gas' process of old ... maybe the solid lumps left at the end could be called 'coke'.

Ancestry is an excellent site for sniffing-out your family past. I took out their 1 month free trial together with their big rival Find Your Past freebie to compare. I found a month wasn't really long enough to delve comprehensively so I had to make a decision which one to subscribe to and at the time Ancestry was a much better site with more records. I looked at their 'pay as you go' sub but decided the 'premium' sub was more useful to my needs - the thing is that once you start searching the whole thing becomes uncontrollably addictive and you realise that you've spent hours (at each sitting!!!) looking so the 'pay as you go' sub would soon mount-up. If you need certificates (birth, death, marriage) a good tip is to use Ancestry's order page but don't send it off to them as the charge twenty odd quid a cert; just use the data their order form generates to order direct from the Government's General Register Office at: http://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/home.asp and the certs cost £9.25. The FreeBMD site worth using as well and will generate tons of useful stuff for nowt. I've got back to 1731on my Mum's side and still working on it; I've got back 150 years on my Dad's but I'm discovering orphans ... kids left alone after deaths in child birth and a number of fathers killed in pits. What's up-lifting is these kids being formally adopted by relatives. Brett ... I wonder if the library edition is the 'full' version or is crippled in some way?

Adam wrote: " ... every area should have a memorial to miners who worked and died down the pits not just places in South East Northumberland but those in Yorkshire, Scotland, Wales, etc.". When doing my Sunday trawl (see above) for images of colliery pit heads I was suprised at how many mining memorials there are in the different regions; these range from the obvious tubs through to beautiful bronze sculptures ... many funded by the local communities. Many of these memorials are dedicated to those who died in specific pit disasters/accidents rather than 'areas'. Woodhorn would appear the have tons of resources but little of it seems to be available online ... it's 'hiding' behind a £4.25 'paywall' for EACH image. Yep, I appreciate they have to generate dosh to run the place but ....

Most folks make judgments about a person's worth based on superficial observations and what they may see in Milly is a big conk, a down-turned gob, crooked gnashers, unfeasibly lush locks, and an irritating adenoidal squawk. They can't wade past any of that to discover if he is anything other than a caricature. Steve Bell, the Guardian political cartoonist, has a brilliant take on Camaroonie ... he's rendered as a bright red condom, complete with the 'tit' on top. Oh, and always dressed in an Eton uniform. Steve Bell has a website of his work and it's worth a visit for a laugh: www.belltoons.co.uk/

My question about "Suggestions as to how far out from Bedders should the scope of the Memorial Site go would also be welcome." is views on which pits to include. Should we restrict it to Bedders pits A, D, E, F or cast the net a little wider but the problem is where should the boundary be? Should Blyth (Bates) for example be included and others a little further out? The original idea was for a Bedlington Memorial, not a Northumberland one. John I'll check your site for images of pit heads ... I only did a quick look elsewhere on the web on Sunday.

Maggs, the trouble is those with deep mining knowledge have either croked or are getting their OAP; shortly there'll be nobody left who knows how to sink a shaft, work a seam, wind a cage, or any of the hundreds of skills needed. 300 years worth of coal below and even if there was a concerted drive by the Government to support deep mining there'd be no expertise left to do it.