A truth psephologically acknowledged

Saw this:

And then this:

Badelyng by …

I learned one thing over the weekend: penguins collectively afloat are a ‘raft’, but ashore are a ‘waddle’. I’m a fan of penguins, so that makes sense.

That bit of serendipity reminded me of Conan Doyle’s attempts to be more than a writer of detective stories. While the Professor Challenger stories, especially the first, The Lost World, are as good as they get, let us not forget the two stories involving Sir Nigel Loring in the Hundred Years War. The prequel, Sir Nigel, is a picaresque romance, somewhere vaguely between Walter Scott and Cervantes (though nowhere near as convincing or engaging as either).

Here is young Sir Nigel being schooled by the aged Knight of Duplin (chapter XI):

“Ah, lad, you are a Solomon to some of them. Hark ye! only last week that jack-fool, the young Lord of Brocas, was here talking of having seen a covey of pheasants in the wood. One such speech would have been the ruin of a young Squire at the court. How would you have said it, Nigel?”​​

“Surely, fair sir, it should be a nye of pheasants.”​​

“Good, Nigel—a nye of pheasants, even as it is a gaggle of geese or a badling of ducks, a fall of woodcock or a wisp of snipe. But a covey of pheasants! What sort of talk is that? …”​

A badling of ducks … but only when they’re afoot. Or as the Boke of St Albans would have them, A badelyng of Dokis.

The Boke interests me for several reasons:

• It was the first English attempt at colour printing (as right).
• It is usually credited to a female author, Dame Juliana Berners (or Barns), of whom little seems definitely known, but quite a lot implied.
• It mainly consists of three essays: one each on hawking, hunting (that one may be the contribution of Dame Juliana, and a rendering in English verse of an earlier French text) and heraldry. To that, in a later addition, was added a fourth, on angling. To me it seems a strange collation from a putative Benedictine prioress.
• It has the look-and-feel of an ‘improve yourself’ text, which I speculate is designed for the up-and-coming ‘new men’ of the later fifteenth century. Perhaps this is ‘book two’, for those who have already acquired the skills of which knife to use, which way to pass the port, and why one shouldn’t wipe one’s snout on one’s sleeve.
• There is an appendix of collective nouns, which seems to be the Ur-text for all subsequent time-wasters.

When I started in the teaching racket, the late Alan Durband was a reliable stand-by for the classroom. Either from him, or some other, I remember pages of formulaic and prescriptive (and, above all, time-filling) exercises. Some of which would be ‘Collective nouns’. I was, even in my green innocence, not fully convinced of the usefulness of such stuff — but, even today, one can resort to lists of such stuff. As here.

That prompts the sick-inducing thought that, some where, ESOL students are still being fed this rubbish.

On the level

No. Haven’t gone all funny handshakes and bare legs (or is that ‘on the square’?).

It just that there are two current concerns chez Redfellow:

• the first is finding time to relish the defenestration of outgoing President Trump and the restoration of proper order;
• the second is flicking to and from the Viking Recorder.

One of those may need explanation.

The fine city of York occupies a sump. All water coming down from the hills beyond Harrogate and Ripon tends to find its way down the Ouse. From the other direction, towards the north, comes the Foss — variously marked on the map as a dyke, a ditch, a stream and even a full-blown river. The Foss enters the Ouse just down river from the Castle. And it has proved to be the real bugger.

So a barrier was constructed to control the Foss. In the last flooding of York, that proved inadequate, so more potent pumping gear had to be installed. As with all the hydraulics of this part of the world, chucking larger and larger quantities of water into the main streams merely aggravates the problems a bit further down. So sorting the flood problem here, means a couple of years later a new ‘project’ is needed there.

In 2015, when large parts of York went submarine, we tripped down to London. There’s a stretch of the line past Selby where both sides of the line were inundated. The train was running on a thin raised embankment, with water both ways. Impressive, but a trifle worrying.

Before 2015 there was the worst flooding in memory in 2000. The Ouse swelled to 5.5 metres above its normal levels, 540 properties were flooded, and damage was estimated at way over two million.

Chez Redfellow lies to the north of the A19 — which, give or take, is the route of the old Roman road from the Porta Principalis Dextra (we call it Bootham Bar) to Cataractonium (a.k.a. Catterick). And the Romans, in their civil engineering wisdom, seem to have followed a small ridge north-westwards out of the fortress. So there a discernible hump between us and the river.

Even so, the Viking Recorder (the rather unimpressive but magnificently-named official measuring station) is what matters in these parts —

• 

As I write, the level is measuring 3.54m — but estimated to reach 4m or 4.5m tomorrow morning.

A good day …

At my advanced age, surviving one more day is a small achievement.

Shifting a couple of hundredweight of smokeless briquettes (well, OK: 200 kg in foreign money) and a cubic metre of hardwood logs is something far more.

Even the Arthur-itis rose (or didn’t) to the occasion.

A nice library

Quick flick through the morning tweets, and found one extolling the virtue of a library.

Tell me about it.

The accompanying image, for a moment, had me puzzling:

Hold on! I know that … err … Cambridge? Yes, Cambridge. Trinity, Cambridge? Yes, of course. The Wren Library. Took a moment, but realisation struck through.

Probably the second most evocative library in this archipelago.

The first? Ah, c’mon!