A few years ago, in the garden, a mob of jackdaws went after and killed a blackbird fledgeling so I'm not that sympathetic and magpies will bully jackdaws off bird feeders. Nature in all it's survivalist glory? Jim

Being a bit pedantic, kyo was common in north Durham and Northumberland for cattle perhaps morphed a bit to coos and Anglo-Saxon was a shared language/dialect in the Borders by the 7/8thC and well up to NE Scotland as in Doric while Gaelic had been pushed to the west, but common in Galloway...

Ian Tyler's book Seathwaite Wad is a good read, getting quite expensive to buy so if you can borrow it so much the better. Jim

Suppose a word of caution, about 3 years ago my pee went red and I explained to myself with having eaten red jelly or beetroot in something. It wasn't it turned out to be an enlarged prostate, uncomfortable but dealt with quite happily. Sometimes it's still too normal to think it'll be better...

I wonder if neoprene normally used to be pre-aged in 'ye olden days'. I got through 2 suits between 1968 and 1983/4, they were generally just washed in the nearest stream and apart from knees/elbows/crotch being regularly wrecked (with very average repairs ) and becoming a bit tighter on the zip...

I seem to recall BSC using punched card programing and knitting needle sorting when I got some computer-based auditing training about 1974/5. In all fairness BSC were quite advanced in using computing for finance and some aspects of manufacturing operations. Jim

Many years ago (1976/7?) my girlfriend and I went to Machynlleth Alternative Technology site, it had quite recently started. I managed to utterly muck up the pronunciation so she was in hysterics anyway. One of their features at the time was an energy efficient modern-sized house, looked quite...

Excellent stuff, just enough annotations and wistfully thoughtful backing soundtrack and I rather like the occasional shutter clicks. Jim

I think 'poss' is reasonably common, there was a poss stick mill down by the river here until the 1920's (Durham Derwent). My Mum had a single tub Hoover with an agitator, mechanical poss stick a bit like a domestic version of those tubs on the dressing floor at Killhope, and a rather lethal...

Suppose you need to say "was", I suspect most people are aware of the intervention of a few idiots so the tree was chain sawed a few weeks ago. The site's been sorted although some damage to The Wall happened and possibly the resultant timber will be used somewhere near by, maybe Housesteads...

Did wander in a few times in the 1970/80's on the way back home from Sleets Gill etc, lovely pub but a bit remote even as a way back to Middlesbrough. As Speleofish points out most pubs are struggling, rural ones even more so. I'm not helping much as it's probably a year since I last went to...

I've had a hypothermic event once and as a casualty I can happily (now) confirm it's utterly disorientating and deeply scary, I had no real idea what was happening beyond my vision suddenly got very blurry, apparently I was mumbling (even more) gibberish. I kept on trying to pull off the blanket...

Presumably these things are called zappatites or maybe frankmites?

This would have been one example of where AditNow's archive was so handy as over the years people attached numerous articles and reports to mines, possibly John Lawson and/or Roy Fellows would know. There were links relating to aspects of their explorations in WCMRG journals but they may only...

Not least for a record of the people involved for example Eric Richardson around Nenthead, he generally managed a benign smile, and the helpful contributions of people to put names to faces 20 years or so after the event and Legendrider's interest in older cars, which helped date a Beckermet...