Today’s plan was good: to take some pictures at Crakehall, one of the most attractive cricket grounds I know, during the first home game of the season. It was only when I got the pix back home that I found the sky, on almost every shot, was filled with a multitude of midges. Aaargh! I salvaged a couple… and deleted the rest…
Licenced today: a Shell lorry delivering fuel to a petrol station in Ulverston, Cumbria…
Had a wander round Goole this morning and did a double-take when I saw this shop front…
I called in at North Cave Wetlands yesterday, to see what was about. Avocets were sitting on eggs and, in the absence of marsh harriers, may hopefully raise a brood (avocet chicks, fluffy and long-legged, are a sight to gladden the stoniest heart). Half a dozen terns were wheeling around. Their flight is lazy and loping, until they spot a fish and dive. A stoat carried its young - known as kits - one by one into the woods: a sight which left the couple next to me in a state of rapture. The best sighting was a black-necked grebe, in summer plumage, just like in the photo, with a fan of golden feathers on both sides of the head. It was swimming near little grebes and great crested grebes, which gave a good indication of size. They dive constantly, but with no apparent effort; one second they’re swimming, then suddenly there’s just a widening ripple (Pic by RickenMon, Creative Commons)...
Licenced today: two walkers on a track - Longmire Road - in the Troutbeck Valley…
According to an account in today's Guardian, a copy of the so-called ‘Wicked Bible’ has turned up in New Zealand. By omitting the word “not” from the seventh commandment, this edition, of 1631, appeared to advocate adultery. No one knows how the mistake occurred (or whether it was a mistake at all, rather than, say, an act of literary sabotage by an underpaid and under-appreciated printer’s apprentice). The printers Robert Barker and Martin Lucas were summoned by King Charles I and hauled before the court, where they were fined £300, admonished for their sloppy workmanship and stripped of their printing licence. With the court ordering all Wicked Bibles to be burned, only about twenty copies were saved from the flames.
One aspect of this quirky footnote to biblical history had passed me by. I wasn’t aware, until I read it today, that it took a year for the original typesetting error to be discovered. A year! The Bible is a hard slog, even for the most assiduous readers, which may explain why so many Christians hug their Bible to their chests, wave it like a flag or brandish it like a weapon, instead of actually reading it. In 1631, as now, most Christians would have read a selection of carefully curated excerpts from the good book, and little else. I wonder what percentage of even the most committed Christians have read the Bible in its tedious entirety, from Genesis to Revelation.
Licenced today, for a fee that wouldn't even buy a Big Mac...
