To be honest with you, I have no idea what to write about today (Tuesday). I hope this isn’t a sign of things to come. I guess I should tell you about my day so far, though it’s not very exciting.

It started an hour after it was meant to as I was an hour late going to bed the night before and there’s no way I am running up a hill at 5.30 in the morning on only six hours sleep. So instead I went straight to work and got some serious typing done. Half way through the morning the non-working lock on our front gate was changed, and while that was being done the health insurance company I have applied to rang me to ask about my medical history.

Now there’s a thing. A man you’ve never met rings up and says he is from AXA and you prove to him that you are who you say you are. Did I ask him if he was who he said he was? No. And he garbled his name so quickly that it was impossible to catch. Bless him, he was clearly reading from a script and was probably not medically trained at all. Didn’t exactly install confidence in me to tell him the most intimate secrets of my medical past. Not that there are many. Still, I made him laugh a couple of times, I asked him to repeat several things as his accent was a bit strong though very vague, and I still had no idea what he was asking me if I’d had. Though I reasoned that it was probably nasty stuff and if I’d had it I would have recognised it in any accent.

That done, the rest of the day went smoothly. I’ve been doing some more family history research as I have access to some old books, online for a short while, so that’s been taking up a couple of hours in the afternoon while the new novel ‘rests’ as they say in cooking and acting circles. I’m letting the first draft calm down and letting ideas filter through for a few weeks, meantime, I’m back in 17^th century Essex and tracking down my earliest known Collin ancestor, or at least trying to. So, a couple of hours a day scrolling through old books and deciphering the writing – a bit like trying to decipher mister Whagdrstyasu who phoned me about the health plan.

And that’s it really; quiet days at home, until the cat wants something then it gets noisy, working mornings, simple lunches, bit of a read, a bit of a write or research, then a read and glass on the balcony before the evening session of, well, film watching mainly. No complaints here!

Share on Facebook

Kalo mina, happy month! On Saturday, after weeding the garden a bit and cutting back the vine a lot, and after burning it all off and also the other stuff that’s been lying around all summer, and after assuring our concerned neighbour that we were okay and the house wasn’t on fire (very kind of him to worry about us, makes you feel a bit safer), and after (probably) annoying the other neighbours with the smoke and airborne burnt bits, and after lunch was done and an old episode of Lovejoy had been watched, I decided to see if I could find my great-grandmother’s grave in Devon. As you do.

I’d actually been to the churchyard, back in 2010, and I’d looked at all the graves there, or so I thought, but hadn’t seen one for Kate Scott. I later found out that she definitely was buried there, in Crediton, Devon, this is, and I’ve even seen the press cutting that described her funeral. It was seeing a church on the Lovejoy episode that set my mind to it, I guess.

 

I remembered that I had seen a website where interested people with very little else to do had been around photographing graves across the country and posting up results. I wondered if by any chance anyone had done Crediton. Sadly not it seems, so I started looking around for other sources which might help unlock the great Scott mystery, as it’s been called. (For more on this subject and if you fancy joining in, you can see the work I did on it a few years back at this link: http://www.symidream.com/scott/evidence.html)

So, if you live near Crediton and have nothing to do for a few hours and fancy a graveyard walk, perhaps you could look for her while you are there, and take a photo for me. Of the headstone I mean, I don’t want you going round digging anything up. She was Kate Scott (nee Maxwell) and was buried there in 1940. It’s a very nice churchyard to walk around, honest.

 

 

While I was in the area that time, I also walked around Sandford churchyard, as the Scotts lived nearby, at Priorton Mill. I did see one Scott headstone in Sandford, strangely, but not for the famliy I was looking for. I also went to look in Honiton where her husband, the elusive Arthur Henry Scott was buried in 1942, but couldn’t locate his grave either. I’m not very good at this game really.

Anyway, while looking around to see if there was any kind of list of graves or even photos on any other sites, I found this About Crediton church organ. It made me smile and it’s not made up. I thought I would share with you:

“The War Memorial Organ was designed based on plans drawn by the church’s organist Lieutenant Harold Organ FRCO in 1915. Organ was killed in action in 1917 but the plans were continued by Cyril Church…”

What are the chancels eh? Aisle bet you the current organist is one who can’t play c sharps? A Mrs D Flat, per-apse? Wouldn’t that be swell? No, I’ll stop now, I don’t want to bombarde you with a mixture of church organ related puns, that would be too rank.

Later on, I was distracted by Lugnabana, a townland in Co. Leitrim, Ireland, that no longer exists. It did exist in 1834 when another great-great ancestor of mine walked from there to Durham looking for work and I wondered if any other information about it had come online since my last search a couple of years ago. I ‘Googled’ ‘Lugnabana, Ireland’ and Giggle (sic), in all its wisdom, asked me if I was sure I’d meant to ask for Lugnabana and suggested, perhaps, that in my idiocy of not knowing what I was looking for, I had meant to ask for ‘Log Cabin Ireland’ or even ‘Rugby Ireland’? Certainly not. Who would want to find a log cabin in Ireland?

Actually that sounds like a rather interesting idea, and if it had suggested Rugby team… But I digress and will do so again before I go. We recently watched a film called ‘Invictus’ about the South African rugby team winning the world cup in the first year of Nelson Mandela’s presidency. I don’t know how accurate a film it was, but we liked it. So, if you’ve not seen it, it’s today’s recommended purchase.

Share on Facebook