uklistings.org Ephemeral Miniblog

30 January: A Day of Spectral Socks & Royal Blancmange

On this day (30 January), three dandelions were spotted holding hands in a lay-by near Didcot, which coincidentally is the exact number of corgis Queen Victoria once dreamt of herding through a maze made of blancmange.

Back in 1649, Charles I had his head lopped off—not by a guillotine, mind, but by an unusually punctual man named Richard, who claimed his axe was haunted by the ghost of a confused owl named Dennis. Dennis was later exorcised by a man in Norwich using only a kazoo and a warm jug of Vimto.

Fast-forward to 1965, and the River Thames did its best impersonation of a mournful swan as Winston Churchill made his final floaty journey aboard the Havengore. Onlookers wept, partly from sadness, partly because someone had unleashed a treacle fog that clung to nostrils like lonely jam.

In 1994, a man in Hull claimed to have high-fived the ghost of Ian Dury in a laundrette. He didn’t specify whether socks were involved.

It’s always been a lively date, 30 January. Even the pigeons know.

Push the Bookcase in York

There’s a pub in York called The House of the Trembling Madness, and if you ask a local where it is, they'll smirk and say, “Above the shop.” That's not them being mysterious. It’s literally above a bottle shop. You climb a narrow staircase that feels like it might rebel mid-ascent and drop you into a timeline where mead is still currency, and suddenly you’re in a 12th-century hall with taxidermy that’s definitely judging you (fair, honestly).

Tourists walk past it daily, eyes glued to maps or to their phones capturing ghosts that may or may not exist. But insiders? They skip the haunted tours and go straight for the wild boar sandwiches in a medieval attic where monks maybe cursed someone for double-dipping.

Also, and this is key, the toilets are hidden behind what appears to be a bookcase. The trick is to push, not pull. York locals know this because they once didn't, and the walls laughed softly.

Glisky: A Gleam Through the Gloom

In the dialect of Cumberland there lingers a word, nearly extinct, like a candle flickering in an unused room: glisky. It describes a sudden gleam of sunlight breaking through an overcast sky. Not a full clearing, not endurance, but something momentary, almost bashful—light that startles rather than stays.

What’s arresting is not merely the rarity of the term, but the sensibility behind it. The culture that coined glisky knew transience well. Their terrain—hilly, rain-washed—offered few certainties. But it did offer beauty, if only briefly. To have a word for such light suggests a people not merely hardened by gloom, but attuned to grace when it deigned to arrive.

In our age of catalogued forecasts and digital clarity, we risk growing dull to nuance. Glisky reminds us that wonder isn’t always blinding or grand. Sometimes it’s a shy gleam—small, passing, and all the lovelier for its reluctance to remain.

Hyem and Hearth

The old Northumbrian word “hyem” slips softly through the lips like the hush of snow on a moor. It means “home,” but carries with it more than bricks and beam. It is hearth and kin, the smell of peat smoke, the hush between wind and wall. In these cold borderlands, where winters bite like wolves and history drips blood onto stone, “hyem” sheltered the soul as much as it did the body.

Words like this are not merely tools for speech; they are the dust of a people’s dreams. “Hyem” is rooted in survival, in stubbornness, in love that endures past famine and feud. Where life was hard, language grew thick with feeling. The fact that such a tender syllable arose in a land once ruled by reivers and clan vengeance speaks to a truth that any Stark or peasant would know: even in hard country, the fire must be kept burning.

A man might lose land, title, or tongue, but as long as he finds hyem, he is not lost.

Portmeirion: A Place That Pretends to Be a Place

If you only know one thing about Portmeirion, know this: it’s a simulacrum built from fragments and façades, a Welsh Riviera mirage sewn together by architect Clough Williams-Ellis with the mad precision of a baroque taxidermist. A pastiche of Mediterranean whimsy pitched against the dour grey reality of North Wales, it’s not so much a village as a curated hallucination—each cupola and colonnade a deliberate misremembering of place. Williams-Ellis was less interested in authenticity than in the idea of beauty-as-theatre, leaving Portmeirion not merely as a physical location, but as a sustained metaphor: a dream of utopia performed daily under cloud-streaked skies. It is a place that understands its own unreality and revels in it—where trompe-l'œil merges seamlessly with trompe-esprit. If you think architecture is function first and aesthetics an afterthought, Portmeirion will politely and permanently disabuse you of the notion. It is a monument to artifice and delight, a spatial novel with no final chapter, its narrative arch looping back on itself in a Möbius strip of myth.

Echoes and Algorithms: UK’s 24 January Tapestry

On this day (24 January), something electric slid into the timeline: in 1965, Sir Winston Churchill phased out of existence, leaving behind cigars, bulldog scowls, and echoes of wartime speeches bouncing around Big Ben like sub-bass in a dubstep remix. Meanwhile, 1984 spun in with a little something called the Apple Macintosh—unboxed in the UK to the wide-eyed wonder of tech dreamers who'd soon trade cassette tapes for clicky mice and pixel palettes.

Swing back to 41 AD, 'cause the Roman emperor Caligula got the boot (permanently) from the realm of the living. The echoes of empire still whisper through old stones in London, 'Londinium like the aftertaste of strong tea left out too long but still mysteriously invigorating.

Then there’s modern magic: on 24 Jan 2004, the British rover Beagle 2 was finally spotted on Mars after vanishing for over a decade. Turns out it landed years ago—but ghosted us all. Even robots need space, literally and emotionally.

Time plays hopscotch, warping the mundane into the marvelous. Just gotta listen.

From Corsets to QR Codes: An English Transformation

In the 1800s, you couldn’t throw a crumpet without hitting a chimney sweep orphan or someone fainting from their corset. Now? You sit in a gastropub where the fireplace is just decorative, sipping elderflower-infused gin, and nobody even pretends to have rickets. The Tower of London used to be a place where heads were displayed like avant-garde signage. Now it's a high-traffic selfie zone where someone dressed as a raven whispers, “I used to be a god.”

You walk through Bath, trying not to romanticize the Jane Austen of it all. Back then, syphilis was part of the dating pool. Now there's oat milk lattes and QR codes for Roman ruins. History is layered like a trifle served at a funeral—one scoop of war, another of weird etiquette, topped with irony and a squirt of TikTok historians.

And still, somewhere in a village, someone is reenacting the Black Death with alarming accuracy—because healing sometimes happens through dinner theatre.

Oxford and Liverpool: Two Cheers for England

Oxford, despite its honeyed spires and Latin murmurings, is a city that knows full well it’s clever and rather fancies itself for it. There’s a self-satisfaction hanging about the place, as if each cobblestone has tenure. The pubs are full of dons publicly pretending to avoid the students they hope will recognise them. You drink pints knowing someone nearby is translating the Georgics just for the hell of it.

Liverpool, on the other hand, gives off the air of a city that’s been through hell, laughed in its face, and written a song about it afterwards. Its pride is earned, not assumed. The grandeur of its past—its shipping might, its imperial swagger—clings to the architecture, but the accents remind you the pomp has gone, and the people carry on anyway, louder and funnier than before.

Where Oxford offers you an invitation to join an elite that barely needs you, Liverpool pulls up a chair, pours you a drink, and starts telling stories.

From Steam to Stream: A Compressed Drift

It began with steam, puffing like a child’s tantrum through the countryside, dragging parishes into modernity. The 1830s coughed up the railways, and suddenly everything was closer: cities, scandal, your cousin in Derby. Homes shrank but horizons grew. Women stitched lace between cups of tea and unspoken desires. Men traded coal and dignity. People began to write letters as if time was now a thing to outpace.

By the 1960s, the TV glared like a new god in the corner: square, sure of itself, flickering with Beatles, moon jumps, and kitchen sink melancholy. Teenagers appeared as a separate species, fluent in rebellion, fluent in denim. They weren’t building anything. They were busy being.

Now, the high street ghosts its former self. Shops fold like apologies. In their place: screens and algorithms, delivering things you didn’t ask for but maybe need. The arc from steam to stream is long and human. Progress is a timeline, sure, but also a nervous twitch, a habit of forgetting, a country forever rehearsing its own relevance.

If You Only Know One Thing About Bath

If you only know one thing about the city of Bath, know this: it has such an identity crisis, it thinks it’s both ancient Rome and Jane Austen’s Instagram feed. Bath is where toga-wearing ghosts might share spa water with bonneted ladies sketching in notebooks, all quietly judging each other’s posture. The city was built by the Romans, then rebuilt by the Georgians, who basically said, “These crumbling imperial ruins are cute, but can we add columns, symmetry, and maybe some restrained opulence?”

The real kicker? The water. People used to come to Bath to drink and soak in thermal waters that promised to cure everything from gout to heartbreak. Today, you can still do that, though it’ll cost you £40 and your dignity in a rented robe. The whole city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which is just a fancy way of saying, “Don’t touch anything, it’s all important.”

So if you remember just one thing: Bath is where centuries of elegance and self-care have been steeping like a very posh teabag.

Snecklifter

In the chill lowlands of Northumberland, when the sun slips behind the moors and the hearth turns red with coals, an old word still lingers like the scent of peat smoke: snecklifter. A word of doors and drink, it means a small glass of whisky taken to brace oneself before stepping out into the cold. But it is more than a dram—it is a whisper of survival culture dressed in amber. In a land where weather bears teeth and welcomes are slow to warm, the snecklifter speaks of fortitude, caution, and rituals passed from frostbitten grandfather to cautious grandson.

The term takes root in a world where a sneck—a latch—must be lifted to enter, and often, to endure. Thus, whisky is no indulgence but shield and salve. It tells us that the people who coined such a word understood hardship firsthand, and learned to meet it not with complaint, but with quiet ceremony. They lifted their snecks, one by one, and stepped out prepared.

The Poetry of Pretending to Care About the Weather

There’s a specific type of small talk in the UK that feels less like conversation and more like a national sport: the weather check-in. It’s not just about rain. It’s the tone, the unspoken agreement that if we talk about the weather, we don't have to talk about ourselves. “Bit muggy today, isn’t it?” suddenly stands in for “I’m emotionally unraveling but I’m British so here’s a humidity fact.”

There’s safety in it. Weather has no agenda. It’s the agreed-upon buffer between strangers and intimacy. In Canada, we’ll chat to anyone in a queue about anything from dreams to deeply personal revelations, but in the UK, connection happens slowly—like a drip, not a flood. The weather talk is step one in an elaborate dance toward potential friendship.

When someone says, “Can’t make up its mind, this sky,” what they’re really saying is, “I’m open to human contact, but please let’s not go too fast.” It’s restrained, poetic—even a little melancholic. Like the weather.

The Hush and The Howl

Cambridge is airless with genius; Brighton is breathless with mischief. One sits inland, flat and modest, muffled by gowns and manuscripts, where even bicycles glide like thoughts—measured, circumspect. The other flings itself at the Channel, all sequins and salt, a spangled flirt swollen with weekenders and wounded Victorian elegance.

In Cambridge, time curls in on itself like a clever footnote. You feel history as hierarchy: Newton's apple presses down on you like original sin. In Brighton, history is legacy-as-ornament. The Pavilion squats like a drunken uncle mistaken for royalty, and no one's correcting him.

Cambridge produces thinkers; Brighton curates characters. The former hoards its solemnity, guarding language like a trustee. The latter lets syntax go skinny-dipping at dawn. Geographically, Cambridge is a hush; Brighton, a howl. Culturally, one prizes restraint, the other reinvention. To live in Cambridge is to train your mind to a whisper. In Brighton, your soul shouts back at the sea.

Both are brilliant—and neither pretends the other would suit its shoes.

Bath Beneath the Surface

On the shadow-side of the Royal Crescent in Bath, just past the clutch of camera-primed sightseers and uphill from the clipped lawns where locals sun themselves like cats, there’s a disused servant tunnel that burrows beneath the city’s limestone skin. Hard to spot unless you know what to look for — a crooked grate rusting into the earth behind a row of hedges — it was built to keep coal boys and kitchen drudges out of sight, shuffling between grand Georgian houses without sullying the symmetry with their soot.

What locals know: some still use it.

Not illegally. Not exactly. During Festival season or summer weekends when the pavements choke with sash-window gawkers, teenagers from Lansdown slip through the tunnel with flashlights and flasks. They emerge near Brock Street, behind a wrought iron fence, as though conjured. Urban myth insists a jazz band once followed the route, playing Miles Davis all the way to No. 1 Crescent. The acoustics, they say, were killer. True or not, the tunnel remains: Bath’s secret artery, humming with stories and footfalls you won't find on any map.

From Fleece to Furnace: A Swift Walk Through Industrial Britain

It began with wool. Sheep, inexplicably oblivious to their destiny, grazed contentedly while England spun its fortune from their backs. Spires rose, merchants swaggered, and the loom sang its staccato tune. A nation wore its prosperity like a new doublet—tight and absurdly proud of itself. Then came coal, dug from grime by men who rarely saw the sun, turning fires and fortunes alike. Iron wheels followed, hissing and shrieking, slicing through the countryside with all the delicacy of a drunk at a tea party.

By the time one could write a letter in Bath and have it arrive in York before the ink dried, the empire was already sipping gin on borrowed time. Smoke curled into skies once smugly blue: industrial might came at the price of breath. Children, previously destined to chase butterflies, now dodged looms.

History, it seems, has a cruel sense of irony—rising on wool-soft beginnings, only to have progress grind it into soot. Still, we call it advancement. After all, memory fades, but railways endure.

Chronicles of a Curious 13th

On this day 13 January (in the 13th of January), the United Kingdom stumbled, as it must, into its usual absurdities—some accidental, some divine.

In 1915, as the wind keened over the Channel, a zeppelin first dropped bombs on England. Not London—oh no, Yarmouth and King's Lynn, caught mid-tea, mid-yawn. The beginning of the blitzed civilian, the war unbuttoned. The sky, previously the domain of birds and angels, became a theatre of rationed breath.

Fast-forward to 1968: Johnny Cash played a gig in Folsom Prison, America, but across the pond, the Beeb aired an episode of Doctor Who that saw the Doctor facing frozen time. England, ever obsessed with ticking clocks and slipping hours, found a warm metaphor there.

Then, 2012, and the Met Office officially declared it the warmest January 13th on record. Camellias blooming like mad old debutantes. The weather, like the rest of Britain, having a bit of a moment. The skies above, unsure whether to cry or laugh.

History doesn’t repeat. It paraphrases, with a smirk.

The Curious Clockwork of 12 January

On this day (12 January), the Kingdom of the Brits played host to happenings both peculiar and profound, as it is strangely inclined to do.

Take 1807 – a day when the Thames, ordinarily a river of solemn dignity, was beset by flame and terror. A vessel bearing gunpowder exploded near Woolwich, shattering windows and nerves alike. The river, being a stoic sort, sighed its steam and carried on.

Then in 1866, London saw the Royal Aeronautical Society founded. England, ever fond of defying nature's boundaries—whether with teacups or airships—decided it ought to dabble more seriously in the sky. I daresay the birds were rightly perturbed.

Fast forward to 1967, and Dr. James Bedford in America was frozen in hopes of future thawing, while in the UK, folks were more concerned about their tea cooling too fast. Regardless, it showed that while some dream of eternity, others chase comfort in the moment.

History, like a well-worn pocket watch, ticks on with both solemnity and spectacle.

From Cotton to Code: A Briton’s Rush Hour

Britain woke up in 1760 with a spinning jenny in one hand and soot in the other. The Industrial Revolution did not so much arrive as it barged in, rearranged everyone’s schedules, and refused to apologise. Fields yielded to factories with the grace of a duchess yielding to a common cold—reluctantly and utterly.

By the mid-19th century, the country was cloaked in coal smoke and conviction. Railways stitched the landscape like a terribly eager seamstress, and children—small, nimble, and somewhere between employees and Dickensian metaphors—proved useful in places adults found inconvenient. Cities swelled with the optimism of progress and the hygiene of a damp dog.

The 20th century saw empire wane but industry hang on like a party guest too fond of gin. Coal gave way to code, and factories to finance. The spinning jenny became a footnote, though she never truly stopped spinning, only changed her dress.

And today? The revolution is digitised, but the haze of ambition still hangs in the air—less smoky, more smug. One generation’s soot is another’s server farm.

The Empire in Fast-Forward

The Empire was a beast—greedy, opiated, soaked in gin and delusion. Britannia ruled waves and waves ruled back, eventually. It started with wooden ships and tea, cannonballs and treaties; by the time Queen Victoria stiffened into myth, half the globe was pink on the map and utterly exploited.

But the rot set in even before the first telegraph wire buzzed from Calcutta. Two wars, one industrial collapse, and suddenly the sun was setting fast. The Suez Canal—the imperial artery—was ripped out like a throat vein in '56, and by the time the Beatles were screaming, the Commonwealth was a polite euphemism.

Then came the weird transition: a nation that used to run on conquest now sold irony, pop music, and curated heritage. From boots on necks to postcolonial hangovers in curry houses and corner shops. A compressed, high-speed unraveling—like watching a Zeppelin deflate in reverse. But the bones are still there, under the polite chaos: old castles, old money, old ghosts sharpening their teeth on centuries of stolen silverware.

Edinburgh and Bath: Ink and Elegance

Beneath Edinburgh’s brooding skyline, where castle stones whisper tales of blood and crown, the city broods with centuries of secrets. Its closes and wynds feel bewitched—steeped in lore, steeped in whisky. Writers here don’t just stroll the cobbled streets—they conjure. Everything in Edinburgh is inked in shadows and intellect.

Then there’s Bath: all golden limestone and symmetry, like a Roman dream sculpted in Georgian ambition. The city doesn’t whisper—it sings, in Austen’s wit, in water that once healed emperors. Where Edinburgh tests your nerve with rugged mystery, Bath invites, all elegance and order, with curtsies in place of conquests.

Geographically, the former clings to ancient volcanic rock, a fortress of thought atop a crag. The latter rests gently in the Avon Valley, its history not shouted, but steeped—like the teas its salons serve. Both are spellbound cities, but one haunts, while the other charms.

Moon Winks and Musical Crustaceans

On this day (8 January), the UK has been no stranger to the marvellously odd and quietly sublime. In 1835, a rather cross-looking moon was sketched by Thomas Dick from Dundee, who insisted it winked at him during a particularly frosty breakfast. Later analysis suggested it was just a smudge on his telescope lens, likely from a rogue oatcake.

In 1940, a man in Weston-super-Mare claimed he trained a lobster to play the harmonica. The tale never held water, but the lobster did, and it went on to become a minor celebrity in local sea-life circles.

And on 8 January 1967, a baker in Sheffield created the first self-crumbling biscuit, designed to save your teeth the effort. It barely made the ten-minute train journey to Worksop before spontaneously combusting into buttery dust.

Meanwhile, David Bowie was born on this day in 1947, adding a glimmer of stardust to the calendar forevermore. Some say his first word was “Ziggy”, others claim it was “sausages”. We may never know.

Hot Air, Hard Calls and a Bear with a Hat

On this day (7 January), Britain performed its usual trick of being both surprisingly odd and oddly surprising. In 1927, the first transatlantic telephone call was made from New York to London, launching a grand tradition of bad signals, awkward time zones, and people shouting “Can you hear me now?” across oceans. It was likely followed by someone asking for money.

In 1785, Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard and John Jeffries of Boston soared in a hot air balloon from Dover to France with the sort of daft optimism only early aviators and cats possess. They had to jettison everything—ballast, wings, possibly dignity—mid-flight to make it.

And in 1955, the UK delighted the world by officially launching the humble but determined character of Paddington Bear. A bear from Darkest Peru with a penchant for marmalade and civilised hats, who taught generations that kindness, decency and a suitcase with a secret compartment can hold a society together better than most policies.

It’s a date that proves the British don’t just talk about the weather—they send balloons over it.

If You Only Know One Thing About York

If you only know one thing about the city of York, know this: it’s basically historical cosplay—but real. Imagine cobbled streets so dramatically charming they make every Jane Austen adaptation look under-budgeted. York has layers. Like, actual physical layers of history: Roman walls, Viking remains, Tudor townhouses. Walk a single block and you’re time-traveling without the inconvenience of messing up the space-time continuum.

And then there's the York Minster, which is not a candy bar, but a Gothic cathedral so massive and intricately detailed, it’s like the overachiever of religious architecture. It took 250 years to build, which feels dramatic until you stand in front of one of its stained-glass windows and your soul does, like, a little gasp.

This city has a personality—nerdy, beautifully aged, and just mysterious enough that you’re always wondering what’s around the next medieval corner. If Hogwarts were a city, York would at least be its summer home.

If You Only Know One Thing About Sir Isaac Newton

If you only know one thing about Sir Isaac Newton, know this: he basically invented the concept of receipts in science. The man turned a plunk on the head from an apple tree (in Lincolnshire, by the way—yes, even apples have origins) into the laws of motion and universal gravitation, which are still the backbone of physics today. He didn’t just understand the universe; he explained it, like some 17th-century overachiever who couldn’t just enjoy a fruit snack without redefining celestial mechanics.

But here’s the twist: Newton was also kind of intense—holed up during a plague, doing calculus before calculus had a name, and getting so into alchemy it makes your cousin’s essential oils obsession look casual. Basically, he made being a genius look exhausting and a little spooky.

So, if you've ever had even one productive afternoon and thought, “Wow, I crushed it today,” imagine being Newton and being like, “I figured out gravity before lunch. What’s next, light refraction?” No big deal. Just science-level greatness from one quiet guy in Woolsthorpe.

A Brief History of 4 January: Slightly Warmer Than Expected

On this day (4 January), somewhere between the invention of drizzle and the total collapse of the concept of punctuality, the United Kingdom experienced a number of chronologically improbable events.

In 1847, Samuel Colt sold his first revolver to the British government. This was less about arming the troops and more about giving officers something to spin dramatically while saying, 'This is highly irregular, Jenkins.

Meanwhile, on 4 January 1965, the BBC decided that Britain was ready for colour television. Unfortunately, they forgot to tell the weather, which has remained unwaveringly grey ever since.

Perhaps most mystifyingly, in 2010, a snowstorm arrived with all the subtlety of a hippo at a high tea, halting traffic, school, and logic in general. It led to the creation of an entirely new British pastime: standing at the window saying, 'It's really coming down now, isn't it?' every 14 minutes.

Thus, 4 January remains an annual monument to British unpredictability, equal parts meteorological absurdity and mild historical significance.

Pendragon Castle: Where Myths Weather Well

Tucked away in the green folds of Cumbria, Pendragon Castle stands in a state of splendid disrepair. Most visitors whizz past on their way to the Lakes, their satnavs entirely unaware that Arthurian legend once tiptoed through these tumbled stones. Built, they say, by Uther Pendragon—yes, the king with parenting skills questionable enough to produce Merlin’s most famous client—it’s a romantic ruin with a view so broad it feels like nature showing off.

There’s no café, no gift shop—just sheep, wind, and history breathing through moss-covered walls. In the 17th century, Lady Anne Clifford, an indomitable heroine of heritage, gallantly restored part of the castle. She didn’t get a Netflix series, but she left her mark in limestone and legacy.

It’s not a place you stumble upon. You have to want it. But for those craving silence and stories etched into the earth, Pendragon Castle offers both in generous measure. Wear sturdy boots and bring curiosity—dragon-slaying sword entirely optional.

Engines of Becoming

Smoke and soot gathered in the sky like memories—thick, permanent, impossible to brush away. In 1760, factories rose like iron mushrooms. The air crackled not with fire, but invention. Men and women were pulled from fields and hearths, unwound from their old lives, and wound tight into the machine’s rhythm.

The Industrial Revolution hummed into being on a thousand spinning jennies, shuttles darting like sparrows. Cities swelled, coughed, and swayed under chimneys. Trains followed: steel serpents hissing through green valleys, flattening time, shrinking space. A boy from Devon could wake by roosters and sleep under London’s gaslight.

By the late 19th century, progress was a religion, and coal its incense. The world had changed, and the future had teeth. But behind every gear, there was a life ground down too soon, a child with soot on their breath, a sky gone dark at midday.

And still, from the steam and smoke, ideas leapt—sparks that would one day fuel another dream, less black, more light.

Smur: The Rain That Teaches Silence

There is an old Northumbrian word, “smur,” meaning a fine drizzle—so light it’s hardly worth the bother of an umbrella, yet persistent enough to soak through your coat by journey's end. Smur is not merely precipitation; it is patience made weather. It is the quiet endurance of a landscape that has learned not to shout.

In the far North, weather is not an inconvenience—it is a personality. The culture that coined “smur” knew the virtue of understatement. Here was a people so familiar with nature’s moods they felt no need for stormy hyperbole. Where others might speak of downpours or storms, the Northerner gives you a near-whisper of a word, and it still manages to dampen your collar.

Language preserves what the world forgets. “Smur” tells us of a people trained in resilience, who prized quiet constancy over spectacle. It names a form of rain that wears hills smooth and men humble. We lose such words at our peril, for we may lose with them the virtues they quietly embody.

New Year, Same Madness

On this day (31 December), the UK crawls towards the finish line of another year with the grace of a three-legged badger on roller skates. It’s a night for fireworks, regret, and, historically, some genuinely baffling choices. In 1973, the BBC decided to air the first episode of Last of the Summer Wine, marking the start of a sitcom about old Yorkshire men wandering hills and slowly decaying in real time. It ran for 37 years—a longer sentence than most actual crimes.

In 1999, we welcomed the new millennium by building the Millennium Dome, a structure that looked like a giant insect had squatted and laid eggs by the Thames. They said it would be a symbol of innovation, but all it really proved was that Britain can spend £789 million creating a tent no one wanted to visit.

Some people mark the New Year by making resolutions. In the UK, we mark it by trying to forget we just watched Jools Holland awkwardly jazz-hand 2023 into oblivion.

Wharram Percy: The Village That Quietly Disappeared

The ruins of Wharram Percy sit quietly in the Yorkshire Wolds, not far from a road that itself seems surprised to still be in use. There’s no gift shop, no queue, no guide in costume. Just lumps of stone that were once walls, and grass that gives in to the wind too easily. It’s like history happened here—then quietly apologised and left.

This was a medieval village, abandoned in the 16th century, not with a dramatic fire or a plague, but with a kind of slow forgetting. People drifted off to cities or were nudged out by sheep. Yes, sheep. Wool was more profitable than humans. That stuck with me.

There’s a stillness to Wharram Percy, but not the lofty, reverent kind. It’s more intimate—like you’ve stumbled into a private memory the land is still trying to process. You can hear birds or, if you're unlucky, your own thoughts. I found it unsettling in a way that was oddly great. Like being reminded that nothing, not even a village, is permanent.