Eggs have long been associated with Easter since for Christians the Easter egg is a symbol of Christ’s empty tomb.
The custom of the Easter egg originated in the early Christian community of Mesopotamia, which stained eggs red in memory of the blood of Christ, shed at his crucifixion.
This practice still survives in Greece where hard-boiled eggs are dyed bright red to symbolise the spilt Blood of Christ and the promise of eternal life. They are also cracked together to celebrate the opening of the Tomb of Christ.
In more recent times since those of the early Christians of Mesopotamia egg hunts have become a fixture of the Easter events calendar.
However, here’s one event from recent years from Lakewood Springs in Illinois that sounded a little too intimate for comfort…
On 5th May elections will be held in England for local councils, local police and crime commissioners and in Bristol the elected Mayor.
As part of the election process, there’s a period before the announcement of the election and the final election results in which central – in the case of general elections – and local government is prevented from making announcements about any new or controversial government initiatives (such as modernisation initiatives or administrative and legislative changes) which could be seen to be advantageous to any candidates or parties in the forthcoming election.
This period has traditionally been called “purdah” after the practice in certain Muslim and Hindu societies of screening women from men or strangers, especially by means of a curtain. “Purdah” itself originates from Urdu and Persian “parda“, meaning a “veil” or “curtain“.
Earlier this month I attended the quarterly meeting of Bristol’s Ashley, Easton & Lawrence Hill Neighbourhood Partnership. At this meeting attendees were clearly told by the officer serving the partnership that “purdah” was no longer an acceptable term and that the time in question should be referred to as the “pre-election period“.
This occurred after “purdah” had already been used a few times by elected councillors and makes your correspondent wonder if colourless, unaccountable, unelected council officers (whose wages we pay. Ed.) should be allowed to dictate the vocabulary which is used in meetings.
I don’t think they should.
Do you agree or disagree with my conclusion? Please comment below.
Last Thursday I was in Shrewsbury, county town of the county of my birth. Shrewsbury is steeped in a wealth of medieval history, including plenty of ancient street names (mostly based upon the shops sited there – e.g. Butcher Rown, Fish Street, etc. Ed.), amongst them the intriguingly titled Grope Lane.
Grope Lane street signA look back down Grope Lane towards High Street
Grope Lane in Shrewsbury is a narrow alley connecting High Street and Fish Street in the heart of the old medieval town, as shown on the location map below.
Location of Grope Lane in Shrewsbury. Image courtesy of OpenStreetMap. Click on image for full-sized version
As with many towns in the Middle Ages, Shrewsbury’s Fish Street (and nearby Butcher Row. Ed.) are named after the trades that occupied them. However, Grope Lane is also reputed to be linked to trade – this time the pleasures of the flesh.
Wikipedia has an excellent page on this street name in its unsanitised version.
Gropec*nt Lane, says Wikipedia, was a street name found in English towns and cities during the Middle Ages, believed to be a reference to the prostitution centred on those areas… Gropec*nt, the earliest known use of which is in about 1230, appears to have been derived as a compound of the words grope and c*nt (our medieval forebears were less sensitive and more earthy in their use of language than their modern descendants, as anyone who had read Chaucer in the original Middle English can testify. Ed.). Streets with that name were often in the busiest parts of medieval towns and cities.
Towns and cities with active quays or ports often had an adjacent Grope(c*nt) Lane, as in the case of Bristol, although that street name recorded in the reign of Edward III (1312-1377), was subsequently changed to Hauliers Lane and has since been changed again (see below).
Although the name was once common throughout England, changes in attitude resulted in its replacement by more innocuous versions such as Grape Lane. A variation of Gropec*nt was last recorded as a street name in 1561.
In Shrewsbury a street called Grope Countelane existed as recently as 1561 and connected the town’s two principal marketplaces. At some unspecified date the street was renamed Grope Lane, which it has retained to the present day. In Thomas Phillips’ History and Antiquities of Shrewsbury (1799) the author is explicit in his understanding of the origin of the name as a place of “scandalous lewdness and venery”, but Archdeacon Hugh Owen’s Some account of the ancient and present state of Shrewsbury (1808) describes it as “called Grope, or the Dark Lane”. As a result of these differing accounts, some local tour guides attribute the name to “feeling one’s way along a dark and narrow thoroughfare”.
Other towns and cities in England also had their own local Grope(c*nt) Lane including the following:
London (several examples);
Bristol (now called Nelson Street);
York;
Newcastle upon Tyne;
Worcester;
Hereford;
Oxford (now Magpie Lane);
Norwich (now Opie Street);
Banbury (now Parsons Street);
Glastonbury (now St Benedicts Court); and
Wells (initially changed to Grove Lane, now Union Street).
Where Bristol has the Bristol Post, formerly the Bristol Evening Post, as its newspaper of record (warped. Ed.), the Potteries has The Sentinel, formerly the Evening Sentinel.
Both newspapers now belong to the Local World stable and share many common features: the content management system running their websites, difficulty in distinguishing editorial content from advertising, a cavalier attitude to the correct use of the English language and so on.
Yesterday’s Sentinel carried a report of a railway signal failure in the Stafford area.
The report was helpfully illustrated with a photograph as per the screenshot below.
The photograph is also helpfully captioned, as follows:
DELAYS: Rail services have been hit by signalling problems at Stafford.
It is evident for a number of reasons that the anonymous members of the Sentinel’s “Digital_team” who put together this report are no great users of the railway network.
Firstly, the photograph shows semaphore signals. These are not used at Stafford, which lies on the West Coast Main Line, where semaphore signals were removed and replaced with colour light signals many decades ago.
Secondly, the plate on the signal mast identifies the signals as part of the Severn Bridge Junction signal complex.
Thirdly, what is the Abbey Church of St Peter & St. Paul in Shrewsbury doing in the background, lurking behind the largest sempaphore signal box in the country? 😉
Shelf life is the length of time that a commodity may be stored without becoming unfit for use, consumption, or sale. In other words, it might refer to whether a commodity should no longer be on a pantry shelf (unfit for use), or just no longer on a supermarket shelf (unfit for sale, but not yet unfit for use).
As one of these four submarines is supposed to be at sea at all times, perhaps Mr Daly would care to explain to his readers, why the quartet is cluttering up the quartermaster’s stores instead. 😉
Alternatively, perhaps Patrick could learn the definition of the term “service life“. 🙂
Update 12/02/16: The piece has since been amended and the offending “shelf-life” replaced.
A couple of days ago, the Tory Police & Crime Commissioner candidate for Gloucestershire, Will Windsor-Clive criticised the £100,000 or so the Gloucestershire constabulary spends annually on interpreters (posts passim) in an early campaign effort to deploy bigotry and xenophobia.
Today, the Western Daily Press reports that the current Police and Crime Commissioner, independent Martin Surl, has defended his force’s expenditure on linguists.
He is reported to have said the following:
Translators [sic] are highly qualified professionals who provide a fundamental service.
Victims must be protected and the law administered without fear or favour and effective communication is essential to the process of justice.
It is also a legal requirement that if a case comes to court, all sides must be understood and be able to understand the proceedings.
Well said, Mr Surl, although you need to see my handy illustrated guide to appreciate the difference between translators and interpreters. 🙂
Bristol’s wasted year as European Green Capital (posts passim) may be over, but the greenwash* continues, as shown by the advertising hoarding below by the side of the A4032 Easton Way, a dual carriageway blasted through this inner-city community in the late 1960s or early 1970s to speed motorists from one jam to another. To be more specific, the hoarding itself is conveniently situated next to the traffic lights by the Stapleton Road bus gate, where bored commuters can gawp at it waiting for the lights to change as they suffocate in their own traffic fumes and poison the rest of us.
As can be seen from the photo, at least one local hasn’t fallen for the greenwash and has said so, pinpointing the source as the trousers of Bristol’s elected mayor. 🙂
The mayor – and the local authority he runs – had an ideal opportunity during Green Capital Year to tackle some of Bristol’s endemic problems, such as the chronic over-reliance on the motor car, abysmal public transport and the unending stream of litter and fly-tipping blighting the inner city, but decided to do very little on these matters, preferring instead to spend money on pointless art projects and mutual back-slapping events for the great and good.
* Greenwash (n.), a superficial or insincere display of concern for the environment that is shown by an organisation.
Only a couple of days after hearing of the creation of a giant statue of Mao Zedong (posts passim), reports have been received that the statue of the so-called Great Helmsman in Henan province has been destroyed.
Pictures such as the one below have been posted on Chinese social media.
The statue’s hands, legs and feet appear to have been hacked off and a black cloth draped over its head.
According to an unnamed local delivery driver, it was destroyed because it had occupied a farmer’s land.
This destruction brings to mind the traditional farmer’s challenge to trespassers: “Get off my land!” 🙂
Another reason for the destruction could be that Henan province was one of the regions worst hit by China’s great famine, a catastrophe that claimed tens of millions of lives that was caused by Mao’s disastrous “Great Leap Forward” – a bid for rapid industrialisation.
The official Chinese line is that the statue had not gone through the correct approval process before construction, according to The People’s Daily.
News emerged today in the British national press of a 36-metre tall statue of the late Chinese leader Mao Zedong being built in a village in China. Here’s The Guardian’s report of this story as an example.
The statue of the so-called “Great Helmsman” is being constructed at Zhushigang village in Tongxu County in Henan Province.
It is reported to be costing some RMB 3 mn. (approx. £312,000). The materials used in its construction are steel and concrete, with the exterior being coated in gold paint.
History is looking on your works and despairing, Mao! Photo: CFP
Reading about the statue and thinking about its future, not to mention what has happened to statues of past powerful leaders (particularly dictators. Ed.) around the world, Percy Bysshe Shelley‘s 1818 sonnet, Ozymandias came to mind.
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—”Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
In antiquity, Ozymandias was a Greek name for the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II. Shelley began writing Ozymandias soon after the announcement of the British Museum’s acquisition of a large fragment of a statue of Ramesses II from the thirteenth century BC, leading some scholars to believe that this had inspired Shelley.
In more modern times, Mao’s record is chequered. His supporters credit him with driving imperialism out of China, modernising the country and building it into a world power, promoting the status of women, improving education and health care, as well as increasing life expectancy as China’s population grew from around 550 million to over 900 million during his leadership. Mao is also known as a theorist, military strategist, poet and visionary.
On the other hand, his critics consider him a dictator comparable to both Hitler and Stalin who severely damaged traditional Chinese culture, as well as being a perpetrator of systematic human rights abuses who was responsible for an estimated 40 to 70 million deaths through starvation, forced labour and executions.
Earlier this month I attended the quarterly meeting of Bristol’s 
A couple of days ago, the Tory Police & Crime Commissioner candidate for Gloucestershire, Will Windsor-Clive criticised the £100,000 or so the Gloucestershire constabulary spends annually on interpreters (
