The Griper's Times

SO many villages and towns around Britain have a story so good it would definitely benefit from what I would tentatively call a "Black Plaque" scheme. If English Heritage's little blue signs are intended to single out sites with links to celebrated historical figures, the Black Plaque - by contrast - would be the benchmark for folklore. "It was on this spot the people of Woolpit greeted the Green Children in the reign of King Stephen" or "In this place Spring-Heeled Jack caused a coach to crash in 1837." I can't imagine the idea would take off in the corridors of Whitehall but what's interesting is the way that local communities themselves often embrace old folk stories in the knowledge that, centuries on, it's still very much their thing. Let's take Bungay in Suffolk, a small market town which even today scarcely has 5,000 people living there.  Here in an August storm of 1577, a gigantic black dog was said to have manifested in the mid...

THE Christmas before Covid came I spent a couple of days working on a feature about loneliness during the festive period. I'd been struck by figures reported at a council meeting about how many millions of Britons felt isolated all or most of the time - but most especially at a time of year where we're left to assume that everyone, everywhere all at once is having the most brilliant time.  This is, as it turns out, pretty disastrous for both mental and physical health - in fact chronic loneliness is reckoned as bad for people's wellbeing as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.  Perhaps predictably my 1,500 long-read on the problem, the consequences and the admirable efforts locally to combat it joined the long list of things I wrote that fell into the "not really that interesting actually" category and an article left to be post online while I was on my Christmas break was instead left for me to publish myself in early January. I couldn't help but notice how, 12 month...

Kingfisher as depicted in a Medieval bestiary. The artist's mastery of colour is obvious for all to see. TO be perfectly clear I'm not in actual fact a twitcher. The distinction between twitchers and birdwatchers is maybe slightly blurred, but broadly speaking I've understood twitchers to be serious birdwatchers.  They're heavy-duty spotters - they have notebooks with proper margins, they know the proper anatomical names, they don't get out of bed for anything less than a life tick. But when they do they're usually up and into their wellingtons by four in the morning sharp. They're the men - and it is to be honest mostly men who twitch - ready and willing to drive the 200 miles to the East Anglian fens in the hope of spotting a passing migrant. And I don't mean the sort that The Daily Express get so angry about. Generally speaking twitchers are all about seeing as many rare species as possible, hence the long-distance trips and the constant monitoring of...