1 Very excited about Kevin Allen’s new job as a coach driver and operator. We’ve been waiting for someone to cotton on to the idea that there are a group of renegade oldsters who need entertaining. And sounds like the summer one was a hoot. So this is his Xmas trip to Torquay. I want to go.
This was a book that someone recommended in AoA. And strangely enough, I’d just been thinking that I needed one. And I’d just been to a Zoom by Jane Duncan Rogers where people were invited to ask her anything about End of Life Planning and her work book is out of print at the moment. Autumn seems like a good time for this kind of planning around Power of Attorney etc.
Have I told you that Eve Tibber is doing a talk at our Rebel Later Life conference on Oct 10th at Cecil Sharp House on What It's Like To Live in A Co-Housing Community. It will be fascinating for all of us that are curious about this kind of communal living where you have your own separate space. Eve was also part of designing their co-housing community building Cannock Mill Co-Housing in Essex. Can't wait to hear what she has to say. And how they deal with conflict and ideas for the future and make decisions. Get your tickets while they are available. More big news on the speaker front later this week. Tix here - https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/.../rebel-later-life-the...
Sad but not surprised that Tender Loving Care might be Mike Leigh’s last film.
From Film Directors - ‘He is 83, and he says this one is the last.
Mike Leigh premiered ‘Tender Loving Care’ at the 53rd Telluride Film Festival on September 4. Kate O’Flynn plays Amy, a social worker. Marion Bailey plays her mother Birdie and Paul Jesson her father Geoff. The film runs 107 minutes.
Leigh works without a finished screenplay, from discussion, improvisation and a long rehearsal with the cast. He wrapped in London in February and told IndieWire in July that illness makes this most likely his last. Bleecker Street opens it December 4.’
We’re fascinated by ancient traditions and rituals that go on across Britain. And this is one of them. The Burry Man in Scotland’s South Queensferry, a man from the community is chosen and covered in burdock burrs… there are theories.
‘Once a year a man in a Scottish town is covered head to foot in thousands of sticky burrs and walked through the streets for nine hours, and nobody can tell you why it started. 🌿
This is the Burry Man of South Queensferry, on the Firth of Forth in the shadow of the bridges, and it happens every August on the day before the Ferry Fair. It has been recorded for well over two hundred years and is almost certainly a great deal older than that.
The preparation begins early. A local man is chosen for the honour, and it is treated as an honour. He is dressed in a flannel suit, and then helpers press burdock burrs onto him by hand, thousands of them, until there is no cloth showing anywhere. Only a narrow gap is left for his eyes and mouth. A hat wound with roses goes on his head. He cannot bend his arms, so he holds two flower covered staves out sideways and two attendants walk with him supporting them.
Then he walks. 🚶 Around seven miles through the town in high summer, unable to sit, unable to scratch, unable to properly turn his head, stopping at house after house where he is offered a nip of whisky through a straw. He is expected to accept. He collects money for charity and he wishes good luck on every doorway he stops at, and it is thought unlucky to refuse him.
As for what it means, nobody knows. The theories are all reasonable and none is proven. A scapegoat figure carrying the town's bad luck away. A fertility rite. A fisherman's charm from the days when the herring came and went unpredictably. A protective spirit made of the plant that sticks to everything.
What is not in doubt is the endurance of it. It survived the Reformation, industrialisation, two world wars and the arrival of three enormous bridges over the water beside it.
A man wrapped in weeds, walking a town's luck round its own streets, in the twenty first century, because it has always been done. 🏴’Scottishbloodline
All hail 84 year old Rita Mackenzie who travels from Huddersfield to Blackpool every week in order to dance in the ballroom. ‘An 84-year-old woman who makes a weekly 160 mile (257 km) round trip to dance at the famous Blackpool Tower Ballroom said her heart “lights up” every time she steps inside.
Rita Mackenzie started making the trip from Huddersfield in Yorkshire to the seaside resort in Lancashire almost 30 years ago following her divorce.
“It was my second home and now it’s become my first home more or less,” she said.
At first, Rita said she was nervous to drive on the motorway by herself but counts it as one of the best decisions she has made.
“I thought I’d either sink or swim...and it was the best thing I did,” she said.
“I’ve never looked back.”’ BBC Yorkshire.