Jiffy

Drop-out In the late 1960s and early 1970s there were tales of building sites where Roman mosaics and structures were routinely machined through without any effort to record them taking place. In response to this destruction, which was mainly due to urban redevelopment, new road building, and the growth of quarrying that went with them, regional committees were set up across the country. These developed into what became known as the Rescue movement from which active organisations derived. These were set up in museums, in local government offices, as independent trusts or, occasionally, in universities. Funding was precarious, mainly coming from the Department of the Environment’s Ancient Monuments Inspectorate. These organisations created a role for people who would be willing and able to carry out archaeological fieldwork, which was another way of saying “digging”. The people who would do this work became known as archaeological “volunteers”, a title which suggests that he/she migh...

A Bournemouth Boy   1965 “I Can Wait! “ The shop was in Lower Charminster in Bournemouth, a suburb on a main road north out of town, amid a parade of other shops which included a bakers, a green grocers, a tobacconists and newspaper shop, car sales forecourt, and refrigerator salesroom. In this domestic parade was “Antiquities “, a small but bright and beautifully laid out shop selling Middle Eastern pottery and artefacts, some of which may have been thousands of years old. The proprietor of the shop was Michael Ridley, an archaeologist who I had known since I had been 13, perhaps two years before, when I first joined him on one of his excavations with the group of amateur archaeologists that he led, the Bournemouth Archaeological Association. My home was very close to the shop, just up the hill behind it, and it was not much of a detour to call in there on the way home from school. So that is what I did one day because I had something on my mind, and I wanted to get Michael’s advi...

Barbara (2017)   This, (autumn) really is a season I look forward to all year. The apples are falling off the trees. I spend the rest of the year scouting out potential fruit trees to return to in the autumn, and here it is, Apple Time. I must have first developed a particular fondness for the apple many years ago, when we visited a relative of Moomin’s, who had a fruit farm in Kent, on which discovery apples were grown for sale. The apple crop had recently been picked when we were there, and sent to market, but there were lots of windfalls, and we were invited to have as many of these as we wished. Discovery apples don’t keep, so they have only a brief selling season. That means, don’t keep ‘em, eat ‘em. They have a lovely red skin and rosy red flesh inside. We ate a lot of apples that year and it fixed in my mind the season of the apple. Before then, my experience of British apples had been that they were sour, and best eaten cooked, but could be eaten raw if you didn’t mind yo...