Athos Made Me Do It

[bad-moodboard]

The London Necropolis Railway, Westminster Bridge Road Entrance. 

[tattydolly]

It was known to the railway workers as The Stiffs' Express!

[lilithsaintcrow]

"Norman believes that one reason bees became so closely associated with death is because they have long been so integral to human life and sustenance."

Why We Tell Bees About Death

The connection between apiarists and funeral rites stretches back centuries.

[tattydolly]

I remember this happening when QE2 died and Twitter going batshit over it. I was just *shrug* yeah - you've got to tell the bees.

[illustratus]

Orestes Pursued by the Furies by John Singer Sargent

[redscharlach]

Currently being pursued by Furies.

Back shortly.

[tattydolly]

I'm waiting for 'pursued by Furies' turning up as a 'why my fic update is slightly late' excuse on AO3.

[chongoblog]

*gathers all of the people in the world who write the number 7 with a little dash in the center of it so I can study them like little critters and find out what makes them do that*

[pepperf]

[dduane]

I saw it in a cartoon when I was little, and liked it. Have done it ever since.

[tattydolly]

British, but started putting a line across my sevens when I started my first job that was wall-to-wall spreadsheets. Writing quickly my 01 and 07 became indistinguishable. Kept it up every since.

[chameleonjoy]

Q&A with Alex Rider Screenwriter, Guy Burt 🦂

I sent Guy Burt (screenwriter/adapter/executive producer of the Alex Rider tv series) a load of questions hoping he may choose a few to answer and he VERY kindly answered them all! Incredibly grateful he took the time to do so 🥲

Sharing here for those not on Twitter!

[dappermouth]

anytime someone from the UK orders a print from me I’m delighted because the addresses tend to be charming and sound completely made-up, I just suspend my disbelief and accept that I’m sending a package someplace with a name like Bristleberry House at Ditchmallow in Brambleford-on-Cotton—incredible lmaooo I bet this gets delivered to you by a badger in a little coat

[scumbagsblog]

The replies to this post are fucking hilarious

[wilburian-deactivated20221116]

@bigbraveboop

[vonlipwig]

I am once again posting my ever-growing collection of towns that sound like PG Wodehouse characters:

[hacash]

All of these areas are places you would certainly get killed in on Midsomer Murders.

[pollydoodles]

I mean these are cute but I also need you to know I grew up near a place called Nasty

[typhoidmeri]

[j4gm]

[very-uncorrect]

this post is absolutely bafling as a british person because like 85% of these names just feel so incredibly normal to me it’s so jarring to see how non-british people react to them

[doriangraysrockcollection]

you can’t convince me there isn’t some dude - sorry, some bloke named Kirby Underdale who lives near that last sign. he drives a little too fast, it makes everyone nervous, and his neighbors decide to have a sign made and installed instead of talking to him about it.

[dduane]

My favorite: Ottery Saint Mary. (Insert image here of very long-suffering Blessed Virgin with otters climbing all over her.)

[tattydolly]

Kirby Underdale amuses me because I used to drive past a sign to a place in Yorkshire called Kirkby Overblow. That was, until it all got too much for me and I had to divert so I could see what Kirkby Overblow looked like. Nice little village with stone cottages, nothing special.

May I also introduce the society of Tumblr to the car game of Wodehouse or Christie. When you find a double-barrelled place name you have to decide if it would be a name of a character in a Wodehouse or an Agatha Christie novel. Bonus points for backstory justifying your choice.

[ip2lb]

[scooplery]

[dduane]

cc: @petermorwood

[tattydolly]

#I had no idea this made it on to Tumblr! #wigan kebab #smack barm pea wet #babby's yed

[audioeidolon]

So you’ve written rare pair fic on AO3- how rare are we talking? Select how many fics are tagged for your rarest written pairing on AO3, and let’s see how rare your ship REALLY is.

2000+ (You are on a luxury cruise.)

1500-1999 (You’ve chartered a trip and drank margaritas on the deck.)

1000-1499 (You are fishing off the back hoping desperately for more.)

500-999 (Storms may pass but you are unsinkable.)

100-499 (There is no bond like that of you and the five others manning the ship)

50-99 (The ship left the dock without everyone on board and you cannot drive.)

10-49 (The only reason you’re alone on board is you’re the only one with taste.)

Less than 10 (I am the captain now.)

Voting ended onFeb 13, 2024

Reblog and put your rare pair in the tags/comments! I want to see the depths people will go to create, for the most random two characters in the most obscure media.

[tattydolly]

Lowest pairing (Alex Rider fandom) Yassen Gregorovich/Wolf - 5 fics

Next lowest (Alex Rider fandom) Yassen Gregorovich/Ian Rider - 62 fics

[vriskakinnieaynrand]

[tattydolly]

If you are not in tears by the end of this story, you have no soul.

[max--phillips]

Everyone please. Please look at this animal. It’s called a tenrec and they live in Madagascar and lOOK AT IT!!!!!!! He’s just a little guy! A creachure!!!!!

[modmad]

[tattydolly]

Why do so many animals from Madagascar look like they've only got one nerve left and you just got on it?

[shacklefunk-deactivated20220623]

yknow theres a lot of pressure to be successful, particularly on artsy kids whose professions are seen as useless unless theyre famous, but life is fucking hard and sometimes things dont turn out

but i think thats not bad. my dad has wanted to be a musician forever, and hes rly pretty good. but then he joined the military to get away from an abusive family, and then he got married, and then he got divorced, and a lot of horrible shit HAPPENED. he has ptsd and severe anxiety and he could never really get back on the horse. and he never made it as a musician, and now hes 53

but i grew up in a house full of instruments, and he can play all of them, and some of my earliest memories are of him playing guitar on the front porch and me thinking there wasnt a better musician in the world. so. even if you dont get to the stars, exactly, what you do isnt worthless. its not a waste of time if life is difficult and you cant make it, or if you arent famous, or if your work doesn’t influence thousands of people. it will influence someone

there are a million ways to be happy and a million ways to be a successful artist. we create what we do to enhance the human experience and relate to each other and improve ourselves. theres something to be said for just doing that,,,for the sake of doing it, yknow

[talkgentlytome]

This is the most comforting, warm and important piece of text I have ever read, and it is so true. No life is wasted that is spent sharing and loving.

[jehanneargentee]

My mother never became a professional artist. She became a social worker, then later taught emotionally disturbed children. But our home was filled with photographs of wildflowers and wildlife. Spice racks, shelves, and other useful objects were adorned with small paintings. She taught me and my sister that we could make things beautiful, even if in small ways, and let us glue glitter and fake gems on our cheap kids furniture and make it ours. Capitalism tries to say that art isn’t successful unless it makes money. But that’s not why humans make art. We make art to convey emotion. To make an object or a moment or a story OURS. And making someone smile when they hear you sing, or look at something you made for them is as valid a reason for creating as any other.

[tattydolly]

Not just art. There are whole areas of human endeavour that are way too much fun to leave to the professionals. Every sport. Every species of art. Every science. Every type of academic study. You don’t need to get paid for it. You don’t even have to be good at it. You need no other justification except the you enjoy it.

[unhelpfultarot]

Three of Swords and The Moon

Currently suffering extreme distress as a result of unresolved cliffhangers, please stand by.

[neil-gaiman]

So I'm the one who asked about the beans in the English breakfast a day ago and I was reading the notes and-- what the actual fuck is black pudding? Never heard of it, not sure I even want to know, but now I feel bad for missing ANOTHER thing in the English breakfast.. also my dad devoured the food before my mom could say "beans are off, love" but we will remember it for next time!

I will let someone in the notes describe and explain Black Pudding. Someone will take joy in it.

[petermorwood]

@dduane called upstairs and told me: "Neil's got one for you!"

Well, maybe not me specifically, but here goes... :->

Black pudding is the Irish / UK name for a sausage made with blood - pig, cow or sheep - rather than chopped or minced meat as the main ingredient, forms of which are found in cuisines all over the world.

Black pudding can be long or short, straight or curved ("stick" or "ring"), and sometimes even a cake or terrine.

The "pudding" part, which USAians associate with a sweet dessert, comes from the French word "boudin" (boudin noir is French blood sausage) and seems to have something to do with "edible material inside a wrapper" - the wrapper may also be edible, like the skin on a sausage or black pudding...

...and the suet crust of a steak-and-kidney pudding...

...or inedible like the cloth or bag used for a boiled pudding. This is how Christmas puddings used to be made, hence Dickens writing that the Cratchit house smelled like a laundry, and why traditional images show them as spherical with a sprig of holly on top.

Black puddings are also boiled before going on sale, so they're actually cooked and ready-to-eat, though I've never heard of anyone hereabouts doing so.

Usually they become an ingredient in a recipe such as this salad (one of DD's Middle Kingdoms dishes)...

... or appear sliced as part of a fry-up.

The black puddings I'm most familiar with (Irish / UK) mostly use pig-blood, oats or barley and various herbs and spices. They're a standard part of a Full Irish Breakfast / Ulster Fry - just the sort of thing to start a day that involves ploughing a 40-acre field behind two Shire horses, though perhaps best eaten infrequently if just sitting at a desk.

This is pretty close to the sort of Ulster Fry I grew up with, including the black pudding...

...though there should also be a slice of white pudding (minced pork, oats or barley, spices) and that ordinary fried bread, nice though it looks, would be a half farl of soda and a couple of farls of potato bread instead.

(For those familiar with a Full English Breakfast and wondering "Why no baked beans?", AFAIK there should never be beans with an Ulster Fry since, unlike everything else, they can't be fried - which, as the name suggests, is the whole point...)

Black puddings were used as weapons (!) for "the Yorkshire martial art of Ecky Thump" (!!) in an episode of 1970s comedy show "The Goodies"; this is the notorious episode where a TV viewer died of laughter...

There are regional variants of black and white pudding all over these islands: Stornoway black pudding from Scotland, Pwdin Du from Wales, Bury black pudding in the Midlands, Hog's Pudding in the West Country and so on.

Perhaps the best known Irish black pudding variant is "drisheen" from Cork and Limerick; its signature herb is tansy, and oatmeal rather than barley gives a softer texture than regular pudding.

Cork and Limerick were major Viking settlements, so I wonder if there's some association between drisheen with tansy and Scandinavian blood sausages with marjoram and other herbs.

That notion was first prompted by Frans Bengtsson's well-researched novel "The Long Ships"; Michael Meyer's excellent translation is the usual English version.

There, black pudding - or at least blood sausage "with thyme in it" - provokes a tearful emotional response from two hard-bitten Vikings who, after several years as slaves then mercenaries in Andalusian (Muslim) Spain, get their first taste of Real Grub at King Harald Bluetooth's Yule feast.

The book version's a bit long, but you can get the picture (hah!) from a couple of frames of the graphic novel.

Wild boar, bread cakes and fried turnips were carried in, but when the blood-sausage came, Orm and Toke got tears in their eyes. "That scent is best of all!" "There's thyme in it..."

"Please, if it's not against Harald's orders, could we have some more? For seven years we've been eating vegetables in the land of the Andalusians. We've missed seven Yules-worth of blood-sausage!"

Back in 1987, I felt the same way about foods from home after only 6 months in Los Angeles - and yes, one of those foods was black pudding...

[tattydolly]

All of this, but with the slight addition that the reason Bob Cratchitt’s house smelled like a laundry was not because the Xmas pudding was cooked in a cloth, but because the only place in a lower class Victorian house that could boil something the size of an Xmas pudding was the laundry copper in the outhouse. https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/28181

[elodieunderglass]

Hey bestie whats a narrow boat? I saw you tag that on something you reblogged and I'm pretty curious now!

- Terry Darlington, Narrow Dog to Carcassone

A narrowboat (all one word) is a craft restricted to the British Isles, which are connected all over by a nerve-map of human-made canals. To go up and down hills, the canals are spangled with locks (chambers in which boats can be raised or lowered by filling or emptying them with water.) As Terry says above, the width of the locks was somewhat randomly determined, and as a result, the British Isles have a narrow design of lock - and a narrowboat to fit through them. A classic design was seventy feet long and six feet wide. Starting in the 18th century, and competing directly with trains, canal “barges” were an active means of transport and shipping. They were initially pulled along the towpaths by horses, and you can still see some today!

Later, engines were developed.

Even after the trains won the arms race, it was a fairly viable freight service right up until WW2. It’s slow travel, but uses few resources and requires little human power, with a fairly small crew (of women, in WW2) being capable of shifting two fully laden boats without consuming much fossil fuel.

In those times the barges were designed with small, cramped cabins in which the boaters and their families could live.

During its heyday the narrowboat community developed a style of folk art called “roses and castles” with clear links to fairground art as well as Romani caravan decor. They are historically decorated with different kinds of brass ornaments, and inside the cabins could also be distinctively painted and decorated.

Today, many narrowboats are distinctively decorated and colorful - even if not directly traditional with “roses and castles” they’ll still be bright and offbeat. A quirky name is necessary. All narrowboats, being boats, are female.

After a postwar decline, interest in the waterways was sparked by a leisure movement and collapsing canals were repaired. Today, the towpaths are a convenient walking/biking trail for people, as they connect up a lot of the mainland of the UK, hitting towns and cities. Although the restored canals are concrete-bottomed, they’re attractive to wildlife. Narrowboats from the 1970s onward started being designed for pleasure and long-term living. People enjoy vacationing by hiring a boat and visiting towns for a cuter, comfier, slower version of a campervan life. And a liveaboard community sprang up - people who live full-time on boats. Up until the very restrictive and nasty laws recently passed in the UK to make it harder for travelling peoples (these were aimed nastily at vanlivers and the Romani, and successfully hit everyone) this was one of the few legal ways remaining to be a total nomad in the UK.

Liveaboards can moor up anywhere along the canal for 28 days, but have to keep moving every 28 days. (Although sorting out the toilet and loading up with fresh water means that a lot of people move more frequently than that.) you can also live full-time in a marina if they allow it, or purchase your own mooring. In London, where canal boats are one of the few remaining cheapish ways to live, boats with moorings fetch the same prices as houses. It can be very very hard for families to balance school, parking, work, and all the difficulties of living off-grid- but many make it work. It remains a diverse community and is even growing, due to housing pressures in the UK. Boats can be very comfortable, even when only six feet wide. When faced with spending thousands of pounds on rent OR mooring up on a nice canal, you can see why it seems a romantic proposition for young people, and UK television channels always have slice-of-life documentaries about young folks fixing up their very own quirky solar-powered narrowboat. I don’t hate; I did it myself.

If you’re lucky, you might even meet some of the cool folks who run businesses from their narrowboats: canal-side walkers enjoy bookshops, vegan bakeries, ice-cream boats, restaurants, artists and crafters. There are Floating Markets and narrowboat festivals. It’s generally recognised that boaters contribute quite a lot to the canal - yet there are many tensions between different kinds of boaters (liveaboards vs leisure boaters vs tourists) as well as tensions with local settled people, towpath users like cyclists, and fishermen. I could go on and on explaining this rich culture and dramas, but I won’t.

Phillip Pullman’s Gyptians are a commonly cited example of liveaboards - although they were based on the narrowboat liveaboards that Pullman knew in Oxford, their boats are actually Dutch barges. Dutch barges make good homes but are too wide to access most of the midlands and northern canals, and are usually restricted to the south of the UK. So they’re accurate for Bristol/London/Oxford, and barges are definitely comfier to film on. (Being six feet wide is definitely super awkward for a boat.) but in general Dutch barges are less common, more expensive and can’t navigate the whole system.

However, apart from them, there are few examples of narrowboat depictions that escaped containment. So it’s quite interesting that there is an entire indigenous special class of boat, distinctive and highly specialised and very cute, with an associated culture and heritage and folk art type, known to all and widely celebrated, and ABSOLUTELY UNKNOWN outside of the UK - a nation largely known around the world for inflicting its culture on others. They’re a strange, sweet little secret - and nobody who has ever loved one can resist pointing them out for the rest of their lives, or talking about them when asked to. Thank you for asking me to.

[tattydolly]

You can follow a narrowboat journey on the Macclesfield Canal here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhSUZRZPHp0

[theehorsepusssy]

[tattydolly]

Ah, Yorkshire!

[some-1one]

capybara taking a hot bath during winter in Itō, Japan

[tattydolly]

I’m looking at all the citrus fruits floating on the surface there. This is basically capybara punch.

[flameslikeanything]

If you’re ever feeling down, just pull up google maps, zoom in on England and start looking at all the place names.

[flameslikeanything]

[lowpolyrats]

my personal recommendations:

[dduane]

…And this doesn’t even scratch the surface. Don’t get me started about Ottery St. Mary. Or Birdlip.

[tattydolly]

Let me introduce you to the travel game of Christie-Wodehouse. Every time you come across a signpost to a double-barrelled place name you have to decide whether it’s a character from an Agatha Christie or a PG Wodehouse novel. From the above examples I would say that Nempnett Thrubwell definitely belongs as a Wodehouse character, but Hooton Pagnell could possibly be a Christie witness to a crime.