The last posting was a summation of all that had occurred over half a month or more. In these weeks I lost, my garden, my privacy and my will to live.
However, the darkest hour is just before dawn. (This is a lie, it’s actually around 1 – 2 a.m.) (If you don’t believe me stay up and look.)
Anyway, having registered my despair, which I conveyed in a way you won’t believe (I went silent and retreated to my craft room), finally, this morning, other members of the archery group arrived to remove the moving targets.
They arrived with the trailer of one of them. The gaffer, who has been resident in the garden throughout, supervising the OH, stood dangerously on the road in the traffic as the company of archers moved the moving targets up my side path, as you do, well, they did.
As you can see the targets are large and heavy. They have to be. They have to withstand people shooting arrows at them. Fortunately the members are archers.
How does this help? I think I can hear you wondering.
Well, archers have massive upper body development. After a few years of bows and arrows and an awful lot of back pain the OH’s shoulders on his right hand side have expanded noticeably.
In Warwick, as in many old English towns established by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there are roads called ‘The Butts’ or similar names, often just outside of old town walls. These areas were for compulsory archery practice. Able bodied men could be required under the feudal system to do military service. Vassals, those men who held land, which actually belonged to the local lord, held the land, which was their livelihood, on condition they would turn up to defend the lord if and when required. Serfs, who were the poor landless servants, didn’t have much choice, or possessions, so were co-opted anyway.
By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, military service meant bows and arrows. The only alternative was to go rogue, like Robin Hood and his band of forest dwellers, which, of course, meant bows and arrows.
If you practice drawing a bow often enough, you will become deformed with massive lopsided shoulders, especially if you are drawing a longbow, which is as tall as you are. The English, possibly thanks to urban development including the facility of places to practice archery, were very good at drawing bows. They were a force to be reckoned with, and were so good that if they were caught by the traditional enemy, the French, they would have their two middle fingers cut off so they couldn’t draw the bow. This is the origin of various rude gestures involving a finger raised to the sky.
The advantage of English archery was so great, that by the famous Battle of Agincourt, which was a turning point in the Hundred Years War, in 1415, the English Longbow Men won the battle. This was in spite of the French having new fangled crossbows. These machines did not require years of training and upper body strength, you just wound them up, put the arrow in the slot and pulled the trigger. However, the French crossbows were huge and took ages to wind up. The French were shooting uphill against the sun and the English Longbow Men, up the hill, picked off the horses, the infantry and a lot of the nobility with ease.
Then they probably all loaded into a trailer and drove home.
Once they’d got all the bosses in the trailer, obviously.
It’s that upper body strength, you see. Enables you to draw a longbow, best the French and carry the bosses the OH has made up the side passage and into the light.
It’s probably a metaphor for something.
Anyway, if you are impressed, so was Shakespeare, who lived five miles from my drive, on and off. He’d have known all about it, it’s why he wrote Henry V (who was the boss of Agincourt) celebrating the King and all those archers who had been practising on The Butts (up the side of the Girls’ School and on the way to the doctor’s).
And Jane gets her garden back! Happy ending! (not necessarily the one Shakespeare wrote, but close.)
Further joy.
Oh yes. While my garden was full of archers likely to break the bird bath, whack bosses into the pots and demolish the fence with massive unstable structures, I retreated to my bedroom and began examining the wardrobe. The contents to be exact.
It’s not my walk-in, it’s the other one. Now the OH has his own bedroom and two wardrobes, his old one has silted up.
What has it silted up with? I hear you ask, or, if you’re very grammatical: with what has it silted up, or even: up with what has it silted?
Dolls of course.
Big dolls.
Years ago, years and years ago (not as long ago as Agincourt but quite a while) there was another Miniatura. Same venue, same organisers, different collectors. It was Miniatura Bears and Dolls.
I took along my little dolls and quite quickly, being me, started making big, original artist porcelain dolls.
Then Bears and Dolls folded and I put my dolls in the wardrobe.
Because I had nowhere to sell them.
And now I have an online shop.
Stay tuned.
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