That doesn't mean you break the rules - completely the opposite. For me it means you don't have to follow the pack. You can be a little off the wall and not worry about it.
When you are young the pressure is to follow others, to conform to their rules and beliefs. But as you get older you start to formulate your own rules and beliefs.
In many ways my life has been a contradiction. I hated PE at school but loved sport (work that one out). At heart I am a non conformist who conforms. A breaker of rules who abides by rules. Maybe I'm just mixed up? What do you think?
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Whenever I visit a new place I try to get under its skin. By that I mean I pretend that I live there and how I would feel about that. On our stay in Kent we were close to a village named Lyminge, It looked a tad down at heel and not the prettiest place but it had a heart, That's what I'm always looking for in a place - a heart.
I'm also looking for pride. Lyminge has a series of publicity boards in the centre about its history and there seems to be a very active heritage/historical society.
I can't help thinking when I see this that we are missing a trick in Hethersett. Hethersett is a wonderful community full of caring people. It has groups covering just about every subject imaginable and people are always stepping forward to help others. But we don't have a heritage group as such. There was a Hethersett Society but this hasn't reconvened following lockdown and looks less and less likely to continue.
We have a village archive, and archivist Gary Wyatt regularly gives excellent illustrated talks to various groups. But there seems to be a lack of research into village history.
I am very loathe to set-up or become involved with another group as my workload in the volunteer sector pretty much sees me working full time. But it would be good to get a group of people together to research Hethersett's past and come up with something tangible. If anyone lives locally and is reading this and would like to help me take this idea forward I would love to hear from them.
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Yesterday I promised you a sad story. It comes from a stone in Hythe Church in memory of a local resident. It reads: "Also of Margaret, wife and mother of the above who died at Hythe May 13th, 1920 aged 73 years. This tablet is placed in loving memory by her daughters Ethel, Hilda and Gladys."
Above this is another memorial which you can see pictured with this blog. This shows quite plainly that Margaret lost a husband and four sons within a period of 28 years. I have no idea how she would have coped with this, particularly when I found out that she lost daughters as well.
So I searched the internet to find a little more about this tragic family and here is part of their story.
Margaret Elizabeth Mary Hamilton nee Cragg was born in Devon, the eldest of the five daughters of Rear-Admiral John Bettinson Cragg and his wife Margaret. She married Thomas Bramston Hamilton, an officer in the Royal Artillery in her home town on 2nd June 1864 and as a married woman travelled with him as his military postings which took him round the UK, to Ireland, Shorncliffe in Kent, Sheerness and finally to Bitterne in Hampshire. Here, Thomas bought Bitterne Grove, a house and estate of about thirty acres, for £6,600 in 1877 and the last five of their eleven children were born there.
When Thomas left the army he became president of the Church Missionary Society and of the Church of England Temperance Society and Honorary Secretary of the Bitterne Conservative Association before dying aged only 47 on 2nd April 1884. It was the first of many losses for Margaret. Edith, her second daughter, died at Bitterne Grove in 1889, aged 22, and five years later, Margaret’s sister, Fanny, died there during a visit.
Margaret moved to Hythe in about 1899. Why is unknown, but she was familiar with the area from her husband’s Shorncliffe posting in the 1870s, when she had lived in Sandgate. Just before his death, her husband had arranged to buy a house in Hythe. She eventually moved into a 17th century house in the town.
Her son Kenneth, who had emigrated to Ceylon, joined the Ceylon Mounted Infantry when the Boer War broke out, as a private. He died there of enteric fever on 15 May 1900.
His slightly younger brother Ernest, meanwhile, had emigrated to Natal, where he lived in Eshowe, a fairly new European settlement. When war broke out, he joined Bethune’s Mounted Infantry, an irregular corps of 356 British men. Six months later, he was dead, killed in action at Scheepers Nek.
Alastair, the second son, joined the British army on 15th November 1899, a month after the war broke out and served as a second lieutenant in the Royal Irish Fusiliers. The war ended in May 1902, and he resigned his commission in September that year and became a cattle farmer in Carolina in the Transvaal (now Mpumalanga). He was killed by lightning on his farm on 5th December 1902.
So the horrors went on as the inscriptions show. The details above are taken from the website https://hythehistoryblog.wordpress.com/tag/margaret-hamilton/ if you would like to read more do visit this site which gives an in depth history of the family.
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Some events in the winter Olympics have had to be postponed - because it's snowing. You just couldn't make that up.