I checked one of my recent blogs and it weighed in at 1,400 words!
I was delighted to wake up yesterday to find my three Hethersett-related stories have been featured on the EDP24 web site.
The first was a piece with photographs about our small remembrance service around the war memorial in the grounds of St Remigius Church. The second was a call to light up the village at Christmas and the third was a piece about another delay to the re-opening of the King's Head. Two of these were the lead items on the website.
It's good to be able to raise the profile of the village in a small way, although finding new stories is quite difficult at the moment with clubs and societies shut down and relatively little happening in the village. Relatively little that is until you scratch below the surface a bit and there are plenty of stories to uncover as I hope will be evident from my next Hethersett Herald.
If you want to view the pieces on the EDP website they are as follows:
Remembrance Service - https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/village-remembers-war-dead-in-short-service-1-6921175
King's Head Re-opening - https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/historic-pub-to-delay-reopening-after-lockdown-1-6921295
Light up for Christmas appeal - https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/village-to-light-up-this-christmas-1-6921300
The Rector, Rev Derek McClean, also filmed the remembrance service and has put it online at: https://www.facebook.com/hethersettchurch/videos/377616196798669/
Yesterday I did something I haven't done for decades - no it wasn't buying a round of drinks as that isn't allowed under lockdown rules. I set my camera to take black and white photos and went out on a round of the village to see what I could capture. I also took a few in sepia as well.
I have this very small sports camera - a DB Power EX5000 which is a cheaper clone of the Go-Pro family. It takes ok photos but I won't be swapping it for my usual Sony camera, but I hope you like a few of the photographs here. It was a very grey day which didn't help, but then the sun came out. So I took photographs of the parish church from the same angle - the first in black and white, the second in sepia and the third in colour. Perhaps you would like to tell me which you prefer. I do like the black and white and so will be using that method for other village pictures during lockdown.
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I have mentioned watching the American What's My Line programme over the past few nights and being thoroughly entertained by it.
Last night I came across a side-story. One of the most prominent panellists in the 1950s and 1960s was Dorothy Kilgallen. Kilgallen was initially a close friend of Frank Sinatra but fell out with him.
In 1965 she died at the age of 52. She was found on the floor of her apartment and had died from a mix of alcohol and drugs. But there was some suggestion that, as a journalist, she had too much knowledge in certain areas and was murdered. She had told people that she had some explosive information regarding the assassination of President Kennedy. This information, if it existed, never came out, but her cause of death was initially given as a heart attack and then changed. The amount of barbiturates and alcohol in her blood was relatively small. There certainly seems to be more about her death than meets the eye.
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Yesterday I mentioned what I call You Tube Ramblings whereby you log on and just see where things take you. A slight alternative to this involves music.
Here's what you do. Take one of your favourite pieces of music and listen to it. Then follow this by picking your favourite piece of music from those suggested for you on the right hand side. Just repeat this and see where things take you.
I gave it a go last night and started with one of my favourite pieces of pop/rock music and decided to go with 10. this is the way it went.
1/ Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum
2/ A Song For You - Leon Russell
3/ I'll Never Find Another You - The Seekers
4/ Those Were The Days - Mary Hopkin
5/ As Tears Go By - Marianne Faithful
6/ Hey That's No Way To Say Goodbye - Judy Collins and Leonard Cohen
7/ Ball and Chain - Janis Joplin
8/ Freebird (live) - Lynyrd Skynyrd
9/ Nights in White Satin - Moody Blues
10/ Funeral For a Friend/ Love Lies Bleeding - Elton John
Quite an eclectic mix that tended to get heavier as it went along. The Lynyrd Skynyrd track lasted 12 minutes and was recorded at Coliseum Stadium which I believe is in Los Angeles in 1977. It is a blistering version of the song.
Anyway that playlist is over 50 minutes of good stuff.
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Finally some more photos taken on yesterday's Steward Stroll which was 3.6 miles around the village - taking my total walking distance since lockdown started to almost 23 miles.