The Forget Me Not was just coffee and biscuits and a chat. We usually have speakers, music or something special but occasionally it's just coffee and a chat which is very pleasant.
If you live in Hethersett or somewhere near, why not come and say hello. We meet in the Methodist Church Hall on the first and third Tuesdays of the month from 10 am. I'm usually there. So just say "Peter's blog sent me." A few of my bloggettes come along. I start telling them about where I've been and what I've been doing and they say " yes we know. We read it in the blog."
I had a chat with our district and county councillor David about a variety of village matters. We are getting a new pedestrian crossing close to the schools and that should certainly help with the safety in the area.
Friday is a big day for the village, although technically only really a ceremonial one. At 1.30 pm the builders will be handing over the keys of the new playing field pavilion to the parish council. It will mark the culmination of work by so many people over many many years.
But there will be an ironic twist to the fact that the building is now almost ready for occupancy. It's an irony that I feel very much a part of and something that defies logic.
For many years I was chairman of the village football club. Our men's Saturday team won a number of trophies (the latest being this season). Our dream was always to step up to the Anglian Combination and we applied to that league on more than one occasion only to be told that, although our league position was good enough, our facilities weren't.
Now we have the top class facilities but, through no fault of our own, we are being told that our league position isn't good enough for us to step up into the higher league. Let me explain.
We were told that to gain promotion we needed to finish in the top four of our current league. With the season completed we were safely in fourth place. Then something happened over which we had no control. One of the teams was found to have fielded ineligible players in two games which they won. Consequently they were docked six points and wins were awarded to the two teams they had beaten. That award meant that one of those teams leapfrogged us into fourth place. This meant we finished fifth and outside the places needed to step up.
To me our football club/team is being punished due to the transgression of another team and due to matters outside our control. I have offered to write a heartfelt letter to both the league and the Football Association in my capacity as former club chairman and as an honorary life member of the club.
I will always fight for what I feel is right and fight what I feel is unfair and for people/organisations that are penalised for something they cannot do anything about.
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I bet the name Geoffrey Litester means very little to Norfolk people and probably nothing to those living outside the county.
Many, however, will have heard of Robert Kett and his rebellion against enclosures. Almost 200 years before Kett there was another rebellion in Norfolk led by Litester who was a dyer.
Litester and a group of peasants squared up to the Bishop of Norwich Henry le Dispenser at what became known as the Battle of North Walsham. It was the last major resistance of the Peasants' Revolt.
Revolts broke out all over East Anglia in 1381. After the Battle of North Walsham Litester was captured and executed.
The Peasants' grievances were based around life becoming harsher for them as landowners became wealthier with wages being strictly controlled. The struggle was against the State the King (Richard II who was only a boy) and badly educated priests, many of whom were landowners themselves.
The rebellion in Norfolk had spread up from Essex, Kent and Suffolk.
Henry Le Dispenser became known as the fighting Bishop for obvious reasons but little is known about Geoffrey Litester (sometimes written as Litster). He was moderately well off and came from Felmingham. Despite this he was still a peasant and he and his men would have been untrained and unequipped to face Dispenser's force.
Apparently there wasn't much of a battle before the peasants surrendered. Litester was hanged, drawn and quartered at North Walsham. His body went on a tour of Norwich, Great Yarmouth and Lynn as a warning to others.
Dispenser had something of a dilemma as a fighting priest. In his role as Bishop he heard Litester's confession and absolved him. As a soldier he had him executed.
Litester's widow Agnes was forced to settle his outstanding debts.
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I have been following the news closely about the protest group Animal Rising, following the incident we witnessed at close range at the Derby.
A subject that has always fascinated me is propaganda. I tried to write an article on it once but found it just too vast a subject. It all ties in with my thoughts about promises and the reality often being very different. I have mentioned this so many times in the past that you are probably utterly sick of it. But here I go again.
Animal Rising accused the Jockey Club of starting the Derby whilst a protestor was on the track. This they said the Jockey Club had promised they wouldn't do. Pure propaganda as it turned out. The race had already started when the protestor got onto the course. We can confirm this by what we saw with our own eyes and television coverage also confirmed that when the race started there was nobody on the course.
Irrespective of timings, what the protestor Ben Newman was doing was endangering the lives of horses, of jockeys, of himself, of police and security staff and ultimately of spectators if horses had got out of control.
Now we hear that the protest group is not against horse racing per se but has some garbled views on the whole relationship between humans and animals. I can understand their aims to get us to eat less meat and to fight the slaughter of animals. We have cut our consumption of meat down by about two-thirds and I could quite imagine us eventually going vegetarian.
But the group advocate non violent confrontation and then boast that they disrupted both the Grand National and the Derby. There's a very thin line between actual physical violence and implied violence where actions could lead to violence eg a protestor getting onto the Epsom course and having to be dragged off it by security and police before 14 horses thundered down. This protestor could have caused any manner of violent incidents by his actions.
Incidentally Newman has elected trial at Crown Court and been remanded in custody for over a month. So how much is that going to cost us the taxpayer? No doubt he wants to expound his extremist views in an open court and have his Andy Warhol 15 minutes of fame.
Sometimes I think our planet is mad and heading towards hell in a handcart. I wonder what Bishop Dispenser would have thought of it all.