Amongst the extraordinary feats in his life was getting an obituary in The Stage since he had worked as a stuntman doubling for Sean Connery in You Only Live Twice, where he did not just fly the autogyro but also built and modified it for filming.
In an age of tarnished celebrity Ken Wallis was the real deal; a man who deserved to be famous for the valour of his life and his achievements. Amongst those was a determination to go his own way but always making friends. No matter how tired he might be, Wallis was unfailingly polite and took care that every person he spoke to became a potential ally to aviation, engineering and innovation but always with a regard for the traditions which he knew his friends valued.
He knew everybody and everybody knew him. As a result, when Old Buckenham airfield - where he was member 007 - suggested holding an appreciation day, the event snowballed.
An estimated 500 cars attended as spectators with about another 200 classic cars putting on a display of automotive engineering which spanned his lifetime.
At least 80 landing slots were booked for visiting aircraft which in the end became so numerous that the organizers had to ask them to come by car - they had run out of capacity to get everyone landed by the time the family wanted to make an address to the crowd of around 2,000, filling the hangar and spilling out over the fields.
In recognition of his development of the autogyro and all the stories he told about them, as many as possible flew in and lined up by Little Nellie's hangar.
We were blessed with a bright, warm and breezy day to give thanks for the life of Wing Commander Ken Wallis MBE.
Over at Fahrenheit211 a personal explanation of why a person would spend precious time tracking stories with no financial reward and, it sometimes appears, little effect on the world.
In response I give you.....garlic.
Seeds and seed bulbs harvested for next planting
Mr Raft has just harvested several large bulbs which are being used, stored, admired and generally enjoyed. There will be garlic with our Yuletide dinner. I might see about putting a few prepared cloves in to oil as that is another way of storing them.
Mr Raft has also let some bulbs go to seed for the next generation so I'll pop them in the earth now in the belief and expectation that there will not just be this autumn but another when the wheel of the year has rolled all the way round, through all those moons.
Blogging also has to be about optimism, a belief that any small act of defiance is better than none.
You can have a religious argument about the definitions of "a blue moon". Whatever, this month contains the novelty of two full moons in one calendar month.
As it was so cloudy at the first full moon I wasn't able to see it so I'm hoping for better weather on Friday night. The August moon(s) are my favourite; she floats over the fens and fields as if looking for her own reflection in the water and windows. The great harvesters creep over the land late in to the evening, half-paddle-steamer, half-dragon, then they vanish improbably by daylight as if they went back to giant burrows.
Logically, everyone knows the moon is a faraway rock but when you look at that silver white disc - or a ruby moon which I've seen - it is impossible to think of it as merely subjectively beautiful; she's objectively, intrinsically beautiful and always was long before there were any humans to wonder if you could reach her.
In 2005 Andrew Smith published his series of interviews with the astronauts who had done more than just wonder. Standing at the pinnacle of thousands of years of technological development they had been able to answer the question: what's it like to go to the moon?
"Moondust - in search of the men who fell to Earth" was updated in 2009 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. It is now 40 years since the final manned Apollo mission and Smith's book puts the programme in to its historical context. He secured interviews from the remaining moonmen, including email exchanges with Neil Armstrong who clarified many factual points about the mission.
Thank goodness Armstrong's mission was successful. The emergency speech had already been written in case anything went wrong. And yet, as Smith's book shows, there is curious sense in which the eulogy remains true; the moonmen suffered a kind of death because their old selves would not exist thereafter and nothing they would do subsequently could quite compare with those few days.
This full moon will not have Neil Armstrong beneath it. I believe she'll be looking for him.
............
Moondust - in search of the men who fell to Earth Andrew Smith, Bloomsbury 2005, update 2009
ISBN 978 1 4088 02380
This year I was privileged to visit the churchyard of St Just in Roseland, Cornwall.
The churchyard is famous for its graves on a steep hill where the church lies in the cup of the surrounding paths in a sub-tropical garden with a tidal pool at the bottom. The sea coming and going and the exotic planting make the spot simultaneously unearthly but eccentrically English.
The high tide coincided with sunrise, so I was there to watch the church emerge from darkness. Because the natural form of the bay is a deep amphitheatre, the light produces extraordinary effects such as the church tower not having a top but carrying on up to heaven.
Looking around the graves there were several elegant War Grave headstones, particularly fine black ones which take a sharp cut and don't easily wear away. It was pleasing to find that volunteers have been photographing them and indexing them.
There are several searches one can do. This one was for war graves in St Just in Roseland. Clicking on any of the returned names goes to a photograph of the individual gravestone with details which are known about the person.
David Cameron, the Prime Minister who doesn't have a parliamentary majority with his own party, thinks that Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, speaks for the whole country.
Rowan Williams doesn't even speak for the whole Anglican communion in England, let alone the world. Please don't mention the g-word.
"The Church Commissioners' commercial property portfolio consists of a diverse range of Retail (including High Street, Shopping Centre and Warehouse Parks), Industrial, and Office properties, located throughout the UK and is currently valued at £321 million.
Notable investments in the portfolio include the MetroCentre, Europe's largest (and recently voted Britain's Best) shopping centre. The Centre is managed by Capital Shopping Centres but the Commissioners receive 10% of the net rents."
The congregation will rise and sing hymn number 666
The moon nearest the Autumn equinox (around September 23) is known as the Harvest Moon, but that was back on 12 September. The coming moon on October 11 is known as the Hunter's Moon although it can be called the Harvest Moon if the moon phase falls closest to the equinox in a given year.
It didn't this year but never mind; the harvest comes in from August onwards and is still going on, so this was a good weekend for a Harvest festival. Given the burst of hot days last week it worked out well. Besides, the children have been back at school for just over a month so they've had time to do projects on Where Our Food Comes From.
The modern consumer parade of seasonal food doesn't catch what we know is the deeper psychological truth; there isn't going to be any food made for months. People want, profoundly, to store life against the depths of the winter, near the solstice, when we will need captive sunshine. Maybe there should be more tinned food in the displays, or more exhibitions of salting, drying and preserving in sugar. It is one thing to produce food, quite another to be able to shift it forward, each jar a tiny time capsule.
The bees do it best with their immortal honey and beautiful wax but they are in great danger and nobody knows quite why their numbers are dropping and colonies are crashing. The British Beekeeper's Association asks that in the meantime, please could everyone put in bee-friendly plants, especially for May and June where the bees need all the help they can get.
Plants I've found are robust and take hardly any looking-after are foxgloves, hollyhocks, lavender and thyme. They might need a trim when the bees are finished with them but otherwise they just get on with it. As the hollyhock flowers tend to drop off and lay around on the path it's best to plant them at the back of the border where you don't have to sweep them up.
The Anglo-Saxons had a charm for bees and St Benedict had a Catholic prayer for them. As we are largely dependent on the bees for pollination or there won't be a next harvest, it is urgent to discover what is causing the colonies to collapse. A prayer on the side never does any harm, though. Other practical advice from the British Bee Keepers Association.
St Barnabas has a claim to be the natural saint of the bloggosphere and whistleblowers. He was tortured then stoned, or perhaps burned, to death for talking to the public.
The blogger Fr. Mark White notes that Barnabas may have been as prolific as St Paul, but St Paul was the one who got the attention and whose work survived and made it in to the official list. The MSM, if you like. St Barnabas' work seems to have mostly vanished and he has to make do with the credits others give him.
He's remembered in many churches, though. For instance, at Great Tey in Essex there is a church dedicated to him.
You might think that a vicar of a church invoking such a virtuous man would have an instinctive reaction when faced with someone telling an unwelcome truth. They would rise up and defend the them, especially if it concerned a child.
In June 2009, seven-year-old Chloe David was involved in a case of bullying at the Great Tey Voluntary Controlled CoE primary school, the one associated with St Barnabas Church and its vicar the Reverend John Richardson.
Chloe was tied to a fence with a skipping rope and lashed by four boys. Now, children play rough but this is exceptional. It is sufficiently serious that it may be an S&M act-out, which means you have to record it in full and make sure social services know in case they want to launch further enquiries as to where this game originated.
The dinner-time supervisor Carol Hill found Chloe. Mrs Hill is a first aider and has a duty to the child and her parents which, if ever there is a choice, takes precedence to her duty to the school. She wrote in the school record:
"Chloe has been tied up and then hit with a skipping rope – red marks on right leg and right wrist".
Hill reported it to her employers and left them to do their job.
The notice sent to the parents by Headmistress Deborah Crabb reads:
"She was hurt on the right leg and right wrist with a skipping rope"
"Chloe was hurt by some other children so to reassure you they had all missed part of their lunchtime today and their parents have been informed."
This is not quite the same thing. 'Hurt' implies playground accident. We've all had those. This was deliberately inflicted injury by a coordinated group. It also neglects to mention the bondage.
At tribunal, Crabb explained the boys insisted they were playing "Guards and Prisoners". So she was always fully aware that this was a coordinated playing-out of a fantasy by four boys whipping a small girl. In no sense could it be interpreted as an accident.
When Carol Hill, who also volunteered at the Beavers, bumped in to Chloe's mother, it transpired that Mrs David didn't appreciate how potentially serious the incident had been, nor the sexual connotations involved, nor that it had been in the nature of an attack.
Chloe's father demanded a copy of the original report and furiously withdrew the children from school, citing that the Crabb had attempted to cover up potentially serious abuse and so couldn't be trusted to deal with real abuse by adults if that ever occurred.
It was further suggested Crabb had acted in this way because one of the children who had been involved in the attack was the son of a governor. What else would she cover up? This is how child abuse continues to happen, everybody making excuses for it and closing ranks to protect their buddies instead of the victim.
In response, the school sacked Carol Hill, claiming that she had broken the child's confidentiality by talking to the parents. Unless Hill had some reason to suspect the parents were the dangerous ones, she had an obligation to speak to them if she believed them to have been misinformed, which trumps her obligation to the school.
She's there to protect children, not to save Crabb's face, or the face of another governor whose child was involved in the victimization. Child protection trumps employment law.
The school also claimed that Carol Hill had no right to go to the papers over their attempt to mislead the parents, and that she did so as a matter of personal antipathy to Crabb. So what?
Crabb tried to lie to the parents and untrustworthy governors colluded with her in that. It is a matter of public interest that a head deliberately misled parents and then tried to plead confidentiality in this betrayal of child protection. At no time could it have been in Chloe's interest to lie to her parents. But it was in the interests of some of the other children and the school.
On that sacking panel were three people from the C of E school’s governing body: John Wickes, Cathy Rayner and the local vicar, Rev John Richardson.
Unfortunately, eighteen months later, that which is glaringly obvious to anyone who isn't an employment lawyer also escaped the Employment Tribunal in Bury St Edmunds, another place where a martyr wasted his blood and is probably wondering if it was worth it.
Carol Hill has an inconclusive ruling which seems to say that technically, they could have sacked her for not keeping schtum about potential child abuse, even though every bit of child protection advice says she must speak out, not keep secrets. It's just they followed the wrong procedure for doing it. Yeah, right, a complete accident and not an example of grown professionals deliberately flouting employment law and child protection protocols.
Anybody with a lick'o'sense would rather Carol Hill looked after their children than this poisonous gang. It follows, of course, that Mrs Hill is the one who might be banned from volunteering with the Beavers and could end up with the social services arguing she can't have access to her own grandchildren.
She is the test case for the vetting and banning list. The school will have to notify what ever the Independent Safeguarding Authority becomes that she was sacked for gross misconduct, or would have been if they hadn't got the procedure wrong. (There is still some argument over what the heck it means).
But the whole point is that if she had a choice at all, she made the correct one in putting her duty to the child ahead of her duty to the employer. Rev Richardson should remember that; his duty to God is ahead of his duty to the Church.
As Carol Hill appears not to want to take it to Appeal, that is the end of this case. However, the political ramifications will carry on because now it looks like any employee who discovers wrong doing, especially abuse against children being covered up, is unable to go to the police without it being gross misconduct. The culpability ought to be in keeping quiet, not in talking.
Come on Michael Gove and Eric Pickles, get yer fingers out. This wants sorting. We can't have a big society if people like Mrs Hill aren't allowed to volunteer and exercise their role in child protection. Even Ed Balls - even Ed Balls - knew this case was rotten and wrote to the school to say so.
There is a way, via the admirable Anna Raccoon, to register support for Carol Hill and to wish her well and give her a pat on the back. Send her the equivalent of a box of chocs, more if you can afford it.
Cold but not bitter, the Holocaust Memorial in the Abbey Garden was quietly organized with the planting of snowdrops. Pearly lanterns against the grey earth.
A few flakes of snow fell but the air was still; they whirled down and vanished. The gardeners, earth-born in gillets and knitted hats, stood looking much like any workmen from the last fifteen hundred years, waiting while the frozen children sang the song they had rehearsed.
The children's reedy voices fluted up thorugh the bare branches, the ringing of their chime bars created an elegant minimalist memorial, bright as silver, fragile as peace.
The pulse of an older England has been beating all summer through fairs, exhibitions, holidays. It's now the end of Summerland and the distant trumpet of winter comes early in the morning on the mist.
The finale of the Harvest Festival overlays Christian theology on the underlying pagan year marker of the Autumn Equinox where, if you've been lucky and diligent, there will be enough food in store to keep you alive for the next six months.
This is the time of year pensioners put an extra tin of ham in the back of the cupboard. They couldn't tell you why since they prefer to live on tea and biscuits and the tins are a sod to open, but that daft peardrop makes them feel safe, like a huge lucky charm.
The Harvest Festival is enjoyed particularly by the ladies of the parish. They take over the church and build tableaux of of fragile beauty out of materials they know are mortal.
So does their Lord.
Now Muriel plays piano Every Friday at the Hollywood And they brought me down To see her And they asked me if I would -- Do a little number And I sang with all my might And she said -- "Tell me are you a Christian child?" And I said "Ma'am I am tonight"
Ana Free's version because it is the one which would be performed in a church.
This is the time of year pensioners put an extra tin of ham in the back of the cupboard. They couldn't tell you why since they prefer to live on tea and biscuits and the tins are a sod to open, but that daft peardrop makes them feel safe, like a huge lucky charm.
