Wherever I lay my blog thats my home

After my flurry of 2011 posts I've come to the realisation that in this iPhone app friendly, wifi, 3G,web 2.0 world -Blogger just don't cut it no more. I always think that the wordpress blogs look so much better when you read them on your phone so I thought I would make the leap across.

So from now on the blog address is http://itsnotthethingyoufling.wordpress.com

Much better iPhone app to update it from and all the old post are wooshed over at the click of a button. Whats more it was all done from the comfort of my iPhone while two kids were covering themselves in pasta. And just to prove my point it wouldn't let me post this from my phone to blogger. so there you go.


And yes I am just copying mark rainey. He's such a trend setter.

List 1: "If it's in the house it's not lost"

Lost (and sometimes found) through the years.

• Monkey- Lost 29/3/11 11.00am Found 14.27 29/3/11

• Evan's right shoe - Lost Marple Carnival 2010 Found the next day by Greenhalgh's the Bakers

• 2 skateboards-Lost March 2009 while moving house from Stalybridge-Marple- Still Missing

• Howies Jumper- Lost 10/9/07 Castrojeriz (Northern Spain-Camino de Santiago) Found 13/9/07 90 km and 3 days later in Carrion de los condes. Picked up by unknown fellow pilgrim and carried to they found out who it belonged to!

• Tomy Tronic Sky Attack c.January 1983 Last seen underneath seat of rental car. A christmas present taken far too soon

• 
  

lost and found

Monkey (23 months) pictured right

A few weeks ago we had quite a crisis as a family but I now feel like I can write about it. It all ended well and more importantly brought to my attention a new menace that is threatening our families ( but more on that later).

Having not long moved back to Marple, Finn, Evan and myself were taking in all the old haunts....first the playground, then the library then and quick stop at the famous co-op cafe for a quick fruit shoot and cake. but wait.....a quick head count on leaving the coop revealed we were one short. Finn, Dolly, Evan .......no monkey.

What followed was a hurried dash around the aforementioned sights of Marple retracing our steps. Now Monkey isn't just any old toy. Monkey is THE toy. Evan literally will not sleep without him. Likewise Finn and Dolly (we're good on original names- pretty lucky finn and evan they didnt get named Girl and Boy).

Coop...nothing.... Library...nothing....playground....nothing.... inbetween...you guessed it...nothing. we retraced most of the way home before I began to admit that the situation was now bigger than I could handle. 6 hours until bedtime and the Ratcliffe clan were informed. lisa rang her mum who went and scoured the streets afresh.

It was at this point i turned to other possible solutions and stumbled across the immoral trade in cuddly toys. we'd checked with mothercare only to find out that our monkey model had been discontinued but low and behold i found one on eBay.

but what was this.. a starting price of £20. and not just the one spare, "oh my child no longer plays with this" toy. this was organised. well these were desperate times. i scrolled down further to the description:

"New. Ideal as a spare or as a replacement for a child's must have toy"

Were people really buying up cuddly toys in the hope of selling them on to the vulnerable and desperate in the event of unfortunate tumble from the pram? oh no Monkey wasn't alone, there were scores of others caught up in the toy exploitation ring. And we seriously considered bidding for it. what could we do . we had tried to slip Elephant to evan as a stand in but he isn't stupid- he was starting to guess that something was up. But we knew we couldn't become part of this underground immoral trafficking.

Then the messages starting coming in from Lisa and from her mum. Monkey had been found. In front of Tittertons ........no Senior Citizens....... by a stranger? No....Great Granny Syb.

By some stroke of luck or fate or divine intervention Great Granny Syb had been going about her normal Marple business- helping out at the hatch at the Senior Citizens centre. She stepped out the door and looked down to see a fallen monkey. She didn't know at the point that Evan had lost it but "the tail was still wet" so she knew it was THE monkey.

So the day was saved (and the night). Now if monkey had dropped even a couple of meters in the direction of the library then she wouldn't have spotted him and of all the places for a sleeping evan to drop monkey, the chances of dropping him in front of the doors of his great granny's hang out seem quite slim. but there we are...reunited.

But lets just spare a thought for all those monkeys and bears that could be keeping kids safe at night but instead are being bought up and sold for huge profits when misfortune falls.

are you still here. there really is nothing to see here. maybe pop back in 2011.

Tamburello's on streetview

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The reprimand for playing cards

Mr Ratcliffe Ratcliffe I presume

I've been doing a fair amount of family tree research since I've been at home with the twins. Sometimes its just easier to not move when they get off for a nap and use one arm to soothe them and surf with the other.

I've been looking into my family tree for about 7 or 8 years now but it kind of goes to bursts of activity. Either because of some genealogical brick wall or because of a lack of free trials on the family tree sites.

Recently I have had two big breakthroughs though. the first was a very fortuitous discovery. Last year I wrote to a lady who had written a booklet of the village of Bradenstoke in Wiltshire where my nanna was born and raised. It's right next to RAF Lyneham and Wooten Bassett (where all the war dead come back into the country). She had collected lots of memories as part of a Millennium Project. As it happens there were a few passing references to a few relatives. So through a long route I tried to contact her to see if there was any further editions in the pipeline.

Months past until just before Christmas I received and email asking whether I knew that she had been to visit my great auntie Lucy many times before she died, recording her memories of her childhood in the village.

I got the tape just before Christmas and surprised my family with it. I had only just got into all this stuff before Auntie Lucy died so only managed to ask her a few basic questions so to now have an hour and a half of her talking was amazing. More striking was to hear her and Wilf's voices after all this time. You could imagine them move around their little flat as they were talking. Auntie Lucy was quite an amazing woman. She worked for the Salvation Army all her life and got married for the first time when she 77! They were married for 13 years before they both died within a month of each other.

My other breakthrough was looking into Lisa (and the twins side of the family). One visit to Lisa's grandfather's grave open up the whole tree back to 1696. From the dates I was able to make the leap back to the 1911 census and from there a managed to get in contact with a distant cousin who had already done a lot of research into the tree. Strange to see old photos of strangers that actually remind you of people you know. Oh we also found out that there are apparently lots of twins on the Ratcliffe side of the family. So that could be where that all came from. Oh and a couple of people called Ratcliffe Ratcliffe back in the 1800's. so good they named him twice. Not quite sure what they were thinking but not a mistake, they named his nephew Ratcliffe as well. well someone has got to carry the name i suppose.

This was all courtesy of a free trial on ancestry.co.uk where I also pulled the document pictured at the top. It's the war records for my great grandfathers brother, George Iles. Really interesting details once you decipher the writing, like a reprimand in 1919 for playing cards on the stairs.

One of the reasons I love family tree stuff is that it is such a good leveller. Everybody has a story of where they come from that can so quickly get lost in the present everyday lives. Yet every-bodies story is interesting in its own way whether they be rich and privileged or working class folk.

Twenty ten

I remember this day twenty years ago watching the year click over from '89 to '90 on my world time/temperature casio watch. I thought that was so cool. Can you believe they based a watches' selling point around being to add on 2 hours to see what time it was in some part of eastern Europe. As I wasn't travelling too much when I was 11 the need to know the time in Tokyo was purely academic.
Zip forward 20 years and i'm now updating this blog on a little machine about the size of the Horace goes skiing tape I was waiting to load for most of 1989 on our dragon 64.

There are quite a few things I wouldn't have guessed 10 years ago at the turn of the last decade. Obviously 2 kids would be a bit surprising for my millenium self. One maybe but twins no. In 2000 I didn't even own a mobile phone, now I'm carrying around some futuristic gadgetry.

I probably wouldn't have guessed that my uni house mates friends band that he kept talking about would go on to be one of the biggest bands in the western world. What are they called again dave? Cold play?

I would've thought I might have finished reading the wheel of time series by now. The latest and 12th book just arrived in the post this morning. A recap of the last 13 years of Reading might be in order before I embark on that one.
All in all it's been a good decade. 2000 seems like yesterday when you say it but then you realise how much has happened in those 10 years. Ok I still my be only living a semi adult life (a house and a reliable career are just a couple of the social milestones I lack) but I'd say a beautiful wife and 2 amazing little people we created is pretty good going. Add to that about 6 years of digging some astounding (and some mundane) archaeology and I think i would be quite happy if I had a glimpse into the future 10 years ago.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

And it's not even halloween yet

It's only the 30th october but already i've prob had my fill of skulls,open coffins and crypts... And that's just day job. this month i've gone from mancunian slums to prehistoric landscapes and now to the inside of a medieval church. The architects didn't really take into consideration just how many people wanted to be buried inside the church in years gone by. This week has mainly been spent dealing with the numerous remains that were tossed aside into a shallow pit to make way for a nice little private crypt for one. Perhaps we will be able to redress the balance a little when we eventually re-inter them go the crypt.

Graham is the reason archaeology is going down the pan

I went up in a crane today...

Hope we can finally clear up the confusion...

angel meadows

So as I mentioned yesterday i'm digging in the Angel Meadows area of Manchester. a place full of thieves, fighters, alcoholics and drug takers. and it was pretty bad back in the 1830's as well.

this morning on my walk to work i passed by the back of the Printworks at about 8.01am. perhaps 1 minute before the sirens came wailing around the corner to deal with the guy that was laying barechested in the doorway of an apartment block, bleeding from the stab wound he had just received up in one of the apartments. you might have seen it on the news today.

This was all about 100 metres from the place i saw a guy last week collapsed in shudehill bus station receiving cpr and mouth to mouth. and not far from piccadilly station where i attempted last week to stop a shop lifter in boots (only with clever words mind you, which didn't really work)

this is all before i actually get to work. this morning we found a fence panel torn down and expected to find lots more new discarded syringes in our trenches ( we've found about 50 so far not including the ones that appeared and then disappeared). eventually we worked out that someone had been in to cut all the lead pipes out of our bulidings and had taken their pick of finds from the site.

so actually the area probably hasn't changed that much. instead of gangs of scuttlers there are gangs of young guys getting arested for violent conduct after the stabbing, instead of people out of it on Gin it's homeless guys drinking strong lager, we have modern beer bottles mixed with 100 year old beer bottles and the only difference with the drug abuse is that the heroin and cocaine were all legal back then.

a grim post but some grim sights. i haven't quite got the sight of that poor guy fighting for his life in that doorway this morning.

Binge drinking c.1909

In am attempt to satisfy the few remaining blog followers out there i have decided to use the lonely and long 11pm feed to share some thoughts. The length depends on how much my phone will allow. 
There are of course not the selection of bottles finn and evan get to choose from of a night. Rather the remains of a 100 year stash from the cellar of a victorian mancunian slum dwelling. One of many that i have the pleasure of uncovering on the site where the coop will be placing their new glassy hq.
Quite the shift from just a few months ago when i was trying to explain what there cholera ridden houses would have been like to a bunch of year 8's. I'd take the rubbish heaps any day of the year. Even the rainy ones but especially there sunny days.

Anna Tamburello

Smiles

First smiles

Feeding time