Walking back into Sneinton

Posted on August 11, 2026 by Alan

I’ve been back on the wandering trail again.

After spending much of the last few weeks walking around places that formed the backdrop to my childhood, I decided to head into Sneinton. The route would take me through the streets towards Colwick Country Park, loop around near Colwick Hall, hopacross into Bakersfield and then take me through the now increasingly familiar Colwick woods before eventually depositing me back in Sneinton again.

Sneinton is an interesting place to revisit because, growing up in Nottingham, it was one of those areas that came with a certain ‘reputation’.

Nottingham has several of them – although some have names that are frankly guilty of false advertising. To the unwary visitor, The Meadows sounds delightful. St Ann’s could be the quiet cloisters of an Oxbridge college. Forest Fields or Hyson Green evoque imagery of idyllic greenery, and Bestwood could probably be marketed as an exclusive new housing development without changing the name.

Sneinton, on the other hand, always sounded exactly like it appeared.

Particularly when pronounced properly. Not Sneen-ton like your sat nav might say, or somebody encountering the name for the first time might reasonably attempt, but Snenton. Preferably delivered quickly and in a Nottingham accent.

As kid in the 1980s I remember it as a slightly run-down inner-city area of Victorian terraces with a substantial Asian community, the sort of place that felt busy and slightly chaotic without necessarily being somewhere you’d choose to visit unless you had a reason.

We did have a reason.

For several years my brother and I attended Nottingham Olympic Judo Club on St. Stephen’s Road, under the watchful eyes of our senseis John Mewett and Dave Lawrence. Consequently Sneinton became somewhere we visited regularly, Mum dutifully taking us on Saturdays, although my mental map of it was probably little more than the journey there, the dojo itself and whatever I happened to notice through the car window along the way.

Walking down St. Stephen’s Road again, I deliberately went looking for it. It’s flats now.

There’s something oddly disconcerting about discovering that a building which occupies a perfectly solid place in your memory has simply ceased to perform the function you assigned to it. Somewhere behind those windows somebody might now go to bed in the spot where I first mastered tsuri goshi, or might take a leisurely dump where at birthday parties hosted there we’d abuse the giant inflatables to embark on ‘moonrides’ – nearly putting some of the smaller guests through the ceiling at one point!

The street itself immediately triggered another memory though. The faces.

As a child I’d noticed many of the houses around here had human faces staring out from the stonework. They’re still there. Stern-looking carved heads tucked beneath the decorative stonework around front doors, apparently watching generations of Sneintonians go about their daily business.

I always wondered who they were. Kings? Local dignitaries? The people who built the houses? Particularly unfortunate former residents who had annoyed the architect?

It turns out I’m far from the first person to notice them. Sneinton has quite a collection of these carved heads and St. Stephen’s Road is apparently particularly well endowed with them. Some look vaguely like ancient warriors, others like rather severe Victorian interpretations of people from the past, but as far as I can establish there isn’t a neat answer to the question that occupied the younger me.

They’re just… faces.

Which is simultaneously disappointing and rather wonderful. They’ve probably been staring at children walking past whilst wondering who they were for considerably longer than I’ve been alive.

Sneinton itself looked surprisingly familiar too.

The Victorian streets remain. It still feels densely packed and bustling and proudly multicultural. The Asian community I remember from childhood is still very evident, particularly the Pakistani influence, but there are now Eastern European shops and businesses mixed amongst it too. Languages and people have changed while the streets containing them largely haven’t.

That’s perhaps what I found most interesting. Sneinton hasn’t really become somewhere else. It’s simply accumulated more Sneinton.

That isn’t to say nothing has changed. Slightly off my walking route is Sneinton Market, which has undergone a transformation that would have seemed utterly implausible to the younger me. Today it’s a fashionable little enclave of independent businesses, food, drink and creative spaces. This is emphatically not the Sneinton Market I remember.

My Sneinton Market was somewhere you went to buy something electrical for 99p while accepting there was a reasonable possibility it might stop being electrical before you got it home. For some reason I have a particularly vivid memory of headphones with orange foam earpieces. They were cheap, probably sounded dreadful and presumably survived until approximately Wednesday.

Nobody was drinking artisan coffee whilst I was buying them.

The funny thing about walking Sneinton today, though, is just how quickly the city starts to disappear.

Heading along the green route eastwards, tightly packed streets give way to twitchels and finally more open space and tree-lined footpaths until suddenly you’re in Colwick Country Park. It’s remarkably easy to forget how close the Trent Valley and all that greenery are to this part of inner Nottingham.

The park itself is comparatively young. It opened in the late 1970s after former gravel workings were landscaped, but the land you’re walking through has a much longer history. The wider estate around Colwick Hall stretches back centuries, and this was parkland long before anyone thought of creating a country park. That might explain one of the things I stumbled across.

In amongst the trees I found an old brick wall, smothered in ivy and pierced by what looks very much like a former gateway. There’s no grand building immediately behind it, no helpful plaque explaining what it once enclosed and nothing obvious to tell the passing walker why it’s there at all.

Naturally, I love this. Abandoned things and mystery. That’s very much my jam!

I don’t know exactly what it is. Given the history of the surrounding land, it may be a surviving fragment associated with the old Colwick Hall estate, but for now I’d rather leave a question mark beside it than manufacture a history simply because it would be convenient to have one. Sometimes finding something you can’t immediately explain is half the fun of wandering.

More annoyingly, I also discovered afterwards I’d walked agonisingly close to the abandoned St. John the Baptist church near Colwick Hall without realising it was there. Had I known, there is absolutely no possibility I’d have walked past it – that one is going onto the list for another day.

From Colwick Park my route eventually carried me over towards Bakersfield and back through Colwick Woods, somewhere I’ve already written about. This time the woods weren’t the destination, they were simply somewhere I happened to pass through on the way back to the car. Oddly, I quite liked that.

Having recently spent a chunk of time trogging around them for childhood memories, this time I could just walk through them again. They’d returned to being part of the landscape rather than a historical exhibit I’d constructed in my own head.

Then, eventually, Sneinton swallowed me again.

There was one more familiar landmark waiting near the end of the walk, although at the moment you’d be forgiven for not immediately recognising it.

Green’s Windmill is currently swaddled in white sheeting while maintenance work takes place, looking less like one of Nottingham’s most distinctive landmarks and more like somebody has put an enormous bag over it. Underneath all that material, though, is another place that reaches straight back into my childhood.

The windmill was another memorable if not regular haunt.

As children, of course, it was simply the windmill. Somewhere Mum or Dad could take us, somewhere you could look inside, look at the scientific exhibits in the museum or – more likely – decamp to the children’s play area and burn off excess energy. Only later do you discover that the place has a rather more remarkable story.

The original tower mill was built by George Green Sr in the early nineteenth century, and his son George worked there before becoming one of Nottingham’s more unlikely contributors to the history of science. With relatively little formal education, Green produced mathematical work on electricity and magnetism that was largely overlooked during his lifetime but would eventually become enormously influential. Today Green’s theorem and Green’s functions carry the name of a Nottingham miller’s son around the world.

Which makes the fact that I basically knew the place as somewhere that was fun to play with plasma balls or on the playground perhaps more than a little ignorant!

So next time you’re tempted to think disparaging thoughts about Sneinton, remember that one of the most important mathematical physicists of the nineteenth century emerged not from some grand academic institution, but from a miller’s family on a Nottingham hillside.

After the Greens, their mill had a rather eventful afterlife: falling out of use, losing its sails, suffering a fire and spending decades as an abandoned shell before being restored and reopened in the 1980s. Which isn’t far off when I first encountered it.

Perhaps that’s the thing I hadn’t appreciated about Sneinton when I was younger. I knew it as somewhere slightly rough around the edges where we went to judo. I knew the terraces, the Asian shops, the market selling questionably inexpensive electrical goods, the windmill on the hill and those mysterious stone faces staring down from the houses.

I hadn’t really noticed how many different landscapes and stories were squeezed together around it.

Within one walk I’d passed Victorian terraces, the ghosts of my old judo club, Pakistani and Eastern European shops, a country park, mysterious estate walls, lakes, the edge of an old country house, ancient woodland and the temporarily bagged up remains of a windmill that once belonged to a largely self-taught mathematical genius.

And yet somehow it all fits together.

As a kid I used to joke that Sneinton (Snenton, remember) sounded exactly like what it was. Walking around it again all these years later, I’m not entirely sure what I thought that meant. It’s untidy in places, of course. But it’s also colourful, busy, old, multicultural. Occasionally it’s beautiful, and occasionally perhaps lacking a bit of care. It has changed enormously in some ways, and hardly at all in others.

Perhaps the little stone faces opposite the old dojo on St. Stephen’s Road understand it better than I do.

They were there when I walked past them as a boy on my way to judo. The windmill was up on the hill. They’re both still there now, while the dojo has become flats, the market has discovered artisan food, new communities have arrived and I’ve somehow become the middle-aged bloke wandering around taking photographs of all of it.

I still don’t know who the faces are supposed to be.

But I do rather like the fact they’re still watching.

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Walking through the Lagoons..

Posted on July 18, 2026 by Alan

Over the last week I’ve found myself doing a lot of wandering. I think it’s time well spent when I have a few days off work. One walk leads to another, and before long you’ve found yourself revisiting places you haven’t properly thought about for decades.

Yesterday’s walk began somewhere that was familiar long before I reached the footpath.

I parked on Godfrey Street in Netherfield, outside the first house I ever bought. It’s funny how ordinary somewhere can look once enough years have passed. At the time it represented everything that came with finally becoming an adult: my first mortgage, decorating rooms that were suddenly my responsibility, discovering just how many things can unexpectedly break when you own a house. Standing there yesterday it was simply another terraced street with cars lining the kerb. If I hadn’t lived there, I’d probably have driven straight past without giving it a second thought.

From there I wandered down towards Netherfield Lagoons.

If you’ve never visited, it’s a remarkably peaceful place. Reeds sway gently beside the paths, dragonflies dart over the water and birds seem to outnumber people. It’s difficult to imagine that this landscape was once anything else.

Yet that’s not how I remember it.

As children, Dad would occasionally bring Rich and me here armed with an air rifle and a pocketful of pellets. We weren’t hunting anything more exciting than tin cans balanced on old banks or tucked safely into whatever earthworks we could find. My memories are hazy now, but I remember rough ground, overgrown ditches and a landscape that felt forgotten rather than protected. There were railway lines too, active ones from memory, where crossing points seemed rather more casual than modern health and safety would ever tolerate.

Perhaps memory has exaggerated some of that. Perhaps I simply didn’t quite find the same corner yesterday. Either way, I found almost none of the landscape I remembered.

Instead there were butterflies drifting across wildflowers, birdsong replacing the metallic soundtrack I’d half expected, and cyclists, dog-walkers and birdwatchers quietly enjoying somewhere that has become one of Nottinghamshire’s loveliest nature reserves.

Walking beyond the lagoons and alongside the River Trent brought back another memory.

I remember meeting my uncle here while he was fishing. I couldn’t tell you whether he caught anything that day. I can’t remember what we talked about. I simply remember him sitting there, rod in hand, as though he’d always belonged beside the river. Funny how memory works like that. It often remembers the person far more clearly than the event itself.

A little further downstream I reached Trent Lock, where the river briefly divides around the weir before boats continue their journey through the lock. It’s one of those pieces of engineering that quietly does its job without demanding much attention.

No boats were using the lock whilst I was there – which probably spared me from reliving a somewhat traumatic canal boat holiday from childhood. That’s perhaps a story for another day.

Leaving the river, the footpath heads back across the fields as you reach the village of Stoke Bardolph.

Most people know Stoke Bardolph for its water treatment works. As children, however, we had a rather less sophisticated name for it.

It was simply “the shit farm.”

Dad would occasionally bring us here too, where we’d stand at what seemed a perfectly acceptable distance throwing stones into what I now know was sewage slurry. Looking back, I’m amazed we were ever allowed anywhere near the place. Today, mature trees screen much of the works from view and modern security makes wandering up to the edge completely impossible.

It’s probably for the best.

Some childhood adventures are best left in childhood.

The more I walked, the more I realised how thoroughly this landscape has reinvented itself. The lagoons themselves exist because people reshaped the floodplain. Gravel was dug here, railway sidings once spread across the area, and later the settling lagoons received coal slurry pumped back from nearby Gedling Colliery after the coal had been washed. It was a working landscape, built to serve industry rather than wildlife.

Now, nature has quietly reclaimed almost all of it. That’s the most remarkable transformation of all: a landscape once shaped entirely by industry now feels as though nature was always in charge.

It’s remarkable how completely it has succeeded. Standing among the reeds, it’s difficult to picture excavators, freight wagons or industrial settling ponds. If you didn’t know the history, you’d assume the birds had always been here.

As I looped back towards Godfrey Street, it struck me that I’d spent much of the afternoon searching for places that no longer really exist.

The rough ground where we balanced tin cans has disappeared beneath grass and wildflowers. The industrial landscape has softened into wetlands. Even the sewage works has hidden itself behind a curtain of mature trees.

Yet somehow the memories remain perfectly intact.

Perhaps that’s what these walks have really been about.

Not finding places exactly as they were, because they often aren’t – although not every landscape changes so dramatically. Lambley Dumbles and Colwick Woods still feel remarkably close to the places I remember growing up.

Places evolve, just as we do. Industries close. Nature returns. Houses change hands. Children grow older.

What stays with us isn’t the landscape itself but the moments we borrowed from it.

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Looking for the Perfect Stick

Posted on July 15, 2026 by Alan

This week I’ve been doing a lot of wandering and pondering. I think it’s time well spent when I have a few days off work. Today I found myself drawn to another place from my childhood.

I’d planned a longish walk – around five miles – that would take me from Carlton Hill, down towards Sneinton and up into Bakersfield and eventually into Colwick Woods before looping back again. Looking at the map beforehand, I realised something I’d never really considered before.

Growing up in Mapperley, then buying my first houses in Netherfield and Gedling I’d spent years quietly orbiting Carlton. Dad’s side of the family seemed to inhabit every corner of the suburb, so we were frequent visitors whether it was to see Mama on a Saturday or one of my uncles and aunties, they were all there – those still with us still are!

And right on its doorstep is Colwick Woods.

I honestly can’t recall when Dad first starting taking me and Rich there.

It feels as though they were simply always part of childhood.

The funny thing about childhood memories is that they don’t usually arrive in chronological order. They arrive in flashes. One moment I’m searching the woodland floor for the perfect stick. Not just any stick, but the sort that absolutely had to become a magnificent longbow.

As far as I can remember, none of them ever did.

Finding them always seemed to be far more important than making them. Then another memory surfaces.

Dad telling us about one of his childhood friends running full speed down a hill and straight into a tree. I’ve often wondered whether that actually happened or whether it was simply an inspired piece of parenting designed to discourage two energetic boys from doing exactly the same thing. Either way, it mostly worked.

Some memories arrive attached to people – one afternoon I think nearly back at the car I managed to disturb what was probably a wasps’ nest. I remember John, a dear family friend sadly no longer with us instantly leaping into action. At the time I simply remember him furiously swatting wasps that had dared sting me. I don’t think I ever saw John express anger before or after that event.

I don’t think he was really angry with the wasps, perhaps he was simply furious that something had hurt one of his people.

Other memories arrive attached to the sky – I clearly remember standing in the open grassland watching the Red Arrows thunder overhead. I recall it was planned. I’ve no idea where they were going, or what event they were performing at, or even how my parents knew they’d be passing overhead. None of that mattered. We simply stood there looking up.

The same hills became sledging runs when winter decided to oblige. Looking back now, they don’t seem anywhere near as steep as they once did. Perhaps hills shrink as we grow, or perhaps imagination simply makes everything bigger.

Another memory has stayed with me for decades despite never actually happening. Throughout a chunk of my childhood I had the same recurring dream.

Somehow, a travelling fair had arrived on the open grassland beside the woods. I remember winning a toy fire engine before wandering into the woodland with my friends Carl and Phil. The woods were familiar and weird all at once. The ground undulated almost like freshly ploughed earth and, somehow, the branches and shadows in the trees formed enormous smiling and frowning faces, like the comedy and tragedy masks you see outside old theatres.

The dream was viewed from the side as we wobbled over the uneven ground, apparently unconcerned with our eerie surroundings. I haven’t dreamt it for years. Yet I can still picture it more vividly than places I’ve actually visited. Memory is a strange thing. Sometimes imagination leaves deeper footprints than reality.

Returning to today, I found myself noticing how much had changed. The broad grassy areas I remembered being closely mown and green have become flowering meadows as part of the woodland’s management as a local nature reserve. In the July sunshine they’d taken on that familiar straw-coloured appearance that only comes after a spell of proper summer weather.

Yet the woodland itself felt reassuring familiar. The valleys still scoop away towards the railway and Colwick Loop Road, there are still glimpses through and over the fence across the Trent Valley, Colwick Hall and Nottingham Racecourse. The paths still invite you to wonder what’s around the next bend, or which fork to choose.

Although these days I’m no longer looking for the perfect stick, the woods still have a habit of leading me down rabbit holes. Only now they’re nostalgia and local history warrens rather than imaginary archery.

Even the name Colwick tells a story. I’d always idly wondered whether it might somehow have been an accidental mutation of “cowlick” over the centuries, but probably not. It almost certainly derives from the Old English Cola’s wÄ«c â€“ a farm or dairy settlement belonging to someone called Cola. Over the centuries, Cola’s Wic quietly became Colwick.

Maybe that dairy fixation leads to the twice-extinct Colwick Cheese. Rich wrote about this before so I won’t repeat the point here.

By the time William the Conqueror’s surveyors compiled the Domesday Book in 1086, Colwick was already a substantial place (listed as Colewic). It had a church, a mill, woodland, meadow, fisheries on the Trent and around thirty-four households spread across three separate manors. While my childhood imagination was busy turning sticks into longbows, it never occurred to me that people had been making their homes around these woods for at least nine centuries before I arrived.

The woods themselves are older still – parts of them are designated ancient woodland, surviving as one of those increasingly rare fragments of woodland that has remained wooded for centuries. They once formed part of the deer park belonging to Colwick Hall and, like so many old landscapes, every generation seems to have found a different purpose for them. Even during the Second World War, the wider area found itself playing a role as a prisoner of war camp for German and Italian prisoners.

I didn’t think of any of this as a child – I simply thought they were woods. Only years later do you begin to realise how many stories they’ve quietly witnessed – ranging from moments of grand historical significance to individual formative moments.

As I dragged my weary legs up the hills of Bakersfield back towards the car, I realised Colwick Woods has two different histories – the version you’ll find in books and from Google searches: ancient woodland, deer parks, OId English place names, estate history, wars, nature conservation.

But then there’s the other history.

Dad carrying sticks while two boys searched for ‘better’ ones, John defending a clumsy boy from angry wasps. The Red Arrows overhead. Snow on the hills. Dreams that somehow still linger decades later.

Neither history is more important than the other. One belongs to the landscape, the other belongs to my family. They’re now impossible for me to separate.

Maybe that’s why certain places stay with us – not because they’re especially beautiful, not because they’re historically important (although Colwick Woods ticks both those boxes), but because – without ever realising it at the time – they quietly become woven into the fabric of our lives.

When I was a boy, Colwick Woods was simply somewhere Dad took us at the weekend or during the school holidays. Now, walking the same paths, I realise he was giving us something rather more valuable, a place we’d carry with us for the rest of our lives.

I very much doubt Dad ever imagined that one day I’d come back here wondering who Cola was, looking up entries in the Domesday Book or writing about ancient woodland. He probably just thought he was taking his boys for a walk.

Addendum: the airshow in question was the annual Nottingham Air Show hosted at Tollerton Airport. We’d take a picnic and enjoy a grandstand view from the grassy hill overlooking Trent Valley.

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Time Travelling through Lambley Dumbles..

Posted on July 14, 2026 by Alan

I’m not sure how long I’ll try to milk this particular cow, but as I’ve a few days off work this week and the weather is lovely I decided to reacquaint myself with an old childhood haunt, and with time travelling in mind, it naturally flowed!

Unlike Woodville Tollgate, this one doesn’t involve sitting in traffic. Instead, it begins with a walk through Lambley Dumbles, following the winding paths beside Cocker Beck.

This isn’t somewhere I’ve recently discovered. Quite the opposite.

I grew up in Mapperley and Gedling, and long before I developed an interest in history, archaeology or place names, I spent countless hours exploring these woods and fields. Back then it was simply somewhere to escape. Somewhere to paddle in the beck, scramble over fallen trees, get thoroughly muddy and latterly as a younger adult possibly reward myself with a pint at The Lambley.

As children, we don’t really think about history. We just accept places as they’ve always been.

Only much later did it occur to me that I’d spent my childhood wandering through a landscape that was already ancient before the first human being ever set foot there.

So, let’s wind the clock backwards.

The oldest thing on the walk

The first surprise is that the Dumbles themselves are almost certainly the oldest thing you’ll encounter.

Not the church, not the village, not even Cocker Beck, the valley itself.

Go back around ten thousand years to the end of the last Ice Age and Britain is emerging from a world of glaciers, meltwater and dramatic environmental change. Vast quantities of water carved deep channels through the soft Mercia Mudstone beneath what is now Nottinghamshire, creating the steep-sided wooded valleys we know today as dumbles.

Which is pretty crazy to think about really.

As children we ran through them without a second thought. We probably saw them as nothing more than somewhere steep enough to slide down and difficult enough to climb back out of again.

In reality, they are among the oldest features in the entire landscape.

A word that belongs here

One thing I’ve always loved about local history is discovering words that only seem to exist because local people needed them.

“Dumble” is one of those words.

Elsewhere people might call them ravines, gullies or wooded valleys, but none of those quite capture what a dumble is. Here in the East Midlands, everyone simply seems to understand the word instinctively.

I rather like that.

Sometimes language survives not because scholars preserve it, but because ordinary people never found a better word.

The beck that shaped everything

As I walked beside Cocker Beck this week, something struck me. It’s tempting to think the stream runs through Lambley. In reality, Lambley exists because of the stream.

Long before anyone built houses, churches or footpaths, the beck had already found the easiest route through the landscape. Those same routes later became tracks, and eventually roads. Even today, the oldest parts of the village still follow the water.

The village didn’t tell Cocker Beck where to flow. Cocker Beck quietly told the village where to be. Once that thought occurred to me, it became impossible to unsee.

Before there was England

Keep travelling backwards.

Long before there was Nottinghamshire, before there was Mercia, before there was England, this landscape was peopled by Brythonic-speaking Britons, members of clans we’ve subsequently named but have no idea what they called themselves or how they even thought about themselves.

There were no counties. No churches. No villages.

Just woodland, streams and probably scattered hunter-gatherers, and later the first farming communities.

Rome arrives… and almost passes by

When the Romans invaded Britain in AD 43 they transformed much of the country.

Curiously, Lambley Dumbles seems to have escaped much of that transformation.

Roman roads passed nearby, connecting settlements at modern-day Derby, Leicester and Lincoln, but the valley itself probably changed remarkably little. If you stood beside Cocker Beck around AD 200, you might occasionally encounter travellers heading towards those roads, but otherwise the view would probably have felt surprisingly familiar.

The Romans stayed for nearly four centuries. The Dumbles simply carried on being Dumbles.

The village arrives

Eventually, people began settling permanently around the streams.

By the time of the Domesday Book in 1086, Lambley was already an established village. Its name probably derives from an Old English phrase meaning something like “the clearing where lambs grazed.”

Like Wooden Box in my last article, it’s another reminder that our ancestors generally named places for what they were rather than what they wished they were.

Kingdoms come and go

Beyond the valley, history refused to stand still. Mercian kings ruled from nearby Repton. Viking armies marched across Nottinghamshire. The Danelaw began and receded, the Normans arrived and reshaped England.

And yet I can’t help wondering how much of that would have been obvious if you’d simply stood beside Cocker Beck.

The water would still have flowed over the same stones, the trees would still have filled the valley with birdsong, the seasons would still have turned exactly as they always had.

Some places seem to absorb history, others simply watch it unfold, immovable.

Looking through time

Walking through Lambley Dumbles this week, I realised I probably enjoyed it just now as a child.

The difference is that I was looking at something completely different, back then I saw mud, trees and a stream, now I see the end of the Ice Age. I see prehistoric hunters following the water. I see Brythonic farmers, Roman travellers, Saxon settlers and medieval villagers all walking the same valley. The people changed, the languages changed, the kingdoms changed.

But the Dumbles remained exactly where the melting ice left them ten thousand years ago.

Perhaps that’s why this place has always felt different to me.

Not because it’s untouched by history, but because it’s older than almost all of it.

The next time I find myself following Cocker Beck beneath the trees, I doubt I’ll be thinking about my step count, I’ll probably be wondering whether ten-year-old me ever imagined that one day I’d realise the oldest thing in Lambley wasn’t the village, or the church, or even the beck.

It was the valley itself.

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Time Travelling from Woodville Tollgate

Posted on July 12, 2026 by Alan

I have a slightly odd mental exercise habit.

Whenever I’m sitting in traffic at Woodville Tollgate, I like to time travel.

Not literally, of course, but I do find myself looking beyond the supermarkets, traffic lights and housing estates and wondering what this exact spot looked like a hundred years ago… a thousand years ago… two thousand years ago.

The answer is actually quite interesting.

Today, Woodville feels like another modern Derbyshire village, but that’s deceptive. In reality it’s one of the youngest settlements in the area, sitting in the middle of a landscape that tells almost the entire story of England.

So let’s wind the clock backwards.

The youngest place in an ancient landscape

The first surprise is that, for most of history, Woodville simply didn’t exist.

Go back 300 years and you’d find woodland, farmland and a handful of scattered cottages. The place wasn’t called Woodville because there was no Woodville to name.

Its origin is a simple toll house on the turnpike road between Burton upon Trent and Ashby. Around 1753, when Parliament authorised the new turnpike, a humble wooden toll booth appeared at the crossroads. It became known simply as Wooden Box.

That’s such a wonderfully practical English name. No romance. No ancient king. Just… the wooden toll booth.

Gradually, houses clustered around the crossroads. Then workshops. Then inns. A tiny roadside hamlet slowly emerged.

By the mid-19th century, “Wooden Box” was quietly giving way to the rather more respectable Victorian name of Woodville. Whether the old name was considered too rustic or whether the growing settlement simply wanted something more dignified, we’ll probably never know. Around the time St Stephen’s Church was built, the new name had taken hold. Which, personally, makes me a little sad. I think Wooden Box has far more character, and perhaps my natural distaste for the Woodville family role in the latter stages of the War of the Roses, but that’s another tale for another day…

Standing at the Tollgate today, you’re still standing where Wooden Box once stood.

Before there was England

Now let’s keep travelling backwards.

Long before there was Derbyshire, before there was Mercia, before there was England, this landscape belonged to Brythonic-speaking Britons, maybe they didn’t see it like that, maybe they belonged to the land.

The hills around modern Hartshorne and Ticknall were covered in woodland, and the River Trent already flowed to the north, probably carrying much the same name it does today. Like many rivers, it seems to have stubbornly resisted every invasion Britain has experienced. Empires came and went, languages changed, but the river simply kept its name.

The people here probably belonged to, or lived close to the frontier between, two Iron Age tribes: the Corieltauvi to the east and the Cornovii to the west. No one knows exactly where that boundary lay, but this area may well have been part of that borderland. It’s quite a fun thought experiment to imagine I might live in what was once a sort of contested no-man’s-land, although in reality we’ll probably never know.

There were no counties. No roads. Just forests, rivers and small farming communities speaking a Brythonic language whose descendants would eventually become Welsh and Cornish, while migrants crossing the Channel carried closely related speech into Brittany, where Breton would later develop.

Rome arrives

In AD 43 everything changed.

The Romans invaded Britain.

Curiously, they never built a town where Woodville stands today. Instead they established settlements around it. To the north-east, where modern Derby city centre now stands, was the Roman fort of Little Chester. Near modern Wall, just south of Lichfield, stood Letocetum on Watling Street. Near Atherstone was Manduessedum.

Roman roads stitched these places together while the countryside around modern Woodville quietly carried on producing timber, livestock and grain for the Empire. If you stood where Woodville is today around AD 200, you might occasionally hear wagons travelling towards one of those Roman roads, but otherwise life would probably have looked resolutely agricultural.

For nearly four centuries this part of Britain belonged to Rome.

Then Rome disappeared.

Mercia

As Roman authority faded, new people crossed the North Sea.

Angles and Saxons settled the Midlands, bringing a new language that would eventually become English.

This was the birth of Mercia.

Only ten miles north of Woodville lies Repton. Today it’s a peaceful village, but around AD 700 it was one of the most important places in England. Mercian kings were buried there, princes were educated there and a monastery stood at its heart.

If you had lived where Woodville now stands thirteen centuries ago, Repton would probably have been the centre of your world.

Then came the Vikings

History has a habit of refusing to stand still.

In AD 873 the Great Heathen Army arrived. Not just to raid. To stay.

For an entire winter, thousands of Viking warriors occupied Repton. Modern archaeology has uncovered defensive earthworks, Scandinavian weapons and a remarkable mass burial associated with that occupation.

Imagine standing on the high ground near Hartshorne that winter. To the north you’d see smoke rising from one of the greatest Viking camps ever established in England. The world changing again.

Where cultures met

One reason I enjoy living here is that this really was a meeting place.

Drive east into Nottinghamshire and Scandinavian place names begin appearing everywhere. Villages ending in -by, -thorpe and -toft tell the story of Danish settlement. Around Woodville, the names remain mostly Anglo-Saxon, although we do have nearby examples such as Bretby and Boothorpe reminding us that Viking influence certainly reached this far.

You’re standing remarkably close to where English Mercia and the Danelaw rubbed shoulders. A century or so later came the Normans, adding yet another layer to the landscape.

One of my favourite examples is just down the road.

Ashby-de-la-Zouch.

Its name tells two stories at once.

“Ashby” is Old Norse, meaning something like “Ash tree farm.”

“de la Zouch” is Norman French, added after the Zouche family acquired the manor in the twelfth century.

One place name. Four words. Two invasions.

It’s almost like reading English history in miniature.

Nearby, Tutbury Castle reminds you who won the second conquest. The Normans didn’t so much replace the villages as place themselves above them, building castles, granting estates and reshaping English society for centuries.

Quiet fields with fire beneath them

After that, time slows again.

For hundreds of years the villages around Woodville changed very little.

Hartshorne. Ticknall. Bretby. Melbourne.

Fields, churches and manor houses.

Then, suddenly, everything accelerates.

Coal. Fireclay. Brick clay.

The Industrial Revolution transformed this quiet corner of Derbyshire almost overnight. Railways spread across the fields, brickworks and potteries appeared, mines opened and workers arrived.

Wooden Box became Woodville.

In little more than a century, a place that hadn’t existed for most of English history became a thriving industrial community.

Looking through time

Today the pits have gone and the railways have disappeared. Many of the potteries survive only in photographs, while the National Forest is slowly returning trees to land that industry once stripped bare.

And yet, every time I drive through Woodville Tollgate, I still find myself travelling backwards.

Past Victorian brickworks.

Past medieval farms.

Past Norman lords.

Past Viking camps.

Past Mercian kings.

Past Roman soldiers.

Past Celtic farmers walking through ancient woodland.

It’s all still here.

Not because the buildings remain, but because the landscape remembers.

The next time I’m waiting at the Tollgate, I doubt I’ll be thinking about the queue of traffic in front of me. I’ll probably be wondering where the toll keeper stood, where the first cottages clustered around Wooden Box, whether Roman traders passed nearby, or whether Viking scouts once looked south from Repton towards these same hills.

That’s the joy of history. The places don’t change nearly as much as we imagine; they simply accumulate stories. Sometimes all it takes is a little imagination—and perhaps a traffic light stuck on red—to realise you’re sitting in one of the most remarkable little corners of England.

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Week One with My AI-Powered Bird Feeder

Posted on July 10, 2026 by Alan

Like I’m sure a few people do, I watched enviously as the bird feeders at the very bottom of our neighbour’s garden became a regular meeting place for robins, blue tits, sparrows and finches – and the occasional wood pigeon with all the grace of a bowling ball.

Over time, though, those feeders gradually emptied, the visits became less frequent and eventually they disappeared altogether.

It got me thinking.

We don’t actually use our garden all that much. It’s a fairly quiet little space, especially during the day, and with the recent warm weather it seemed like the perfect opportunity to make it a little more welcoming for whatever wildlife happened to be passing through.

So, armed with optimism and perhaps a little too much technology, I installed a Birdfy smart feeder and matching bird bath.

The concept is wonderful.

A bird lands.

The camera spots it.

Artificial intelligence identifies it.

My phone excitedly tells me that a goldfinch has popped in for lunch.

I become David Attenborough with push notifications.

Reality has been… somewhat quieter.

The feeder has now been in place for about a week.

Number of birds observed using it: 0.

Number of birds observed using the bath: 0.

Number of times I’ve opened the app expecting exciting wildlife footage: considerably more than I’d care to admit.

The feeder is full of fresh seed.

The bath contains clean water that seems especially appropriate given the current spell of hot weather.

Everything has decent Wi-Fi coverage.

The birds, however, appear to have declined the invitation.

I can only assume there’s a committee meeting taking place somewhere nearby.

“Right then, everyone. New feeding station on the agenda.”

“Looks very nice.”

“Plenty of seed.”

“Fresh water.”

“…Camera?”

“Camera.”

“Absolutely not.”

To be fair, everything I’ve read says this is perfectly normal. Birds are naturally cautious of anything new appearing in their environment. If a fully stocked restaurant with multiple cameras suddenly appeared at the end of my street, I’d probably watch from a safe distance for a week too.

So, for now, we wait.

The garden remains peaceful.

The seed remains untouched.

The water remains crystal clear.

The AI, capable of identifying thousands of bird species, continues its demanding workload of identifying absolutely nothing.

And oddly, I’m quite happy about that.

The whole point wasn’t to create instant entertainment. It was to provide a quiet corner where birds could stop for a drink, grab a bite to eat and carry on with their day without being disturbed. If it takes a little while for word to spread, that’s fine by me.

I’ll keep the feeder topped up, keep the bath clean, and let nature work to its own schedule.

Although if the local robin committee could perhaps expedite the approval process, I’d be most grateful.

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I wanted to make my Plex library more efficient and accidentally built a media processing platform

Posted on June 7, 2026 by Alan

One of the more dangerous phrases in technology is:

“It’ll be a fairly simple project.”

The latest example began with a perfectly reasonable observation. I have a lot of media. This isn’t exactly breaking news to anyone who knows me, but it became particularly obvious once I found myself storing films measured in tens of gigabytes each whilst simultaneously insisting that storage space wasn’t really a concern.

To be fair, storage isn’t a concern. The NAS has plenty of room left and I have absolutely no hesitation filling it with unnecessarily large files if they happen to be shiny enough. Even so, I started wondering how much of what I’d accumulated over the years was actually efficient.

Some files were old encodes. Some contained audio tracks that would never be used. Some carried around subtitle streams, metadata and assorted baggage that served little practical purpose for me. Others were encoded using formats that made perfect sense when they were created but are no longer particularly efficient.

The original plan was straightforward enough: analyse the library, identify opportunities for improvement and make the collection a bit leaner without upsetting Plex, or perhaps even making Plex happier with less transcoding work to do.

That’s it.

A modest objective.

An afternoon’s work, perhaps.

Naturally it evolved into something considerably larger.

Part of the problem was that I wasn’t really looking for a transcoding tool. Those already exist, and some of them are excellent. Tdarr, FileFlows and Unmanic all tackle various aspects of media optimisation extremely well. If your goal is to point a tool at a library and have it start transcoding files, there are plenty of mature solutions available.

What I found myself wanting was something slightly different.

I didn’t want a system that immediately started changing media. I wanted a system that could analyse a library, explain what it thought should happen, categorise recommendations by risk and allow me to decide how aggressively I wanted to proceed.

After all, if I trusted things too much I could end up with non-English language films like Pan’s Labyrinth or Apocalypto calibrated beautifully with no audio track at all if I blindly pointed a tool at my library.

More importantly, I wanted to understand the potential benefit before committing to days or weeks of processing time.

That distinction turned out to be important.

The other thing I quickly discovered was that once you’re dealing with thousands of files, memory isn’t enough. I wasn’t interested in a tool that spat out recommendations and expected me to remember them. I wanted something that could track decisions, record outcomes, understand what had already been reviewed and provide a clear path from “this file could be improved” to “this file has been improved”.

Which is roughly the point at which a media optimiser starts suspiciously resembling a workflow platform.

The first surprise was discovering that media optimisation isn’t really one problem. It’s several completely different problems wearing a trench coat and pretending to be one problem.

Some recommendations are almost entirely safe. If a file contains redundant subtitle tracks, duplicate audio streams or other bits of media archaeology that nobody is ever likely to use, cleaning them up is relatively straightforward. Other recommendations require human judgement. Perhaps a file contains multiple audio tracks and the “correct” answer depends entirely on how you consume your media. Then there are conversions, where the potential savings are significantly larger but so are the risks.

Before long I realised I wasn’t building a tool that made recommendations.

I was building a workflow.

What eventually emerged was a three-stage process.

The first stage deals with safe recommendations. Things that can be cleaned up with minimal risk and relatively little processing overhead. The second stage covers recommendations that require a human being to look at them and decide whether they’re sensible. The third stage is conversion, where files are re-encoded into more efficient formats and where the genuinely substantial savings begin to appear.

This may sound suspiciously like enterprise workflow software.

I would like to stress that the original objective was merely to tidy up a Plex library.

The conversion side of things is where the project really started to become interesting. Modern video codecs are astonishingly effective when given the opportunity. One of the first large validation runs took a 17.5GB UHD source file and reduced it to around 8.5GB whilst preserving the streams and characteristics I actually cared about. Nearly 9GB saved from a single file is the sort of result that immediately gets your attention when you’re looking at a library measured in terabytes rather than gigabytes.

That file hasn’t even been through the Safe and Review paths yet, so there are likely to be further savings to be squeezed out of it.

The dangerous thing about seeing a saving like that is that your brain immediately starts extrapolating.

Save 9GB here.

Save 12GB there.

Repeat often enough and suddenly you’re talking about hundreds of gigabytes, perhaps even terabytes, of reclaimed storage. That in turn makes life easier for Plex by reducing transcoding overhead and network traffic.

That’s roughly the point where a fun experiment starts looking suspiciously like a project.

The obvious response to discovering that you can almost halve the size of some files is to enthusiastically start converting everything.

The less obvious response, which is usually the correct one, is to spend several days proving that doing so won’t create an absolute disaster.

This has been one of the more challenging aspects of the project because I am not, by nature, a particularly patient person. Most software development rewards impatience. You write some code, refresh a browser and immediately discover whether you’ve made things better or significantly worse.

Media conversion does not work like that.

Some of the larger UHD files take twenty hours or more to process. One of the validation runs spent the better part of a day chewing through a single film before finally revealing whether my assumptions had been correct. When you’re accustomed to software projects where the feedback loop is measured in seconds, that’s a surprisingly uncomfortable amount of waiting.

If the answer turns out to be “no”, congratulations: you’ve just spent the best part of a day discovering a new and exciting way to waste the best part of a day.

Mercifully, the pre-work I put in meant all of the major conversion tests yielded a resounding yes.

The idea itself has existed for a few weeks. The last few days, however, have largely involved staring at progress bars and developing a newfound appreciation for delayed gratification.

The irony is that the conversion queue isn’t even the beginning of the actual optimisation work.

The eventual rollout plan deliberately starts elsewhere. Safe recommendations are processed first because they’re quick, low risk and immediately reduce clutter. After that come the review items, where human decisions determine what should happen next. Only then does the conversion queue get unleashed on the library.

In other words, the slowest and most resource-intensive part of the entire project happens last.

This feels entirely consistent with how the rest of the project has gone.

As a result, Media Auditor has become increasingly conservative. Source media remains read-only. Generated files are written elsewhere. Conversions are verified. Outputs are audited. Human approval remains mandatory. A surprising amount of engineering effort is spent proving that a change is safe before the system is allowed to do anything particularly exciting.

This is partly because media libraries are valuable, but mostly because I have no desire to discover what happens when an overenthusiastic optimisation engine decides to improve several terabytes of content in an unexpected manner.

One of the more amusing discoveries has been that the most dangerous part of the entire workflow isn’t actually the conversion process itself.

It’s putting the converted file back.

Creating a replacement file is relatively straightforward. Replacing an existing file without upsetting Plex, preserving rollback options and ensuring that everything can be verified afterwards turns out to be considerably more complicated. As a result, a disproportionate amount of current effort is focused on replacement workflows, validation and approval processes rather than the conversion technology itself.

This probably says something profound about software engineering.

Or possibly just about me.

The project has also changed direction over time. Initially the objective was simply to optimise an existing library. Increasingly, though, that feels like the first phase rather than the end goal.

Once the existing library has been processed, the more interesting opportunity is preventing inefficient media from entering it in the first place.

The long-term vision is to move the same workflow further upstream. New downloads can be analysed before they ever reach the library. Safe improvements can be applied automatically. More complex recommendations can be surfaced for approval. By the time something appears in Plex, it has already passed through a process designed to ensure it’s as efficient and well-structured as possible.

In other words, stop cleaning up after myself and start avoiding the mess entirely.

Which feels suspiciously like a life lesson.

What I find most amusing is how quickly all of this happened. A few weeks ago I was looking for ways to make a media library slightly more efficient. Today I’m validating conversion batches that run for the better part of a day, designing approval workflows, thinking about resource management profiles and planning an optimisation campaign that may ultimately take weeks to complete.

The really annoying thing is that it’s worked.

The first validated conversions have demonstrated exactly the sort of savings I’d hoped for, the workflow is gradually proving itself and there’s a very real possibility that this ends up reclaiming a substantial amount of storage whilst simultaneously making the library easier for Plex to manage.

Which means I can no longer dismiss the whole thing as a ridiculous over-engineered distraction.

Somewhere along the way, “let’s make Plex a bit more efficient” quietly evolved into a media processing platform.

I should probably stop being surprised when this happens.

At this point it’s becoming a pattern.

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I bought a NAS and accidentally built a tiny data centre

Posted on May 23, 2026 by Alan

A couple weeks ago I bought a NAS because I wanted somewhere sensible to store my Plex library (which was sat on a flaky USB hard drive connected to my always-on Mac mini) and provide Time Machine backup for my two Macs.

That was the plan. Simple.

A nice, boring, responsible grown-up storage solution.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and I’ve accidentally-on-purpose built what can only be described as a budget enterprise media bunker with VPN mesh networking, internal DNS routing, automated torrent workflows, dashboard telemetry, HomeKit camera integrations and enough storage to archive a modest Principality.

As these things tend to go.

The heart of it all is a QNAP TS-464 stuffed with four 22TB Toshiba Enterprise drives in Raid 5. Which means:

  • It stores an absurd amount of data, and
  • One drive can die without me immediately entering a state of spiritual collapse.

Originally, the goal was just:

  • Move Plex media off the randomly disconnecting USB drive
  • Centralise Time Machine backups
  • Stop relying on ‘vibes’ as a data resilience strategy

But once the NAS existed, it immediately became obvious it could far more than hold files, as my first job tinkering with the servers at an internet hosting company came screaming from the void of forgotten things in my brain to the forefront. Who knew you could have muscle memory for vi?

Plex moved off the Mac and became a proper always-on media server without having a computer running all the time. Then I added an HDHomeRun Flex Quatro, which basically turned the whole setup into a DIY Sky+/TiVo replacement. Live TV streams around the house now, Plex records broadcasts directly onto the NAS, and somewhere along the line I found myself learning far more about multicast networking than any sane person should. Particularly since I never really watch live TV, haha!

Of course, the second you start self-hosting things, IP addresses begin breeding in dark corners. Suddenly you’re trying to remember whether qBitttorrent lives on :8080 or :8090 and whether Homarr was .71 or .73 and honestly, life is too short for that nonsense.

So naturally I ended up deploying AdGuard Home and Nginx Proxy Manager to create proper internal DNS routing.

Now everything has delightfully nerdy addresses like:

  • adguard.home.arpa
  • nas.home.arpa
  • router.home.arpa
  • etc..

Which makes the whole thing feel dramatically more professional than it probably is (and certainly more so than it needs to be!).

Then came the dashboard phase.

Homarr dashboard on mobile

I discovered Homarr and immediately lost a few hours redesigning widgets that nobody except me will probably ever properly appreciate.

But now I’ve got a mobile-friendly dashboard that surfaces quick links to the assorted things installed on there, NAS stats, services health and other telemetry so I can feel like I’m managing a tiny data centre from the sofa (which I suppose I am!).

It works beautifully as a web app on my iPhone.

And because I’m apparently incapable of leaving things alone, I also wanted all of this available remotely.

Securely, naturally.

Without opening horrifying holes in the router.

Enter Tailscale – which honestly feels like cheating. Suddenly my phone and laptop behave as though they’re still inside the home network even when I’m elsewhere. My entire Homarr dashboard, internal services and admin tools now work remotely as though the house itself has been quietly stuffed in my pocket.

The ‘tiny but brilliant’ things are probably my favourite parts though.

For example: I now have a non-HomeKit compatible doorbell camera appearing inside Apple Home because Scrypted is essentially digital witchcraft.

My torrent setup can accept magnet links emailed to a dummy address, automatically feed them into qBittorrent, then email me when the download is complete like some sort of shady digital butler.

The Nvidia Shield TV Pro has also evolved into an absurdly polished media appliance. Projectivy Launcher cleaned the interface of all the Google cruft, Surfshark selectively routes only certain apps through VPN, and assorted apps cover the combination of things I stream externally and internally on Plex. The whole thing feels smoother and cleaner than most commercial streaming boxes I’ve encountered.

Somewhere along the way I also accidentally reawakened the person who gets excited by:

  • Reverse proxies
  • SSL certificates
  • DNS propagation
  • Multicast traffic
  • Graceful UPS shutdown behaviour
    Whether dashboards have the correct border radius

I regret nothing.

What I love most is that it not longer feels like a pile of separate gadgets.

Everything talks to everything else.

The NAS handles storage and services. Plex handles media. HDHomeRun handles TV. AdGuard handles DNS. Tailscale stitches the entire thing remotely. Homarr surfaces everything cleanly. The Shield makes it pleasant to actually use day to day.

And underneath all the nerdy nonsense, the original goal still quietly works perfectly: the Macs backup automatically, the Plex library is centralised, and everything feels vastly more robust than it did before.

It’s just that the “simple NAS storage project” accidentally evolved into a full-blown self-hosted ecosystem somewhere along the way – thanks to a geeky tendency, awareness of the kind of things that could be achieved – that can, thanks to the power of AI assistants, be converted into clear step by step instructions to achieve what you need!

I’m sure there’ll be more tinkering to come…

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🎼 The Lost Blackbird Song: A Follow-Up on a Musical That Barely Exists

Posted on December 6, 2025 by Alan

Back in 2011, I wrote a little blog post about a song I remembered from primary school. Nothing grand, nothing with a Wikipedia page, nothing anybody outside a generation of classrooms would ever have heard of. Just a strange little musical number from the mid-to-late 80s, sung by a bunch of children who almost certainly had no idea what they were performing.

The only lyrics I could recall were:

“The blackbird sings a tuneful song,
With turns and trills so fine,
Such skill has he, such majesty,
But it’s not as good as mine.”

And for years, that fragment has lived rent-free in my head — a dirge-like, slightly smug verse from a “fake song” written by a character inside a school musical. As best as I can remember, the plot involved a composer who knew he was being spied on, and so he deliberately wrote a terrible dirge to trick whoever was trying to copy him.

It was clever. It was funny. It was, in its own tiny way, art.

And yet… it seems to have vanished from the universe.

đź•ł A Song That Fell Through the Cracks

When I say vanished, I mean properly vanished.

You can usually find anything online these days — half-remembered TV jingles, obscure adventure game walk-throughs, the full lyrics to commercial jingles that aired once in 1984. But this? This little school musical? Nothing.

  • No recordings.
  • No sheet music.
  • No mention in BBC Schools Radio archives.
  • No teachers’ resource PDFs.
  • No nostalgia forum threads.
  • Not even a throwaway reference in a Reddit comment.

Just my 2011 blog post… and my own memory, which has been clinging to that blackbird verse like a last surviving witness.

It’s completely mad when you think about it. Someone, somewhere, sat down in the 1980s and wrote this musical. They composed melodies, crafted characters, wove a plot about artistic pride and deception. They sent the work out into classrooms, where children in school halls around the UK sang their hearts out to it.

And now, nearly forty years later, the only evidence it ever existed is a few lines stuck in my head and an old blog entry on a site best known these days for dormancy and a very occasional burst of random recollections.

🎨 The Quiet Tragedy (and Beauty) of Lost Creativity

There’s something strangely beautiful about that.

We tend to think art only “matters” if it becomes part of the cultural machine — if it’s recorded, archived, written about, remastered, reposted, commented on, placed onto a shelf somewhere.

But so much creative work — especially in schools — is ephemeral by design:

  • Perform it once in assembly.
  • Stick the poster on the corridor wall.
  • Fold up the lyric sheets.
  • Box up the cassette.
  • Move on to the next term’s topic.

No cameras in every parent’s hand.
No YouTube to immortalise it.
No cloud storage full of forgotten MP3s.

Just a moment that existed briefly, fully, joyfully… and then dissolved.

And yet here I am, decades on, still humming â€śbut it’s not as good as mine,” still wondering who wrote it, and still moved by the idea that I might be the last person on Earth who remembers it.

There’s something quietly touching in that — a reminder that even small, fleeting acts of creativity can lodge themselves somewhere deep.

🔍 So Here’s My Hope…

I’m posting this in the faint hope that someone, somewhere, might Google a lyric snippet, or remember doing that musical in the 80s:

  • The one with the composer.
  • The spy.
  • The fake dirge.
  • The hilariously pompous blackbird song.

If any of this rings a bell — even a faint one — please get in touch. I would love to give this little fragment its proper title, its composer, its context, and maybe even its full lyrics.

Because right now, this tiny piece of someone’s genuine creative work is balanced on one wobbly stool: my memory.

And I think it deserves at least a small place on the internet — somewhere safer than the inside of my brain.

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Severance..

Posted on November 16, 2024 by Alan

I never really gave it much thought, in truth, but always had a kind of warm fuzzy glow that I still hosted a few domain names through the employer of my first ‘proper job’.

Notwithstanding I’m sure that a series of mergers and takeovers and things make that company completely unrecognisable from the initially small local internet hosting business I joined back at the start of the millennium (!).

I remember when Nominet launched the me.uk extension the technical guys developing a system to apply for them on launch, I logged into my account and successfully snagged both my forename and surname – not sure why on the former, but the latter has enabled me to have a very neat email address over the years, as I’ve transferred it from a hosted account, to connecting it to my Googlemail account before finally completing the ubiquitous Apple ecosystem my life is connected to.

So I had one domain name, this one, pointed to the WordPress nameserver to handle hosting, with the MX records pointing back to my old employer to handle email forwarding, the other two names the DNS was handled by the old employer – with the MX records for my surname pointing at Apple, and web forwarded here, and for my forename it was all just web and email forwarding.

I hadn’t realised they disabled email forwarding some time ago – I’m not even sure how I noticed, but it prompted one of those far too late at night rabbit holes. Things I’ve not thought about for years if not decades – A records, CNAME records, MX records, name servers – all came flooding back as I belligerently decided to transfer these last little remnants and sever all ties, to a host with less restrictive offerings.

If nothing else it’s made me update all the registrant details for the domains, spread between at least three former addresses – haha! And so far I seem to have managed to get everything pointing in the right direction, without utterly destroying my live email account too. Which is a bonus!

But yeah, it felt kinda weird to have formally severed any relationship with that first foray into gainful employment – even if nobody at the company from the office workers to the owners are probably in any way related to the folk I worked with an for!

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