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Wednesday 7th August 2024

Wednesday 7th August 2024

7912/20853
Christians, I know if you live a bad life and then sincerely repent at the last minute then you go to Heaven. But what if you live a perfect religious life and then at the last second sincerely renounce Christ, do you go to Hell?
I think I've managed to convince my mum that God doesn't exist, after many years of trying. She's lived a good and moral life, so I will be sad if I have condemned her to an eternity of being on fire, but so be it.

More archaeology today and we managed to extract the remaining big stones from the ground. I don't know if they were there for drainage or what - they'd clearly been placed there deliberately. Interestingly most of the garden only has a foot or so of soil on it before you hit a bed of clay, but the bit with the stones in it had been dug through previously and was much deeper, which would have excited me a lot if I'd been on a real dig. And excited me a bit anyway.
I know there were barrows in Cheddar as lots of the roads are called Barrows Road or The Barrows or Barrows Close or We Have Loads of Barrows Here Avenue and there's plenty of evidence of occupation from the Romans, through the Saxons and beyond (including Alfred the Great's Palace at my old school) and cool bits and bobs pop up every now and again, so you never know what might turn up in my parents' vegetable patch. Could this be a grave or a fence post?
We didn't find any human bones (we did find a bit of animal bone that Ernie was very excited about), but we did find two items made from intertwined metal that looked a bit like parts of torc bracelets. But they also looked a bit like 20th Century metal fencing. Or some kind of drill bit. They were different widths and not from the same thing, so it was strange to find them together, but a reverse google search didn't reveal anything. They did greatly resemble a Roman item that came up, but that was made of rope, not metal. So the jury is out. But this biased judge thinks they are definitely torc bracelets and are thus worth millions of pounds.
Phoebe is more interested in the money than the history and asked me how much the big stones would be worth if they fitted together. Of course, all stones are priceless but you won't find many people willing to pay money for two quite big stones, even if they were once part of a bigger stone. I like the history and the money.
My parents tried to show the kids the original The Railway Children film, which I'd loved as a child. But both of them quite quickly lost interest. I was surprised to see that Sally James from off of Tiswas was in the movie, playing a small part as a maid. With Jenny Agutter in this film too no wonder I enjoyed it so much.
Tiswas was the most important thing in the world to me when I was a kid (I cried when I got to Cheddar to discover that Westward TV didn't show it (I was 28 years old). It reminded me that I had once appeared on a Lennie Henry chatshow that had ended with Sally James and the Phantom Flan Flinger surprising us and throwing custard pies at Lenny. Did that really happen? It seems like fever dream. The blog suggests it really happened, but what is truth?
My dad cried all the way through the Railway Children (88 years old he is), but it was a bit twee and polite and dare I say dull on a repeat viewing. It takes something to make Jenny Agutter waving her petticoat around dull. And why didn't she get off the train tracks, the fucking idiot. She could have died and then we'd never have the important dramatic scenes in American Werewolf in London.

RHLSTP with Simon Munnery very much worth your time - here.


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