Sunday February 5th 2023

11:15 Lois wants to take part in person in her church's communion service this morning, so I drive her the 17 miles over to Ashchurch, a suburb of Tewkesbury. When we get there we find the preliminary service is overrunning and still going on, so we sneak into the back-kitchen through a side door. Laid out is food provided by church members for one of the church's 20 or so Iranian Christian refugees, including a couple of birthday cakes for one of the Iranians, which is nice. How kind-hearted these people are!

The hot food is in the oven, but the cold food is all laid out on the worktops and table in the back-kitchen. And Lois has brought some extra candles to put on the birthday cake, which is nice!

Lois examines the birthday cakes baked especially for one of the 

Iranian Christian refugees, and empties out her box of little candles - awwwww!!!!

When the preliminary service ends Lois and I creep into the main hall and have the two packed lunches we have brought with us and pour ourselves out a plastic cup of tea, which is warming. The birthday-boy is given his cake, and he tucks in, offering pieces round to everybody else - yum yum! And then we all join in singing the Happy Birthday song.

the Iranian birthday-boy is presented with his cake,

and everybody sings the "Happy Birthday" song, which is a nice touch!

The room is packed, with the 20 or so Iranians as well as the 30 or so British church-members, but Lois and I eventually find a place to sit at one of the put-up tables. As well as the people there are also about 5 dogs in attendance, and their incidental "comments" during the preacher's remarks - presumably indicating agreement or disagreement - are a constant if intermittent entertainment, I always think! 

Here's one of the dogs that takes a fancy to Lois, or has he just taken a fancy to the packed lunches we're eating? Either way, it's  a big "Awwww!". And don't dogs look soulful - I wonder how they manage it?

one of the church's dogs has taken a fancy to Lois,

or maybe just to our packed lunches, we're not sure which!

flashback to  August 2021: we make our first visit to Ashchurch Village Hall

where the church's local services are held

14:00 Time to go home. Lois hasn't driven our car since the pandemic started in March 2020, but she says she's going to try driving the second half of the journey home today - i.e. after the motorway section is over, and we decide to swap places when we get to Upton-on-Severn.

It will be good to have her as back-up driver again, that's for sure. And she decides to try and do this because she thinks, unfortunately correctly, that I might need somebody to drive me home after some of the dental treatment I'm going to be getting in the next month or so.

Yikes!!!!

20:00 The daylight is staying around for longer now - Lois and I have both noticed: you can't put one over on us, we're both been retired for what will be 17 years next month, and we've got time to "clock" these things haha! And the equinox is only about 6 weeks away now.

this evening's reddening sky behind our house,

with the silhouette of the Malvern hills to the right

We settle down on the couch to watch the latest programme in Alice Roberts' new series "Digging for Britain", which is reviewing the stand-out archaeological findings from the last 12 months, region by region. Tonight's edition is all about Eastern England.

It's nice to see an update on the extraordinary excavation of the "Must Farm" Bronze Age community in the fenlands of Cambridgeshire, 3 miles from Peterborough, an excavation which began a few years ago in 2016, and which has become known as "Britain's Pompeii". It's the most complete time-capsule of prehistoric life ever found in Britain. 

Three thousands years ago, a thriving village here was destroyed by a catastrophic fire. The roundhouses collapsed and sank into the marshy fens, thereby preserving in the sediment lots of materials like wood etc, which would normally have perished long ago.

Until Must Farm, historians knew nothing about how prehistoric families divided up their room space, and it was remarkable to find here distinct kitchen areas in each house, kitchens that were also well-equipped, in some ways not really very different from our kitchens today, with pots and plates for every occasion.

It all feels so familiar somehow, a few big pots for storage, and lots of smaller pots for cooking and eating.

In the above picture, which illustrates the range of the sort of pots found, one of the biggest pots (second from the left), which has been stuck together with masking tape, was actually broken before the fire. Food was found in some pots, some of the last meals that members of the community enjoyed. One pot had residues of animal fluids, from sheep, goat or red deer, a meat and grain stew, and another pot contained a bit of a kind of porridge, so similar to one of my own frequent breakfasts.

flashback to January 27th - one of the porridge breakfasts I enjoyed

on our recent trip to Cambridge, just 44 miles from Must Farm

It's interesting that you don't find milk with meat, or milk with fish. That was a mix they never went in for, and Lois comments that it was the same with the ancient Israelites in Old Testament times, so there's a common theme here, although I'm not sure why! Perhaps we should be told?

Archaeologists have found the level of skills among the Must Farm potters, to have been extraordinary, particularly when you remember that they didn't have potters' wheels in those crazy, far-off times.

one of the beautiful 3000-year-old pots made by

the incredibly skilled potters at Must Farm

It's another reminder that these people from 3000 years ago were even then basically people just like us - they just didn't have the science we have today.

And you find the same thing if you go back even further, to hunter-gatherer times, as revealed by a settlement just outside Scarborough, Yorkshire, to a site dating back to 11,000 years ago, back in the Mesolithic era, 

 a mesolithic site just outside Scarborough on Britain's North Sea coast

Here, on an island in a lake, local people brought animal bones with butchery marks plus artefacts to be buried there - but why? Obviously some kind of ritual was involved here. And the former lake with its now rotten-away trees, eventually became one huge layer of peat, and this is the reason that so many remains have been preserved so well here, including wood and animal bone.

We often think of hunter-gatherers as having a hand-to-mouth existence, possibly at near starvation level. However, these people near Scarborough were obviously leading quite a comfortable life here, with plenty of food available to them, plus they were using a great variety of tools, some of them expertly carved and decorated.  And they had the resources to stay here long-term, and so didn't even need to be nomadic.

The level of preservation here is incredible.

There are lots of animal bones here, but, weirdly, only particular parts of the animal: vertebrae, ribs, shoulder-blades, but virtually no limbs, with the exception of feet. These parts had been brought by these mysterious mesolithic people to the site, and intentionally deposited at the island's edge, in about 2 feet of water. With them are some sophisticated hunting-tools, like spear-points or arrow-points made from antler, some of them in perfect condition, but also some of them broken - they look as if they were broken deliberately, probably as some sort of sacrifice to the gods.

This must all have been some sort of ritual, so people 11,000 years ago were already leading a life with rules about what you do with things, formulated mainly perhaps to please the mysterious unseen gods. After all these people had no science, so they must have been puzzled about all sorts of things, like thunderstorms and lightning, and especially about what happens to people when they die. 

No doubt these rules and rituals must have been regarded as important ways to ward off some of the nastier things in life. Let's hope some of them worked for them anyway, because they obviously went to a lot of trouble over them haha!

Fascinating stuff !!!!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!