Dear reader, do you perhaps live in a quiet country area, or a small town maybe? If so, have you noticed that some of your neighbours - not all by any means - may sometimes seem, shall we say, a teensy bit small-minded, when it comes to what they might see as "modern ways of thinking"?
And in these sorts of ostensibly "quiet" country areas, so-called "mixed relationships" can still cause a bit of a stir, can't they! Did you see this recent front page in the Worcestershire "countryside" pull-out edition of Onion News the other day?
Luckily, Onion News' local desk managed to find a local geneticist who attested that goths and metal-heads are indeed sexually compatible, and can even produce children under the right conditions, if the recommended procedures are followed.
I don't know - the modern world eh! But there are so many different subspecies and subcultures of goths and metalheads these days, and whether any one pairing is necessarily able to produce children together, I wouldn't venture to swear to, to put it mildly!
If your son or daughter is a goth and is thinking of shacking up with a metalhead, and you're hoping to have some grandchildren at some point, I can do no better than to point you to one of the standard reference works!
John Robb's "Art of Darkness" and Esse Berelian's Rough Guide to
Heavy Metal, the two standard "bibles" on the two subcultures,
both featuring tables of "sexual compatibility" with competing subcultures
Flowers are similar to subcultures aren't they - there are literally billions of different types of flowers, and my long-suffering wife Lois, who bought some plants at Clive's Fruit Farm on Tuesday, today, just one day later can't remember what some of them are called. And she was frantically searching through "The Gardener's Encyclopaedia of Plants and Flowers" this afternoon to try to nail some of them down.
flashback to Tuesday: my wife Lois picks out some plants
at Clive's Fruit Farm, near Upton-on-Severn
And these days, if I stroll into the kitchen, I'm just as likely to find "Plants and Flowers" lying on the gas hob as I am our well-thumbed Nigella sitting there - you would not believe!
It's hard to believe it now, but once upon a time, there were just proto-Germanics - and at one time they all lived as in the kind of Sweden/Poland area back a two or three thousand years ago. They shared the same values and were eminently sexually compatible with each other.
I don't know what went wrong, but there was some kind of a two-way split - some big row or other, maybe music-related, nobody really knows - and some people stayed where they were or went north, and the others all went south, and started calling themselves "goths" to show they meant business.
There must have been a lot of hurt feelings around, I'm guessing. In 2021, I gave a presentation on the development to our local U3A "History of English" group, and I remember that this was one of my trademark makeshift home-made slides on the subject: it was obviously the northern group that influenced the development of our own language, English, while the southern group, were, sadly, once famously described as "walking across the stage of history, without making a mark on it".
Poor Goths !!!!! 
Goths are notoriously quarrelsome, however, and have obviously had a millennia-old tendency towards schism, and soon those "southbound goths" were splitting again - it could have been another music issue maybe? - with some deciding to live in Spain - the Vizigoths - and the rest staying in sort of Bulgaria, as it is today, and calling themselves Ostrogoths. Both areas are popular summer seaside destinations for Brits today, as it happens.
In more recent times, we began seeing the so-called "Mallogoths", goths who hang around in shopping malls, further complicating ethnologists' efforts to identify and classify any one goth to a precise subculture - oh dear!
Luckily, some light on the "classifology" of goths is shed today in an email from Steve, our American brother-in-law, which details some of the fascinating subcultures of Brazilian goths, details which I have tried, with mixed results (!), to tabulate, with suggested equivalents from the Anglosphere.
I must stress that this research of mine is still very much a "work in progress", and your postcard comments and suggestions are welcome, as always! And whether one type can necessarily technically have babies with another type in the list, I have absolutely no idea!
typical Brazilian "Renner-Goths", here seen shopping
at popular Brazilian clothing superstore, Renners
And if you've got any doubts about the complexity of this subject, I invite you just to google "Gothologists Near Me" on your smartphone, and then stand back a little, to prepare yourself for the dozens of results that you're bound to see tumbling out onto your screen!
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
But do watch out for my book on the subject, which should be in the shops in time for Christmas 2024. Reserve your copy now - they're bound to be in big demand!
suggested cover for my forthcoming book, to be published
under my nom-de-plume, Colin Lengths. It should be coming out
in time for Christmas 2024 - reserve your copy now!
18:00 Incidentally, if you're wondering whether my poor medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois managed to identify the mystery plants amongst her recent purchases at Clive's Fruit Farm, the answer is that the jury's still out on most of these mystery flowers. And it's still out, even after consultation with Amanda, who, as she does today, often helps Lois out with routine gardening maintenance and gardening issues generally, and especially when, as now, Lois's back is "playing up", which it notoriously does, from time to time.
Amanda helps Lois to plant some of
her newly-purchased "mystery plants"
the scene later as darkness begins to fall,
and the flowers get ready to spend their first
night together in Malvern - awwwwww!!!!!
Michael's railway journeys this week around the coast of East Anglia
The stories of the Romans from this period leading up to their total withdrawal in about 510 AD, after 400 years of occupation, always remind me of classic military withdrawal situations in our own lifetime, when our own servicemen or those of our friends, had been desperately trying to cling on in impossible circumstances.
For instance, there's the British withdrawal from a strife-torn Palestine and from a strife-torn Indian sub-continent after World War II, or the US withdrawal from South Vietnam in 1973, or the withdrawals of all Western embassies and military units from Afghanistan in 2021, for example.
the British withdrawal from Palestine, 1948
part of the US withdrawal from Saigon in 1973
The plus side of the Roman withdrawal from England in the 5th century AD, however, is the legacy of the extraordinary defensive network of castles that they had hastily built in their latter years, often quite crude structures. I expect they were beginning to run out of money and/or men by this stage: many men having been already withdrawn to defend Rome itself and its continental possessions.
Tonight Michael visits the remains of what's called the Burgh Castle Roman Fort near today's port of Great Yarmouth, in the company of a local historian.
Yikes! Those walls would have given the Anglo-Saxons something to think about, that's for sure!
Fascinating stuff, isn't it! [If you say so! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzz!!!!
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