John Carr-Ellison of Hedgeley Hall has kindly given us a copy of an unusual and amusing document that he found among his grandfather’s papers. It’s a typewritten copy of the lyrics to a humorous song written by Mr Sam Dunn sometime between 1917 and 1923.
However you celebrate the Christmas season, songs and carols are such a staple. We hear them on the radio, as background music in shops, rousingly played by brass bands in our streets, and on the tinkling pianos and other instruments that our children and grandchildren are learning to play. And we would have enjoyed singing them as a local community around the Christmas tree such as Powburn’s Community Garden.
Well…it’s been quite a year, hasn’t it? It’s been kind of:
Mmm…the list goes on.
We have today received some helpful guidance information from Ruth Armstrong, Locality Coordinator North Northumberland (part of Northumberland County Council’s ‘Northumberland Communities Together’). It focuses on Christmas Bubbles, the local Tier System, so-called ‘winter guidance’ and more.
I’ve enjoyed visiting and re-visiting the area around the Hedgeley Lakes in recent weeks. How things change, though! The valley floor looks so different now from the yellow Hedgeley of April 2020:
Having walked along and thought about the lanes where we live, that prompted a thinking about the fields around us.
an area, usually covered with grass, used for playing sports (Cambridge Dictionary)
I’d reflected recently on the inexorable changes that occur around us and how environmental changes are perhaps more obvious in the countryside: the falling of trees, riverbank erosion and our attempts to halt the effects of erosion.
Whether or not you count yourself as religious, spiritual, agnostic or whatever, the anticipation of Christmas each year seems to me to be a wonderful thing. Today is the first day of Advent 2020 – advent being the time in the liturgical year encompassing the four weeks before Christmas.
What goes around… Groundhog day! Been there, seen that… Déjà vu!
wendy.pattison@northumberland.gov.uk – Tel. 07779 983072
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