And here it is...

With apologies to BBC Video:





Mark has really gone to town on this one! The book is packed with pictures and clever and witty design jokes. He has decided that as next year is the 30th Anniversary of the appearance of His Owliness in Mawnan Smith, that my planned paperback (fourth) edition of The Owlman and Others should be a special 30th Anniversary edition packed with photos, press cuttings and memorabilia. I am only too aware that my owlman eresearches already fill three bulging box files, and that if we use everything I have got the bloody thing will be the size of an encyclopaedia!

Watch this space............

Strange Days

We spent this morning filming. Much to my amazement, some months ago my father produced a video cassette which contained some cine film he and my mother took in Nigeria when they were stationed there nearly fifty years ago. I made an idle comment to friends of mine that the footage should really be edited, and before I knew what had happened the whole affair had escalated into a full blown documentary film of my father relating his African experiences in the 1950s to the accompaniment of the aforementioned video footage and a veritable treasure trove of photographs and slides which show aworld that has effectively ceased to exist.

I am very impressed at the way that the old chap has taken to this new lifesyle like a veritable duck to water. Mike and Helen from Barnstaple have been over for the last few weekends filming him for the documentary, and - pretty unusually for terminally ill a guy pushing 81 - he has become very enthusiastic about the project. When the film is finished it will be two books and a movie chalked up to him in his eighty-first year, which I am sure anyone would agree is a pretty impressive achievement.

On the CFZ front it is a little quiet here this weekend, because despite weeks of ceaseless activity with our publishing schedule and with the frog project (of which more another time), this weekend everyone is on leave. Mark is back with his folks in Weymouth, John has taken a week off, and Graham is - as we speak - driving up to London to see his mother. Corinna and I are left at base to look after Dad and have a (I think anyway) well deserved rest from the world....

... That is what I had planned anyway, but she is bullying me into trying to finish my new book, so I guess the weekend will be more productive than I had hoped.

More Shameless Plugging

I will treat the comment that someone posted on this blog that "Like so many others - this blog seems to have 'fizzled out'... a typical CFZ related venture!!! " with well bred contempt. After all, the fact that there are several postings today is proof that he/she is talking nonsense. However, I would like to take this opportunity to stress that this bloggything is never gonna be a daily occurence. I try and do three or four postings a month if I can, but I am sure that you would all agree that running the CFZ and doing my best to look after a dying parent is somewhat more important than maintaining the blog..........

However, griping apart, I am pleased to announce that the latest in our series of perfect bound reissues of my books is now available: Only Fools and Goatsuckers.

(There seems to be some technical problem forbidding me to upload pix today :( so no cover shot for the time being)

In the eight years since I wrote it, I have often regretted the title—which, after all, makes no sense to anyone not familiar with the BBC TV series from which I cribbed the name (which means basically everyone outside the UK). But one - long forgotten - wag christened our younger, `Jack-the-lad` selves “the Rodney and Del-Boy of cryptozoology”, and the joke seemed appropriate.

The book should also, I think, be seen within its historical perspective. I was only 37 when I wrote this book, and although I had been working within cryptozoology for some years, I was still really a novice. This was my first expedition, and—with hindsight - I wish that I had done a lot of things differently. But I was then in the middle of a horrific divorce, and so when given the chance to let our hair down in foreign climes, Graham and I did so.

I look back at this book with fondness because, not only was it my first `expedition book` but it was written at a time when the Centre for Fortean Zoology (now an imposing edifice of an organisation, which is unarguably the biggest cryptozoological research organisation in the world), was just `The Last Gang in Town` (as Joe Strummer would have put it). It was a brave new world for Graham, Richard and me, and we were determined to take it by the horns and wrestle it into submission.

Nearly ten years on, we are older, wiser, and more professional, but this account of our younger, stupider, and wilder selves still has much to recommend it.

Do they owe us a living?

My Punky past has been somewhat in my thoughts lately. I suppose it all started when I bought a copy of Penny Rimbaud's autobiography Shibboleth: My Revolting Life on Amazon. For those of you not in the know, Rimbaud (t/n Jeremy John Ratter) was one of the founder members ofthe Anarchist punk band CRASS in 1977. The biography is everything I would have wanted; moving, irritiating, uplifting and angry in equal quantities. Then, I received a letter from one of the CFZ Corps of Volunteers - Suzi Marsh. She is organising a benefit concert for the CFZ featuring punk and rock bands from Barnstaple. However, she had a problem. She neded a connection between the CFZ and punk, in order to persuade the bands to volunteer their services.

So I wrote this:

"To me, punk was and is as much about the attitude and the politics than the music. I was a punk the first time round, and the libertarian do-it-yourself ethic of the movement has influenced me - and the CFZ - ever since. Even the name of our journal comes from a track by Adam and the Ants from their 1980 album 'Dirk wears White Sox'. A quarter of a century ago it was my privelige to meet CRASS on several occasions. They were an Essex based anarchist collective who were not only responsible for a string of gloriously nasty albums but managed to sell over 2 million of them. Not only this, but they managed to do it all themselves without the backing of record companies or the music industry. When I visited them I was impressed how the whole family worked together to run the office, and how - despite the lack of
professional involvement - they not only managed to get all their product assembled and sent to the retailers, but they managed to be cheaper (and better) than anything coming out of the mainstream music industry.

Nearly fifteen Years ago I founded the CFZ. I did so for precisely the same reason that Penny Rimbaud and Steve Ignorant founded CRASS in 1977. The cryptozoological establishment was moribund, boring and - worse of all - becoming increasingly corrupt. It was time for a new broom. Everyone from the old guard sneered at me when I told them what I was gonna do. "You can't start a scientific organisation without the backing of either industry or
one of the universities" they said, as they carried on planning research whose only real motive was self aggrandaisment or to make rich people even richer.

I remembered the tumbledown Essex farmhouse full of punks tirelessly stuffing LPs into envelopes and grinned to myself. I went on with my plans and now we are the biggest cryptozoological research organisation in the world...and we are still not, nor will we ever be in bed with any multinational corporation or establishment university if it means that the
integrity of our work is threatened.

Cryptozoology is the study of unknown animals, but what we do is more than just looking for new species. Knowlege should be free and available to all. All too often these days it isn't. Not only are we untainted by association with major establishment figures, but our research is available to EVERYONE - whether or not they are members of the CFZ. We are working
towards building a full time Visitors Centre - a truly global community resource and a place where researchers from all over the world can meet and work together.

I haven't really thought about it before, but I guess that not only was I a punk the first time round, but I still am!

ANARCHY PEACE AND FREEDOM

JD"

Roll on Friday 16th December at the Exeter Inn, Barnstaple. I'm the fat bloke at the bar wearing an anarchist T Shirt and black leather jacket.......

It wouldn't be surprising if there was another `Rising`...........

Thanks to Marky and those jolly nice people at Xiphos Books in Northern Ireland, (Hi Ronan) my 1999 book Rising of the Moon is now available once again. It has been throughlly edited, one incident (which turned out to be complete nonsense) has been expunged, and - by popular demand - there is now a photo session

Why, you may ask, have I not done major rewrites to this edition? The answer is simple. There is a distressing tendency within fortean circles to present new editions of one’s books as an excuse to revise and change what you originally wrote. In the same way as I heartily disapprove of musicians who re-issue their old records, having sanitised, remixed, and re-recorded them, I dislike the revisionist ethic in fortean publishing very much indeed.

Several on my favourite fortean books have been given this treatment in recent years, and I find this most distressing. Therefore - although I no longer believe that this is a unified theory of everything, I have made no revisions, apart from one passage which has been removed partly for legal reasons and partly because it subsequently turned out that it just wasn’t true! A few spelling errors have been corrected, but otherwise this book is as I wrote it back during the autumn and winter of 1988 - a true and accurate portrayal of a strange and cathartic time of my life, together with our humble (and often bumbling) attempts to make sense of it all.

It is even available on Amazon.

I have never been much of a UFOlogist, but these things do exist. I know. I have seen three of them, and as the explanations for these things involving little green men from the planet Tharg are obviously nonsense - something must cause these phenomena. What could they be?

This book was my first attempt to come up with a unified fortean field theory of everything, and whilst I don't know if I altogether succeeded, it was - I feel - a brave attempt, and so it is good that it is available again....

More Frog Pix

Even Obadiah the frog is getting involved in the project..

I was very happy with the response to yesterday's post (and the text version which was circulated through various Yahoo groups). Amber wrote:

Fascinating frog stuff! The moment I read this ( although I have read of other coloured frogs elsewhere in UK) --- I KNEW this could be a huge bestseller among the naturelovers, crypto and otherwise. I am talking about a luscious coffeetable book...... and spin-offs re: teeshirts, jewellery, charms etc. A veritable Rana Potter phenom! ;-)

The Virgin Mary/Goddess w/ sacred waters aspect adds enchantment to the view..... and certainly magick.
Ribbit on!
Amber

So - especially for Amber - a selection of more pix from our new project:

Note how the markings differ wildly -

even between two specimens from the same pond

David photographs the two frogs for the website

Sweet noises which give delight and hurteth not

It was when I was updating the `On the Office Hi-Fi` sidebar on this blog this morning taht I was reminded of one of the funnierepisodes in CFZ history.

About three years or so ago a bloke called Andy Billings (now living in Canada but then a resident of the next estate up from the CFZ in Exeter), was a regular visitor to our HQ in Holne Court. He soon became a close friend and the CFZ Computer Consultant, but he is such a nice chap that we looked forward to his thrice weekly visits immensely. The problem is that he was a teensy bit gullible, and for some reason brought out the worst in me and Richard, and became the butt of our stupid sense of humour. It was - I think - on his first visit that we found him peering at my voluminous and ever expanding CD collection with a worried look on his face...

"Don't you have any normal music?"

He said. We pretended not to know what he meant, and he went on:

"and, who ARE `Gong`?" he asked, "and do you REALLY need 27 of their albums?"

I protested that Gong were one of my favourite bands, and enthused about them so much that he insisted on listening to a track. I played him excerpts from Radio Gnome Invisible and he looked at me in horror.

The game was afoot.

Over the next weeks and months Richard and I would ensure that whenever we saw Andy's distinctive figure walking up the steps to our house, we would put on ever more bizarre peices of music. Eventually we spent several hours a week downloading weirder and weirder things (many way past the grey area that divides the listenable and the unlistenable. To make it even funnier, we made sure that we would sit, listening to the music, clicking our fingers, nodding our heads, and tapping our feet in time with the rhythm (when there actually WAS any rhythm - which in the case of songs like Zyclon B Zombie or Journey through the Human Body by Throbbing Gristle, or In the year of 1963 I was admitted to the Mental Institution by Wild Man Fisher, there usually wasn't.

In this mannner we inflicted the above named artists, plus Captain Beefheart, Momus, Henry Cow, faust, Chris and Cosey, and the GTOs on poor old Andy, but it was Captain Beefheart that had the most social reverberations.

A few years ago someone asked what the main sources of CFZ funding were, and to my great joy I could honestly say that we were able to earn money dressing little girls as Captain Beefheart!

As you may or may not know, one of our biggest funding sources is from SimonWolstencroft of Tropical World magazine, for whom we do a lot of editorial and design work in return for regular dosh. I first met Simon some years ago when we both worked for another fish magazine. He was the editor and I did regular articles, and co wrote the children's page with Richard. Now, Simon is another good friend, and also happens to be someone who tends to be the focus for Richard's and my jokes. For years it has been an ongoing joke to insert drug jokes, extreme right wing political references and smut into copy which is sent to Simon for him to edit. We make these references as veiled as we can, and much to my great pleasure, we manage to get quite a lot past him.

One of the best was the children's fish costume competition for Hallow'een, when we managed to dress Andy's seven year old step-daughter as Captain Beefheart!




And we got fifty quid for the article!!!!!

I thought that you would all be happy to learn that tyhe CFZ have such high and noble values!

Welcome to the `Frog Log`

Today the CFZ launched (or to be more accurate relaunched a project that has intrigued me for years. Back in 1997 I wrote the following in my monthly column for Uri Geller's Encounters. (This was a late, and not very lamented, magazine published by a bunch of people from Bournemouth. But I shouldn't be churlish, because they gave me my first regular paid work as a fortean scribe):

"In this column I have written on a number of occasions about my search for mythical and semi-legendary beasties. This month, however, I am going to tell the sad tale of how I very nearly caught one!

Devonshire is full of folk stories, most of which were almost certainly invented to while away the long winter nights in years gone by. Occasionally, however, you can find one which has its basis in some kind of truth.

There is a charming medieval folk story of a poor woodcutter who lived with his family in the woods near what is now Bovey Tracey. One bitterly cold night, during the middle of a wild thunderstorm his only child was dying of an unspecified illness when there was a knock at the door.

A beautiful lady, dressed in white and surrounded by an unearthly radiance was standing on his doorstep. He invited her in, gave her the best seat by the fire and the few scraps of food that they had. He used their last few sticks of firewood to feed the fire for her, and he gave her his warm, winter cloak to make her comfortable through the night.

The next morning when the family awoke the storm was over, the sun was shining, and their child was miraculously cured but their mysterious guest had vanished leaving a note which told them that henceforth their luck would change and they would become happy and prosperous. In order to remind them of her visit she had magically created a well in which golden frogs were swimming.

The books of folklore go on to suggest that this was a visitation from the Virgin Mary, and note that to this day there is a Mary Street in Bovey Tracey" They were unable, however to explain either the golden frogs or the mysterious stream.

A couple of years ago we discovered a holy well, half forgotten in a wall in Mary Street opposite Bovey Tracey Hospital, and almost simultaneously we began to receive reports of bright yellow and golden frogs from across the westcountry.

At the beginning of July I was lecturing at a Reptile Fair in Newton-Abbot, and during my talk I mentioned the story of the golden frogs of Bovey Tracey (which incidentally is only about four miles up the road from where I was delivering my talk). After I had finished a rather shy woman called Rosemary came up to me and said:

"Um, I`m not quite sure how to tell you this, but I`ve got a family of golden frogs living in my garden pond!"

The next day, a contingent from the Centre for Fortean Zoology, consisting of me, Graham Inglis and a leather-clad geezer called Richard Freeman (who apart from having the questionable taste to be a `goth` is a zoology student at Leeds University, and was also once a Zoo Keper at a well known menagerie in the West Midlands), turned up at Rosemary`s house in search of these semi-mythical golden frogs.

Our search was hampered by what seemed to be dozens (but was probably only about four or five) small children who followed us around shrieking with excitement whenever we sighted an amphibian of any colour. We caught at least a dozen frogs of various shapes, colours and sizes, but although we caught several glimpses of what appeared to be a canary-yellow frog hopping around distractedly deep inside Rosemary`s shrubbery we were unable to catch it!

Rosemary promised us that she would do her best to catch either this creature or even the bright orange frog that she had seen on at least a dozen occasions during the year so far. At the time of writing we are still waiting, and there is a palatial fish-tank, decked out with a rotten log and some sphagnum moss on my landing waiting to receive any golden frogs that we get sent. However, although, I have various peculiar reptiles and amphibians in terraria on my landing, this particular tank remains empty. I live in hope though!

No-one knows exactly what causes the mutation which has started to produce these remarkable amphibians. Some people claim that they are a direct result of the hole in the ozone layer or indiscriminate use of pesticides, but those of us who have studied the ancient folklore of the region know better don`t we?

Well I have to admit that absulutely nothing came of that experiment. Rosemary singularly failed to deliver the goods, and although we had a mustard-coloured frog in our collection for a few months a year or two later, itescaped. What we did notice however was that after she had spawned, she got gradually less yellow as the months went on.

Then last week I received this photograph:



Its a frog! But it is also unquestionably a golden one, and it was photographed only a few hundred yards from where the CFZ now resides in rural North Devon. What is even stranger is the two frogs which are pictured at the top of today's entry. If you look at them, they are both unquestionably Rana temporaria but their markings are so radically different that they could quite easily be mistaken for different species.

Now, with help from the newest member of the CFZ team, David Phillips (13), who works with the CFZ every weekend, they hope to solve the mystery. David – a keen amateur photographer – is working with Mark North on setting up photo tanks, and together they will be collating the pictures, and they hope to eventually publish a book detailing the results of the project.

We are hoping to collect a library of pictures of different coloured frogs from across the region. Then we shall try and collate the different markings and colour variations with the environmental factors, and see if we can publish an atlas of froggy morphology and try to gain some clues as to what causes these variations.

But we want to take the project further. When we find some healthy yellow or golden specimens, we want to see if they breed true, with none of the signs of malformed tadpoles and infertile eggs that one would expect from a harmful mutation. And btw no animals will be harmed and that all the frogs will be released back into the wild.

David prepares the first of our vivaria. Will these two froggies (that Mark insists on naming after characters from the Sharpe TV series) change colour and patterns over the next few weeks and months?

The CFZ are hoping for YOUR help. Have you got unusually coloured frogs in your garden? Contact the CFZ on 01237 431413 and ask for me, Mark or David. They will be overjoyed to hear from you.