Its now Christmas Eve, and I am at Corinna's house in Lincolnshire. I just want to thank you all for all you have done during 2005. It is very much appreciated I can tell you. Thank you to everyone who has sent cards and even presents to the CFZ - again, I am overwhelmed by your kindness.
Let's hope that 2006 can be another special year for us all.
God Bless
Jon
Saturday, December 24, 2005
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
THE CENTRE FOR FORTEAN ZOOLOGY ANNUAL REPORT 2005
THE CENTRE FOR FORTEAN ZOOLOGY
ANNUAL REPORT 2005
“Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me;
Other times I can barely see.
Lately it occurs to me
What a long, strange trip it's been.”
The Grateful Dead: Truckin’
Dear friends,
It seems incredibly weird that the CFZ is just about to enter its fifteenth year – a decade and a half of cryptozoological research. It seems that every year, when I sit back to write this report, I find myself looking back on the proceeding twelve months and wondering how we possibly ever managed to fit so much in!
It has been an odd year – beset by personal dramas – but it has been a successful one.
The first few months of the year went according to plan. The General Council meeting in January sorted out a great deal of the administrative problems that we had been having, and the publication of my book Monster Hunter opened the doors for a new range of CFZ books. Out were to go the old spiral-bound, home-made books, and in was to come a new range of perfect-bound paperbacks. The entire CFZ Press range was to be revamped with new material, extra pictures, and new artwork by Mark North.
Graham – later assisted by Oll Lewis – took over the job of running the ailing and elderly CFZ forum and has turned it into a thriving cyber-community which spills out into a `Virtual CFZ’ in the animated chatroom ‘Habbo Hotel’. It is all getting very strange.
We spent much of the next three months working on Richard Freeman’s book; Dragons; More than a Myth and everyone who visited the CFZ during the late winter and spring of this year found themselves roped in to working on the project! My girlfriend Corinna, my cousin Pene, and Oll Lewis (a new CFZ recruit from South Wales), all found themselves working on the index, and proof-reading, of this mammoth work. Well over a quarter of a million words long, the book is the first scientific study of dragons for over a century, and when it finally appeared in early July it was well worth the wait. However, by then, the world of the CFZ had changed forever.
In May, Richard, Chris Clark, John Hare and Dave “Davinian” Churchill went to Mongolia on the largest and most ambitious CFZ expedition yet: The search for the fabled Mongolian deathworm. They were in Mongolia for a month, during which Mark North – who had sadly been made redundant – found himself living almost non-stop in Richard’s room in Exeter and working on the dragon book and also our first crypto-novel – Chris Moiser’s While the Cat’s Away.
I spent much of May at Corinna’s house in Lincolnshire working on my next book (The Island of Paradise – my second book about Puerto Rico), and planning CFZ events for the second half of the year. In early June, the day after Richard returned, we had the second council meeting of the year, with the ranks being boosted by Oll Lewis and Lisa Dowley. Work started on capitalising on the successes of the Mongolian expedition – they had not actually found the deathworm, but had amassed more eyewitness testimony than ever before on the subject, and had also found reports (hitherto unknown in the west) of dragon-like creatures in the Gobi Desert - when something happened that was to change the CFZ for ever: My father was taken seriously ill.
Corinna (who happened to be visiting me that weekend) and I went up to see him and were shocked by what we saw. He was so ill and emaciated that there was no way that he could be left alone any more. Three days later Graham and I – thinking, I must admit, that my Dad would not live more than a few more weeks at most – moved in to the old family home in North Devon. I must be a better nurse than I realised, because six months later we are still here!
As many of you will know, it has long been my plan to move the CFZ to a rural location and to set up a proper visitor’s centre. Over the years I have been only too aware that some people have been somewhat disappointed when they saw the physical reality of the CFZ. A Japanese TV crew once came to film us about something, and almost the first thing that they said was: “But we thought you had a centre!”
We did – and do. The CFZ is now unquestionably the biggest cryptozoological research organisation in the world. We are the largest publishers of cryptozoological material in the world, and each year we undertake at least one major foreign expedition. But it is unquestionably true that – until now – visitors have come to see a rather grotty mid-terraced house in an unprepossessing Exeter housing estate. Now, this is all about to change.
My old family home is a rambling house in over a third of an acre of land in rural North Devon. It has outbuildings and a large conservatory as well as a fine old garden. Since June, I have been living here full time again for the first time in a quarter of a century. Graham has moved in as well, and we are joined by Mark North, Richard Freeman and John Fuller on shifts. In August we started moving the main CFZ Office, and I am proud to announce that I have reached an agreement with other family members that when my father finally dies, the CFZ will buy out their interest in the property, and we will finally have a visitor’s centre.
There will be a museum, a library, a laboratory, and room for our collection of exotic animals. There will be a permanent display of our ongoing researches, and what’s more, the village has an outstanding Community Centre that we can use for a nominal fee. Within the next few years we will be able to fulfil one of our major objectives, and the planned centre will be a major resource for cryptozoologists across the globe.
In August we left the village and came back to Exeter for the sixth annual Weird Weekend. It was the most successful event to date.
In Richard’s words:
“If the Fortean Times UnConvention is a wine bar then the CFZ’s Weird Weekend is sitting back on the sofa with a six-pack and watching re-runs of League of Gentlemen.
This year’s convention was again held at the Cowick Barton pub in Exeter. The pub was close to capacity, as the event has grown so much over the last three years. Far from the embarrassing early years when speakers rivalled attendees in numbers, the Weird Weekend is now thriving and can lay claim to being the biggest Fortean gathering in the UK outside of London.
There were 14 talks in all but as with anything you are involved in organizing you never have time to truly appreciate it. I missed many of the lectures this year as I was off behind the scenes doing this, that and the other.
Nick Redfern travelled all the way from Texas to give us two talks. The first was on the Texas Bigfoot. Most of us think of Texas as desert and scrub but in the east, on the borders of Louisiana, there are huge forests and swamps. After the Pacific North West and Florida, Texas is one of the real BHM hotspots in the US.
Nick also spoke about his new book ‘Bodysnatchers in the Desert’ (sounds like a 1950’s B-movie!) and his theory that the ‘aliens’ at Roswell were deformed human children used in altitude experiments by the US government and Japanese scientists pilfered by America after WW2. It makes a damn sight more sense than little grey men.
Over from Ireland was one of my favourite Fortean authors, Peter Costello. His books ‘In Search of Lake Monsters’ and ‘The Magic Zoo’ were benchmark works that inspired a generation of researchers. In his talk he looked back over his distinguished career searching for lake monster in his homeland and in the UK.
Speaking of Ireland I think that when you look in the Encyclopaedia Britannica for said country there should be a picture of Ronan Coghlan grinning cheekily whilst holding up a bottle of porter. One of the weekend’s highlights was the talk by everyone’s favourite twinkly-eyed rascal. The subject was mermaids. Not high up on the list of beast likely to actually exist, I hear you cry. Well you could be wrong. Ronan provided a convincing argument for the existence of an aquatic primate. Not quite the fish tailed, blonde beauty of myth but a more ape-like beast.
That line between man and beast was also blurred by Jon Hare in his talk on Sumatran weretigers. This was Jon’s first ever lecture but you wouldn’t know it from listening to him. His was widely regarded as the best talk of the weekend. He covered obscure martial arts from the Sumatran jungle that involve fighting on all fours and thinking like a tiger (Jon must be one of the few Westerners than have ever practised this art.) Forget the image of a tiger-human hybrid; this is something much stranger, involving beliefs in tiger ancestry and possession by tiger spirits.
On a less threatening note, the lovely Gail Nina Anderson looked at the portrayal of fairies in art. She showed that this was less of a reflection of true fairy lore and rather a projection onto them of the current trends and fashions. Contrary to the popular image, fairies almost never have wings and are often both ugly and malevolent. I was, however, amazed to find out she doesn’t like Richard Dad’s painting ‘The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke’, one of the few portrayals of fairies as disturbing creatures.
Chris Moiser (who wandered around carrying a life-sized toy panther) examined the fortean fauna of the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. These stretched far beyond ‘The Lost World’ and included an elephant sized, subterranean bear in the Peak district (I wonder what he had been drinking when he thought that one up?)
My old mate Steve Jones dealt with strange creatures associated with holy wells and springs. These ranged from fish and snakes to dragons and great wyrms. As always he was seen walking abroad with his mighty horn (er drinking horn that is).
My own humble offering was a recounting of the CFZ expedition to Mongolia.
Some of the treats I missed included award winning author Jeremy Harte on Fortean happenings recorded in medieval literature, and Simon Sherwood on black dogs. David Farrant gave us his theories on the nature of the paranormal. Richard Ingram looked at conspiracy theories.
But it wasn’t just lectures. John Harrigan gave an intense and disturbing theatrical performance in the alter ego of Dr Bleach. Raised in a graveyard with corpses as friends he roamed the audience giving out deformed dolls with messages inside, like diseased fortune cookies. The performance was a prologue for Dark Nights of the Soul, a six-part horror / cryptozoology / fortean / occult anthology play being held at the Horse Hospital in London.
Sam Shearon provided a menagerie of cryptid artwork in a jaw-dropping display of artwork. The reputedly-haunted Monk’s Room in the Cowick Barton was given over to Sam’s amazing paintings of monsters that looked so real that you half expected them to lunge out of the canvas and sink rows of stiletto-like teeth into the soft flesh of you face or stomach.
Other delights included Bob and Sid’s excellent Apra Book stall, CFZ awards, quizzes, much drinking, a Russian restaurant, and extreme right wing phallic ray guns. And the best thing? Not hide nor hair of rescue mediums, healing crystals, psychic questing, or guardian angels”.
We raised nearly £1,000 for CFZ funds and this year was so successful that we are forced to look for a larger venue, so next year’s event will be held at the aforementioned community centre here in Woolsery. The following speakers have already been confirmed:
Gordon Rutter
Bob Morrel
Lionel Beer
Chris Moiser
Paul Crowther
Paul Vella
And there will also be an exhibition from Mark Fraser, and workshops from Paul Vella, Paul Crowther, Oll Lewis and Chris Moiser.
The `Foolish People` Theatre Company will also attend for the second year running, and we hope that within a month or so we shall be able to announce further speakers and attractions. The village is easy to find and we shall be laying on a complementary minibus from Barnstaple railway station, as well as cut rate deals with local hotels, camp sites and B+Bs.
In the autumn the CFZ made its first foray onto the legitimate stage with Richard Freeman’s high profile collaboration with the aforementioned `Foolish People`.
Richard writes:
“Those of you at the last Unconvention may have seen the Foolish People theatre group stall. I was lucky enough to see their excellent production Ruined Steel earlier this year. As it turns out John Harrigan, creator of the group is interested in cryptozoology! Foolish People’s next project is a co-production with the CFZ.
An ark of six plays featuring six classic monsters is being written by John. Entitled Dark Night of the Soul they are to feature Richard Freeman as a narrator much like Rod Serling in the Twilight Zone with Jon Hare as his able assistant. Richard is writing notes for the plays and suggesting story themes. The six plays will feature dragons, basilisks, were-tigers, vampires, the Wendigo, and little people. See Foolish People’s website www.foolishpeople.org for more details.”
In November Richard and I spent several days at Loch Ness, courtesy of the American magic duo Penn and Teller. We were filming a segment for the show Penn and Teller: Bullshit! which will be shown sometime next year. We have come in for some criticism for appearing on a TV show that will not add anything to the sum total of cryptozoological research, but as I said at the time:
I will not be at all surprised if P+T do take the piss. It was always a serious possibility, but I think it was worth it because we not only got paid a heck of a lot of money which was badly needed to swell CFZ coffers (100% of my fee went into the CFZ funds as usual), but got to make good relationships with Adrian Shine and Willy Cameron.
It has not been a bad year. It has not been the easiest that we have had, but we are in a better position than we were twelve months ago, and that is the main thing. The only real downside to the year has been the fact that our publication schedule has been delayed somewhat. We have published four new books and four re-issues, but only two issues of the journal; and the Yearbook has been held up until the spring.
Issue 37 of Animals & Men is very nearly finished and will be sent out in January, but I am awaiting some important information without which it would be difficult to publish. Also coming soon in the new year is the long awaited Big Cat Yearbook edited by Mark Fraser, reissues of The Blackdown Mystery and the first two volumes of A&M reprints and a deluxe 30th Anniversary edition of The Owlman and Others.
There will be a General Council meeting in January and we will then be able to announce the expedition and investigation schedule for the year. As always we are in desperate need of donations of time, money and expertise. The CFZ makes quite a lot of money but, boy, do we spend it fast! We are currently carrying out research all over the world and every penny earned goes straight into these projects. We do not ask for money for personal gain. We are all capable of supporting ourselves, but if we are to continue our programme of research we MUST have more money and more manpower. If you are interested in cryptozoology (whether or not you are a member of the CFZ) and feel that you can help, send donations via PayPal or feel free to email me on jon@eclipse.co.uk.
Until next time, many thanks for all your support this year….
God Bless
Slainte
Jonathan Downes,
(Director, Centre for Fortean Zoology)
December 8th 2005
Myrtle Cottage
Woolsery
Bideford
North Devon
EX39 5QR
ANNUAL REPORT 2005
“Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me;
Other times I can barely see.
Lately it occurs to me
What a long, strange trip it's been.”
The Grateful Dead: Truckin’
Dear friends,
It seems incredibly weird that the CFZ is just about to enter its fifteenth year – a decade and a half of cryptozoological research. It seems that every year, when I sit back to write this report, I find myself looking back on the proceeding twelve months and wondering how we possibly ever managed to fit so much in!
It has been an odd year – beset by personal dramas – but it has been a successful one.
The first few months of the year went according to plan. The General Council meeting in January sorted out a great deal of the administrative problems that we had been having, and the publication of my book Monster Hunter opened the doors for a new range of CFZ books. Out were to go the old spiral-bound, home-made books, and in was to come a new range of perfect-bound paperbacks. The entire CFZ Press range was to be revamped with new material, extra pictures, and new artwork by Mark North.
Graham – later assisted by Oll Lewis – took over the job of running the ailing and elderly CFZ forum and has turned it into a thriving cyber-community which spills out into a `Virtual CFZ’ in the animated chatroom ‘Habbo Hotel’. It is all getting very strange.
We spent much of the next three months working on Richard Freeman’s book; Dragons; More than a Myth and everyone who visited the CFZ during the late winter and spring of this year found themselves roped in to working on the project! My girlfriend Corinna, my cousin Pene, and Oll Lewis (a new CFZ recruit from South Wales), all found themselves working on the index, and proof-reading, of this mammoth work. Well over a quarter of a million words long, the book is the first scientific study of dragons for over a century, and when it finally appeared in early July it was well worth the wait. However, by then, the world of the CFZ had changed forever.
In May, Richard, Chris Clark, John Hare and Dave “Davinian” Churchill went to Mongolia on the largest and most ambitious CFZ expedition yet: The search for the fabled Mongolian deathworm. They were in Mongolia for a month, during which Mark North – who had sadly been made redundant – found himself living almost non-stop in Richard’s room in Exeter and working on the dragon book and also our first crypto-novel – Chris Moiser’s While the Cat’s Away.
I spent much of May at Corinna’s house in Lincolnshire working on my next book (The Island of Paradise – my second book about Puerto Rico), and planning CFZ events for the second half of the year. In early June, the day after Richard returned, we had the second council meeting of the year, with the ranks being boosted by Oll Lewis and Lisa Dowley. Work started on capitalising on the successes of the Mongolian expedition – they had not actually found the deathworm, but had amassed more eyewitness testimony than ever before on the subject, and had also found reports (hitherto unknown in the west) of dragon-like creatures in the Gobi Desert - when something happened that was to change the CFZ for ever: My father was taken seriously ill.
Corinna (who happened to be visiting me that weekend) and I went up to see him and were shocked by what we saw. He was so ill and emaciated that there was no way that he could be left alone any more. Three days later Graham and I – thinking, I must admit, that my Dad would not live more than a few more weeks at most – moved in to the old family home in North Devon. I must be a better nurse than I realised, because six months later we are still here!
As many of you will know, it has long been my plan to move the CFZ to a rural location and to set up a proper visitor’s centre. Over the years I have been only too aware that some people have been somewhat disappointed when they saw the physical reality of the CFZ. A Japanese TV crew once came to film us about something, and almost the first thing that they said was: “But we thought you had a centre!”
We did – and do. The CFZ is now unquestionably the biggest cryptozoological research organisation in the world. We are the largest publishers of cryptozoological material in the world, and each year we undertake at least one major foreign expedition. But it is unquestionably true that – until now – visitors have come to see a rather grotty mid-terraced house in an unprepossessing Exeter housing estate. Now, this is all about to change.
My old family home is a rambling house in over a third of an acre of land in rural North Devon. It has outbuildings and a large conservatory as well as a fine old garden. Since June, I have been living here full time again for the first time in a quarter of a century. Graham has moved in as well, and we are joined by Mark North, Richard Freeman and John Fuller on shifts. In August we started moving the main CFZ Office, and I am proud to announce that I have reached an agreement with other family members that when my father finally dies, the CFZ will buy out their interest in the property, and we will finally have a visitor’s centre.
There will be a museum, a library, a laboratory, and room for our collection of exotic animals. There will be a permanent display of our ongoing researches, and what’s more, the village has an outstanding Community Centre that we can use for a nominal fee. Within the next few years we will be able to fulfil one of our major objectives, and the planned centre will be a major resource for cryptozoologists across the globe.
In August we left the village and came back to Exeter for the sixth annual Weird Weekend. It was the most successful event to date.
In Richard’s words:
“If the Fortean Times UnConvention is a wine bar then the CFZ’s Weird Weekend is sitting back on the sofa with a six-pack and watching re-runs of League of Gentlemen.
This year’s convention was again held at the Cowick Barton pub in Exeter. The pub was close to capacity, as the event has grown so much over the last three years. Far from the embarrassing early years when speakers rivalled attendees in numbers, the Weird Weekend is now thriving and can lay claim to being the biggest Fortean gathering in the UK outside of London.
There were 14 talks in all but as with anything you are involved in organizing you never have time to truly appreciate it. I missed many of the lectures this year as I was off behind the scenes doing this, that and the other.
Nick Redfern travelled all the way from Texas to give us two talks. The first was on the Texas Bigfoot. Most of us think of Texas as desert and scrub but in the east, on the borders of Louisiana, there are huge forests and swamps. After the Pacific North West and Florida, Texas is one of the real BHM hotspots in the US.
Nick also spoke about his new book ‘Bodysnatchers in the Desert’ (sounds like a 1950’s B-movie!) and his theory that the ‘aliens’ at Roswell were deformed human children used in altitude experiments by the US government and Japanese scientists pilfered by America after WW2. It makes a damn sight more sense than little grey men.
Over from Ireland was one of my favourite Fortean authors, Peter Costello. His books ‘In Search of Lake Monsters’ and ‘The Magic Zoo’ were benchmark works that inspired a generation of researchers. In his talk he looked back over his distinguished career searching for lake monster in his homeland and in the UK.
Speaking of Ireland I think that when you look in the Encyclopaedia Britannica for said country there should be a picture of Ronan Coghlan grinning cheekily whilst holding up a bottle of porter. One of the weekend’s highlights was the talk by everyone’s favourite twinkly-eyed rascal. The subject was mermaids. Not high up on the list of beast likely to actually exist, I hear you cry. Well you could be wrong. Ronan provided a convincing argument for the existence of an aquatic primate. Not quite the fish tailed, blonde beauty of myth but a more ape-like beast.
That line between man and beast was also blurred by Jon Hare in his talk on Sumatran weretigers. This was Jon’s first ever lecture but you wouldn’t know it from listening to him. His was widely regarded as the best talk of the weekend. He covered obscure martial arts from the Sumatran jungle that involve fighting on all fours and thinking like a tiger (Jon must be one of the few Westerners than have ever practised this art.) Forget the image of a tiger-human hybrid; this is something much stranger, involving beliefs in tiger ancestry and possession by tiger spirits.
On a less threatening note, the lovely Gail Nina Anderson looked at the portrayal of fairies in art. She showed that this was less of a reflection of true fairy lore and rather a projection onto them of the current trends and fashions. Contrary to the popular image, fairies almost never have wings and are often both ugly and malevolent. I was, however, amazed to find out she doesn’t like Richard Dad’s painting ‘The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke’, one of the few portrayals of fairies as disturbing creatures.
Chris Moiser (who wandered around carrying a life-sized toy panther) examined the fortean fauna of the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. These stretched far beyond ‘The Lost World’ and included an elephant sized, subterranean bear in the Peak district (I wonder what he had been drinking when he thought that one up?)
My old mate Steve Jones dealt with strange creatures associated with holy wells and springs. These ranged from fish and snakes to dragons and great wyrms. As always he was seen walking abroad with his mighty horn (er drinking horn that is).
My own humble offering was a recounting of the CFZ expedition to Mongolia.
Some of the treats I missed included award winning author Jeremy Harte on Fortean happenings recorded in medieval literature, and Simon Sherwood on black dogs. David Farrant gave us his theories on the nature of the paranormal. Richard Ingram looked at conspiracy theories.
But it wasn’t just lectures. John Harrigan gave an intense and disturbing theatrical performance in the alter ego of Dr Bleach. Raised in a graveyard with corpses as friends he roamed the audience giving out deformed dolls with messages inside, like diseased fortune cookies. The performance was a prologue for Dark Nights of the Soul, a six-part horror / cryptozoology / fortean / occult anthology play being held at the Horse Hospital in London.
Sam Shearon provided a menagerie of cryptid artwork in a jaw-dropping display of artwork. The reputedly-haunted Monk’s Room in the Cowick Barton was given over to Sam’s amazing paintings of monsters that looked so real that you half expected them to lunge out of the canvas and sink rows of stiletto-like teeth into the soft flesh of you face or stomach.
Other delights included Bob and Sid’s excellent Apra Book stall, CFZ awards, quizzes, much drinking, a Russian restaurant, and extreme right wing phallic ray guns. And the best thing? Not hide nor hair of rescue mediums, healing crystals, psychic questing, or guardian angels”.
We raised nearly £1,000 for CFZ funds and this year was so successful that we are forced to look for a larger venue, so next year’s event will be held at the aforementioned community centre here in Woolsery. The following speakers have already been confirmed:
Gordon Rutter
Bob Morrel
Lionel Beer
Chris Moiser
Paul Crowther
Paul Vella
And there will also be an exhibition from Mark Fraser, and workshops from Paul Vella, Paul Crowther, Oll Lewis and Chris Moiser.
The `Foolish People` Theatre Company will also attend for the second year running, and we hope that within a month or so we shall be able to announce further speakers and attractions. The village is easy to find and we shall be laying on a complementary minibus from Barnstaple railway station, as well as cut rate deals with local hotels, camp sites and B+Bs.
In the autumn the CFZ made its first foray onto the legitimate stage with Richard Freeman’s high profile collaboration with the aforementioned `Foolish People`.
Richard writes:
“Those of you at the last Unconvention may have seen the Foolish People theatre group stall. I was lucky enough to see their excellent production Ruined Steel earlier this year. As it turns out John Harrigan, creator of the group is interested in cryptozoology! Foolish People’s next project is a co-production with the CFZ.
An ark of six plays featuring six classic monsters is being written by John. Entitled Dark Night of the Soul they are to feature Richard Freeman as a narrator much like Rod Serling in the Twilight Zone with Jon Hare as his able assistant. Richard is writing notes for the plays and suggesting story themes. The six plays will feature dragons, basilisks, were-tigers, vampires, the Wendigo, and little people. See Foolish People’s website www.foolishpeople.org for more details.”
In November Richard and I spent several days at Loch Ness, courtesy of the American magic duo Penn and Teller. We were filming a segment for the show Penn and Teller: Bullshit! which will be shown sometime next year. We have come in for some criticism for appearing on a TV show that will not add anything to the sum total of cryptozoological research, but as I said at the time:
I will not be at all surprised if P+T do take the piss. It was always a serious possibility, but I think it was worth it because we not only got paid a heck of a lot of money which was badly needed to swell CFZ coffers (100% of my fee went into the CFZ funds as usual), but got to make good relationships with Adrian Shine and Willy Cameron.
It has not been a bad year. It has not been the easiest that we have had, but we are in a better position than we were twelve months ago, and that is the main thing. The only real downside to the year has been the fact that our publication schedule has been delayed somewhat. We have published four new books and four re-issues, but only two issues of the journal; and the Yearbook has been held up until the spring.
Issue 37 of Animals & Men is very nearly finished and will be sent out in January, but I am awaiting some important information without which it would be difficult to publish. Also coming soon in the new year is the long awaited Big Cat Yearbook edited by Mark Fraser, reissues of The Blackdown Mystery and the first two volumes of A&M reprints and a deluxe 30th Anniversary edition of The Owlman and Others.
There will be a General Council meeting in January and we will then be able to announce the expedition and investigation schedule for the year. As always we are in desperate need of donations of time, money and expertise. The CFZ makes quite a lot of money but, boy, do we spend it fast! We are currently carrying out research all over the world and every penny earned goes straight into these projects. We do not ask for money for personal gain. We are all capable of supporting ourselves, but if we are to continue our programme of research we MUST have more money and more manpower. If you are interested in cryptozoology (whether or not you are a member of the CFZ) and feel that you can help, send donations via PayPal or feel free to email me on jon@eclipse.co.uk.
Until next time, many thanks for all your support this year….
God Bless
Slainte
Jonathan Downes,
(Director, Centre for Fortean Zoology)
December 8th 2005
Myrtle Cottage
Woolsery
Bideford
North Devon
EX39 5QR
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Just a Quicky
Things are beginning to wind down now as we approach what is euphemistically described as the `festive season`. Mark is going home for three weeks next week, Graham will be manning the office (and looking after my Papa) over the Christmas week itself when John Fuller will be off, and I will be with Corinaa for about a week.
I have been unwell again recently so many apologies again for not having posted much on here sinceour return from Loch Ness. I have also been neglecting the CFZVolunteers list recently, but both Graham and I have been acting on the information that Trystan and Craig sorted out forus re.meta tags a few months ago, and although I am somewhat opart of the walking wounded at the moment the future looks pretty good...
It has not been a bad year. It has not been the easiest that we have had, but we are in a better position than we were twelve months ago, and that is the main thing. The only real downside to the year has been the fact that our publication schedule has been delayed somewhat. We have published four new books and four re-issues, but only two issues of the journal; and the Yearbook has been held up until the spring.
Animals & Men 37 is pretty well finished but we are awaiting some final bits and bobs and so it will not be sent out until early in the New Year.
Also coming soon in the new year is the long awaited Big Cat Yearbook edited by Mark Fraser, reissues of The Blackdown Mystery and the first two volumes of A&M reprints and a deluxe 30th Anniversary edition of The Owlman and Others.
There will be a General Council meeting in January and we will then be able to announce the expedition and investigation schedule for the year. As always we are in desperate need of donations of time, money and expertise. The CFZ makes quite a lot of money but, boy, do we spend it fast! We are currently carrying out research all over the world and every penny earned goes straight into these projects. We do not ask for money for personal gain. We are all capable of supporting ourselves, but if we are to continue our programme of research we MUST have more money and more manpower. If you are interested in cryptozoology (whether or not you are a member of the CFZ) and feel that you can help, send donations via PayPal or feel free to email me on jon@eclipse.co.uk.
Until next time, many thanks for all your support this year….
God Bless
I have been unwell again recently so many apologies again for not having posted much on here sinceour return from Loch Ness. I have also been neglecting the CFZVolunteers list recently, but both Graham and I have been acting on the information that Trystan and Craig sorted out forus re.meta tags a few months ago, and although I am somewhat opart of the walking wounded at the moment the future looks pretty good...
It has not been a bad year. It has not been the easiest that we have had, but we are in a better position than we were twelve months ago, and that is the main thing. The only real downside to the year has been the fact that our publication schedule has been delayed somewhat. We have published four new books and four re-issues, but only two issues of the journal; and the Yearbook has been held up until the spring.
Animals & Men 37 is pretty well finished but we are awaiting some final bits and bobs and so it will not be sent out until early in the New Year.
Also coming soon in the new year is the long awaited Big Cat Yearbook edited by Mark Fraser, reissues of The Blackdown Mystery and the first two volumes of A&M reprints and a deluxe 30th Anniversary edition of The Owlman and Others.
There will be a General Council meeting in January and we will then be able to announce the expedition and investigation schedule for the year. As always we are in desperate need of donations of time, money and expertise. The CFZ makes quite a lot of money but, boy, do we spend it fast! We are currently carrying out research all over the world and every penny earned goes straight into these projects. We do not ask for money for personal gain. We are all capable of supporting ourselves, but if we are to continue our programme of research we MUST have more money and more manpower. If you are interested in cryptozoology (whether or not you are a member of the CFZ) and feel that you can help, send donations via PayPal or feel free to email me on jon@eclipse.co.uk.
Until next time, many thanks for all your support this year….
God Bless
Friday, December 02, 2005
It ain't Nessie-cerally So!!! (Part One)
It has always been one of the great ironies of the CFZ that despite fast becoming the best known cryptozoologists in the world, we have - to date at least - done very little investigations regarding the world's best known monster. Earlier this year, CFZ stalwart David "Geordie Dave" Curtis paid for a three person CFZ expedition to Loch Morar in Scotland to start work on investigating a theory propounded by Richard Freeman and myself that some sightings of lake monsters across the world may be giant eels.
The European eel (Anguillia anguilla) lives in freshwater until it reaches sexual maturity when the reproductive imperative kicks in and the elongate fish swim down to the sea where (according to most sources) they cannot feed, and swim down to the Sargasso Sea in the South Atlantic where they mate, spawn and die. The larval eels (known as leptocephelae)are the shape of leaves and about the size of a little fingernail. They sweim up the Atlantic to coastal waters where they metamorphose into tiny eels called elvers. These swim up the rivers and the cycle begins again. Howeverr, it has been suggested that occasionally an elver becomes sterile, and so when its peers have attained a length of 4-6 feet and sexual maturity, the biological imperative does not kick in and the eunuch eel (as theyhave been dubbed) stay in freshwater and continue to grow.
This is partly hypothesis, but it makes a fair amount of sense and would certainly explain some of the lake monster sightings which have taken place across the northern hemisphere. For years one of the main stumbling blocks for a viable population of giant animals living in any of the monster-haunted lakes (with the possible exception of Lake Okanagan in Canada, and some of the lesser known lakes in Siberia and Tibet), is the sheer lack of biomass in the waters. There just simply isn't enough food to support them. Another problem is thatthe prehistoric giant reptiles were all e=air breathers, and would have to surface to breathe, and presumably come onto land to breed. There are just simply not enough sightings of these creatures to support such a hypothesis.
If, however, our hypothesis is true then we can scratch both of these objections immediately: They obtain their oxygen from the water, and they are occasional visitors or mutations rather than an unknown species of animal.
Richard's methodology during the Loch Morar expedition was simple: "We used nylon rope with empty plastic milk bottles as floatation devices. We tied one end to a tree or rock. We then lased another length to the bottle connecting the two lengths. At the end of the second length, 20 feet or so beneath the float was the bait. This was a mixture of mussels, fish guts, herring, cow liver and Van Den Eynd Predator Plus, a fish-attracting chemical. The mixture was placed in Hessian sacks so it could permeate through.
Sadly nothing touched the bait, but the floatation devices worked a treat. We suspect that it may have been too early in the year and the creatures may have been torpid. Most sightings have been in warm weather and calm conditions."
In October we were approached by an American TV Company who were making the second season of a show called "Penn and Teller's Bullshit" which features the two legendary stage magicians (who are also rumoured to be members ofthe art-rock band `The Residents`), looking at claims of strange phenomena. Would we be interested in going to Loch Ness? We agreed on the condition that we were able to do the investigation our way.........
Loch Ness (Scottish Gaelic: Loch Nis) is a large, deep freshwater lake (known in Scotland as a loch) in the Scottish Highlands, extending for approximately 37 km (23 miles) southwest of Inverness. It is the largest body of water in the geologic fault known as the Great Glen, which runs from Inverness in the north to Fort William in the south. The Caledonian Canal, which links the sea at either end of the Great Glen, uses Loch Ness for part of its route.
Loch Ness is one of a series of interconnected, murky lakes in Scotland that were carved by glaciers during previous ice ages. Quite large and deep, Loch Ness has exceptionally low water visibility due to a high peat content in the surrounding soil.Loch Ness is the second largest Scottish loch by surface area at 56.4 km2 (21.8 sq mi) but due to its extreme depth is the largest by volume. The loch contains more fresh water than all that in England and Wales combined. At its deepest part, 226 m (740 feet), London's BT Tower at 189 m (620 feet) would be completely submerged.
As the legendary Loch Ness investigator Adrian Shine was to confirm to us later in the week, there is practically no empirical evidence for the existance of the the archetypal long necked lake monster in any of the Scottish lakes, there is a firm body of evidence to support the hypothesis that there are occasional sightings of large fish. Some of these are described as being like 'Upturned Boats' and are - in Shine's opinion at least - probably stray sturgeon, others are more elongate, and these are what Richard and I believe may be huge eunuch eels.
Although once upon a time Richard and I used to travel together a lot, and undertake investigations all around the country, times have changed and it wasn't until we were sitting together in the departure lounge at Exeter Airport thatI realised that we hadn't been together on a trip that involved just the two of us since our infamous hunt for the Wallaby Slasher of Cleveland in August 2002! That is not to say that we haven't investigated anythingn - since then Richard has been to Mongolia and Sumatra (twice), and I have been to the States four times and Puerto Rico (once). However it was fun o be back together on the track of unknown whatsits, and we were quite excited about the prospect of the journey ahead.
This is neither the time or the plce to bore on about the rigours of air travel in the 21st Century.I seem to have spent much of my adult life on aeroplaces travelling between one place and another. We left the CFZ in Woolsery just after 7 am - and didn't check into our Edinburgh hotel until nearly twelve hours later. Only jusat over two of those hours were spent in the air - the rest were taken up hanging around in airport bars and baggage check-ins.
However it was great to spend some time with Richard again after so long, and on the whole it was a reasonably enjoyable experience.
When we finally got to the hotel it was full of men in kilts drinking whisky!
No, Honestly!
In one of the most bizarre fortean coincidences that have happened to me in a long history of weird fortean coincidences, we had arrived right in the middle of the alchohol fuelled obsequies for Iam Cameron - the person who went down in history for havingthe longest unbroken `Nessie` sighting in history.
In his own words:
"mid-summer, June 1965. I, along with a friend, was on the south shore of Loch Ness, fishing for brown trout, looking almost directly into Urquhart Bay, when I saw something break the surface of the water. I glanced there, and I saw it, and then it wasn't there, it had disappeared.
But while watching, keeping an eye, and fishing gently, I saw an object surface. It was a large, black object—a whale-like object, going from infinity up, and came round onto a block end—and it submerged, to reappear a matter of seconds later. But on this occasion, the block end, which had been on my right, was now on my left, so I realized immediately that while in the process of surfacing, as it may, it had rotated. And with the predominant wind, the south-west wind, it appeared to be, I would say, at that stage drifting easily across.
So I called to my friend Willie Frazer, who incidentally had a sighting of an object on the Loch almost a year ago to the very day. I called him, and he come up and joined me. We realized that it was drifting towards us, and, in fact, it came to within I would say about 250, 300 yards.
In no way am I even attempting to convert anybody to the religion of the object of Loch Ness. I mean, they can believe it, but it doesn't upset me if they don't believe it. Because I would question very much if I hadn't the extraordinary experience of seeing this object. If I hadn't seen it I would have without question given a lot of skepticism to what it was. But I saw it, and nothing can take that away."
Richard stayed up drinking with Ian's son Willie and other family members, but after dinner and a couple of beers (yes, gys - only a couple), I went to bed. My hard drinking days are behind me now, and the next day I had to hire a car, and drive to Loch Ness. There was too much ice on the roads for me to risk a hangover...
TO BE CONTINUED
The European eel (Anguillia anguilla) lives in freshwater until it reaches sexual maturity when the reproductive imperative kicks in and the elongate fish swim down to the sea where (according to most sources) they cannot feed, and swim down to the Sargasso Sea in the South Atlantic where they mate, spawn and die. The larval eels (known as leptocephelae)are the shape of leaves and about the size of a little fingernail. They sweim up the Atlantic to coastal waters where they metamorphose into tiny eels called elvers. These swim up the rivers and the cycle begins again. Howeverr, it has been suggested that occasionally an elver becomes sterile, and so when its peers have attained a length of 4-6 feet and sexual maturity, the biological imperative does not kick in and the eunuch eel (as theyhave been dubbed) stay in freshwater and continue to grow.
This is partly hypothesis, but it makes a fair amount of sense and would certainly explain some of the lake monster sightings which have taken place across the northern hemisphere. For years one of the main stumbling blocks for a viable population of giant animals living in any of the monster-haunted lakes (with the possible exception of Lake Okanagan in Canada, and some of the lesser known lakes in Siberia and Tibet), is the sheer lack of biomass in the waters. There just simply isn't enough food to support them. Another problem is thatthe prehistoric giant reptiles were all e=air breathers, and would have to surface to breathe, and presumably come onto land to breed. There are just simply not enough sightings of these creatures to support such a hypothesis.
If, however, our hypothesis is true then we can scratch both of these objections immediately: They obtain their oxygen from the water, and they are occasional visitors or mutations rather than an unknown species of animal.
Richard's methodology during the Loch Morar expedition was simple: "We used nylon rope with empty plastic milk bottles as floatation devices. We tied one end to a tree or rock. We then lased another length to the bottle connecting the two lengths. At the end of the second length, 20 feet or so beneath the float was the bait. This was a mixture of mussels, fish guts, herring, cow liver and Van Den Eynd Predator Plus, a fish-attracting chemical. The mixture was placed in Hessian sacks so it could permeate through.
Sadly nothing touched the bait, but the floatation devices worked a treat. We suspect that it may have been too early in the year and the creatures may have been torpid. Most sightings have been in warm weather and calm conditions."
In October we were approached by an American TV Company who were making the second season of a show called "Penn and Teller's Bullshit" which features the two legendary stage magicians (who are also rumoured to be members ofthe art-rock band `The Residents`), looking at claims of strange phenomena. Would we be interested in going to Loch Ness? We agreed on the condition that we were able to do the investigation our way.........
Loch Ness (Scottish Gaelic: Loch Nis) is a large, deep freshwater lake (known in Scotland as a loch) in the Scottish Highlands, extending for approximately 37 km (23 miles) southwest of Inverness. It is the largest body of water in the geologic fault known as the Great Glen, which runs from Inverness in the north to Fort William in the south. The Caledonian Canal, which links the sea at either end of the Great Glen, uses Loch Ness for part of its route.
Loch Ness is one of a series of interconnected, murky lakes in Scotland that were carved by glaciers during previous ice ages. Quite large and deep, Loch Ness has exceptionally low water visibility due to a high peat content in the surrounding soil.Loch Ness is the second largest Scottish loch by surface area at 56.4 km2 (21.8 sq mi) but due to its extreme depth is the largest by volume. The loch contains more fresh water than all that in England and Wales combined. At its deepest part, 226 m (740 feet), London's BT Tower at 189 m (620 feet) would be completely submerged.
As the legendary Loch Ness investigator Adrian Shine was to confirm to us later in the week, there is practically no empirical evidence for the existance of the the archetypal long necked lake monster in any of the Scottish lakes, there is a firm body of evidence to support the hypothesis that there are occasional sightings of large fish. Some of these are described as being like 'Upturned Boats' and are - in Shine's opinion at least - probably stray sturgeon, others are more elongate, and these are what Richard and I believe may be huge eunuch eels.
Although once upon a time Richard and I used to travel together a lot, and undertake investigations all around the country, times have changed and it wasn't until we were sitting together in the departure lounge at Exeter Airport thatI realised that we hadn't been together on a trip that involved just the two of us since our infamous hunt for the Wallaby Slasher of Cleveland in August 2002! That is not to say that we haven't investigated anythingn - since then Richard has been to Mongolia and Sumatra (twice), and I have been to the States four times and Puerto Rico (once). However it was fun o be back together on the track of unknown whatsits, and we were quite excited about the prospect of the journey ahead.
This is neither the time or the plce to bore on about the rigours of air travel in the 21st Century.I seem to have spent much of my adult life on aeroplaces travelling between one place and another. We left the CFZ in Woolsery just after 7 am - and didn't check into our Edinburgh hotel until nearly twelve hours later. Only jusat over two of those hours were spent in the air - the rest were taken up hanging around in airport bars and baggage check-ins.
However it was great to spend some time with Richard again after so long, and on the whole it was a reasonably enjoyable experience.
When we finally got to the hotel it was full of men in kilts drinking whisky!
No, Honestly!
In one of the most bizarre fortean coincidences that have happened to me in a long history of weird fortean coincidences, we had arrived right in the middle of the alchohol fuelled obsequies for Iam Cameron - the person who went down in history for havingthe longest unbroken `Nessie` sighting in history.
In his own words:
"mid-summer, June 1965. I, along with a friend, was on the south shore of Loch Ness, fishing for brown trout, looking almost directly into Urquhart Bay, when I saw something break the surface of the water. I glanced there, and I saw it, and then it wasn't there, it had disappeared.
But while watching, keeping an eye, and fishing gently, I saw an object surface. It was a large, black object—a whale-like object, going from infinity up, and came round onto a block end—and it submerged, to reappear a matter of seconds later. But on this occasion, the block end, which had been on my right, was now on my left, so I realized immediately that while in the process of surfacing, as it may, it had rotated. And with the predominant wind, the south-west wind, it appeared to be, I would say, at that stage drifting easily across.
So I called to my friend Willie Frazer, who incidentally had a sighting of an object on the Loch almost a year ago to the very day. I called him, and he come up and joined me. We realized that it was drifting towards us, and, in fact, it came to within I would say about 250, 300 yards.
In no way am I even attempting to convert anybody to the religion of the object of Loch Ness. I mean, they can believe it, but it doesn't upset me if they don't believe it. Because I would question very much if I hadn't the extraordinary experience of seeing this object. If I hadn't seen it I would have without question given a lot of skepticism to what it was. But I saw it, and nothing can take that away."
Richard stayed up drinking with Ian's son Willie and other family members, but after dinner and a couple of beers (yes, gys - only a couple), I went to bed. My hard drinking days are behind me now, and the next day I had to hire a car, and drive to Loch Ness. There was too much ice on the roads for me to risk a hangover...
TO BE CONTINUED
Sorry Oll
The worst thing about this stupid damn moderating system is that it is confusing. Oll Lewis tried to post a message of support and I deleted it by mistake.
However, as far as Exeternews is concerned..... screw him!
On a brighter note, Animals & Men 37 is well under way, and I am about half way through the Loch Ness report I promised u all weeks ago
love
j
However, as far as Exeternews is concerned..... screw him!
On a brighter note, Animals & Men 37 is well under way, and I am about half way through the Loch Ness report I promised u all weeks ago
love
j
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Thank You
I would like to thank all of you who have leapt to my defence during the recent unpleasantness. It is heartening to know how many friends and supporters I have. Sadly - because I believe in freedom of speech - I have reluctantly changed the settings on this blog so that I can moderate comments that are submitted. I will change this status as soon as `Exeternews` dissapears back into the ether...
I don't know who this person is, but I would like to reassure no-gooder that I have a singular lack of jilted ex-lovers on my trail. In fact I don't think I have ever jilted anyone in the true sense of the word...
One last note. Exeternews asked why I don't invite journalists along on our expeditions. The answer is: I do! We had a journalist along at the Cannoch Crocodile hunt and several at Martin Mere. We have nothing to hide and journalists are always welcome.
I don't know who this person is, but I would like to reassure no-gooder that I have a singular lack of jilted ex-lovers on my trail. In fact I don't think I have ever jilted anyone in the true sense of the word...
One last note. Exeternews asked why I don't invite journalists along on our expeditions. The answer is: I do! We had a journalist along at the Cannoch Crocodile hunt and several at Martin Mere. We have nothing to hide and journalists are always welcome.
Open Letter to the person calling themselves `Exeternews`
Sir or Madam,
I do not know who you are although I have my suspicions. I have ignored your impertinent comments for weeks, but they have now gone from being irritating to defamatory. I have taken legal advice and am referring the matter to the people in charge of www.blogger.com. They will take whatever action they deem necessary.
I am quite happy to enter into a discussion on the ethics of the CFZ on any public platform. I will not, however, respond to mudslinging from someone too cowardly to come out from behind a facile pseudonym.
Jon Downes
I do not know who you are although I have my suspicions. I have ignored your impertinent comments for weeks, but they have now gone from being irritating to defamatory. I have taken legal advice and am referring the matter to the people in charge of www.blogger.com. They will take whatever action they deem necessary.
I am quite happy to enter into a discussion on the ethics of the CFZ on any public platform. I will not, however, respond to mudslinging from someone too cowardly to come out from behind a facile pseudonym.
Jon Downes
Saturday, November 19, 2005
WE'RE BACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
00.24 a.m Saturday.
We have been travelling since lunchtime, and I am so tired I can hardly stand, but we are back, and although its good to be home, Loch Ness was great fun. We didn't catch the monster, but there is a lot to report, and I hope to be able to make a proper report on the morrow - in the meantime, here are three of the most famous Cryptozoological beards.....
Thursday, November 17, 2005
MONSTER HUNTERS SIGHTED AT LOCH NESS
For the last three days the monster hunting duo, Jonathan Downes and Richard Freeman have been filming at Loch Ness for an American TV show hosted by Penn & Teller.Yesterday an eagle-eyed CFZ member sent us an alledged photograph from a Loch Ness webcam. Showing what appeared to be the CFZ team in a boat, cruising the vicinity of the ruins of Urquhart Castle.
Jon and Richard will be back by the end of the week, so watch this space for more updated news.
Sources:-
Webcam: http://www.lochness.co.uk/
Urquhart Castle: http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/drumnadrochit/urquhart/
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Recently Thelma put a posting on the CFZ Forums with a questionairre about the things that CFZers do and don't do etc. These included favourite films, music and whether or not drugs should be legalised and I should have a haircut. I answered reasonably truthfully, but looking back at my - and other peoples - answers a pattern began to emerge.
I think that it is interesting how many people don't think that drugs should be legalised (despite what people in certain quarters think about the CFZ). I think that one of the most destructive things about my generation was the widespread view that drugs are OK, and worse that cannabis is a "soft drug".
Cannabis is a seriously powerful psychoactive agent, and the present generation of skunks are vastly more powerful than anything we had back when I used to proselytise for weed twenty odd years back.
A few years back someone sent me an Alcoholics Anonymous leaflet after one of my appearances at the Unconvention. He told me that he thought that I was an alcoholic. I was furious, but with hindsight I think that he was probably right. Until a couple of years ago I drank far too much, and although I was never one of those people who had to have a drink in order to get up in the morning, I certainly used it as an emotional crutch, and over indulged to a dangerous extent.
I think that booze and dope (particularly the latter) did me more harm than any of the so-called harder drugs that I messed with over the years, If I had my time again, I don't think that I would have touched any of the things I did with a bloody heat bargepole, and I would have drunk far more moderately.
My drinking and drugging days are largely behind me now, but I still ain'y gpnna have that haircut!
I think that it is interesting how many people don't think that drugs should be legalised (despite what people in certain quarters think about the CFZ). I think that one of the most destructive things about my generation was the widespread view that drugs are OK, and worse that cannabis is a "soft drug".
Cannabis is a seriously powerful psychoactive agent, and the present generation of skunks are vastly more powerful than anything we had back when I used to proselytise for weed twenty odd years back.
A few years back someone sent me an Alcoholics Anonymous leaflet after one of my appearances at the Unconvention. He told me that he thought that I was an alcoholic. I was furious, but with hindsight I think that he was probably right. Until a couple of years ago I drank far too much, and although I was never one of those people who had to have a drink in order to get up in the morning, I certainly used it as an emotional crutch, and over indulged to a dangerous extent.
I think that booze and dope (particularly the latter) did me more harm than any of the so-called harder drugs that I messed with over the years, If I had my time again, I don't think that I would have touched any of the things I did with a bloody heat bargepole, and I would have drunk far more moderately.
My drinking and drugging days are largely behind me now, but I still ain'y gpnna have that haircut!
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Be back home tomorrow
It's strange. I have been away from the office for a week now, and it seems to belong to an entirely different time and space. I have been staying with Corinna and her two daughters in Lincolnshire, and generally enjoying domestic bliss and a level of normalcy that I never usually experience. Apart from going to see Alice Cooper at Wembley on Sunday, and writing about half a chapter of my new magnum opus (it is now 50,000 words and rising), I am happy to report that I have generally done nothing with aplomb and flair...
However, I catch the 7.54 for Brum in the morning and will be back at the CFZ after lunch. After that I have about five days in the office before I fly to Loch Ness on Tuesday,,,,
What a life eh?
However, I catch the 7.54 for Brum in the morning and will be back at the CFZ after lunch. After that I have about five days in the office before I fly to Loch Ness on Tuesday,,,,
What a life eh?
Saturday, October 29, 2005
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............
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.
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.
Friday, October 28, 2005
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.
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.......
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.......
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
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....
Sunday, October 02, 2005
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!
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!
Saturday, October 01, 2005
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.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
How do you fancy a VERY weird weekend?
In the last six years the CFZ Weird Weekend has gone from a makeshift and very anarchic gathering in a tumbledown Church Hall in an Exeter suburb, to being the second biggest fortean gathering in the UK. Apart from the Fortean Times Unconvention there is nothing that can touch us. We have actually become so popular with the latest event - a month ago - that we have outgrown our venue in Exeter and have to look for a new home. Coincidentally this has happened at the same time that I have moved house from Exeter to the country, and for the past few weeks we have been looking for a new venue.
We now have one.
I know that there has been some unease in the CFZ camp at the idea of doing a Weird Weekend out in the country, and I am aware that people felt some trepidation about the idea of having the event in a village hall in the sticks. However, we have now concluded negotiations with the management of Woolsery Community Centre, and the next event will be held there on the weekend of the 18th-20th August 2006.
The venue is fantastic. Until I went there this afternoon I was completely unaware of how smashing the place is! It is a fully equipped conference centre with a bar, ample parking and anup-to-date lecture theatre that can hold at least 150 people. We have cinema style seating, a proper PA, stereo cinema projection and even a proper dressing room for speakers.
We have taken the old concept of the Weird Weekend as far as we can. Now, the new event is on the horizon, and it will be a proper community festival with theatre, art exhibitions and workshops as well as the three days of speakers. We may even have live music! So far the following speakers have been confirmed:
BOB MORRELL MBE: The Cryptozoology of ancient Egypt
GORDON RUTTER: Talk tba
LIONEL BEER: Treacle Mines
CHRIS MOISER: Talk TBA
RICHARD FREEMAN et al: The 2006 Expedition reports
Foolish People theatre company will be attending once more, and we hope to be announcing more speakers soon.
We will be running a minibus from Barnstaple Station, and as far as accomodation is concerned, low cost B&B, camping facilities (some even on site), and some more expensive hotels for those who want them will be available.
More information will be released soon, so watch this space......
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Sad news...
Jill Martin of the Tortoise Trust has died. From their website:
Jill Martin
1953 – 2005
16 September 2005
The Tortoise Trust has just lost our dear Jill, co-founder and guiding light from the very beginning. Earlier this year, Jill collapsed suddenly from what turned out to be a brain tumour (metastasis). This was successfully treated by means of neurosurgery and radiotherapy, by the wonderful team of doctors and nurses at Morriston and Singleton hospitals in Swansea, Wales. Jill made excellent progress and was soon back at work, as ever, tending tortoise patients and running the Tortoise Trust office. Unfortunately, the brain tumour was secondary to a very aggressive cervical cancer, and despite all efforts, in recent weeks, Jill’s condition deteriorated rapidly. She died today, with her family and friends.
Jill Martin was a pioneer. She was one of the very first people to see the need for better keeper education, and for improvements in the veterinary management of sick chelonians. She played a vital role in developing many of the husbandry and rehabilitation methods that are now commonplace and accepted as standard, such as effective nutritional management to prevent MBD, the importance of substrates and microclimates, the development of effective indoor/outdoor habitats, and techniques for nursing sick tortoises back to health. Although many do not realise it, Jill Martin was there at the beginning and inspired and developed these techniques from nothing. As a field-worker she was a bundle of energy, with an amazing and acute eye for natural history detail. She was a tireless worker for tortoises and turtles. She worked 7 days a week, and never complained. She answered thousands of phone calls and letters from worried keepers, and was always available to take in any sick or unwanted tortoise. She never turned a sick or needy animal away in all of the 30 years that I have known her. She was a wonderfully talented musician, an artist, and faithful friend and colleague.
Jill Martin
1953 – 2005
16 September 2005
The Tortoise Trust has just lost our dear Jill, co-founder and guiding light from the very beginning. Earlier this year, Jill collapsed suddenly from what turned out to be a brain tumour (metastasis). This was successfully treated by means of neurosurgery and radiotherapy, by the wonderful team of doctors and nurses at Morriston and Singleton hospitals in Swansea, Wales. Jill made excellent progress and was soon back at work, as ever, tending tortoise patients and running the Tortoise Trust office. Unfortunately, the brain tumour was secondary to a very aggressive cervical cancer, and despite all efforts, in recent weeks, Jill’s condition deteriorated rapidly. She died today, with her family and friends.
Jill Martin was a pioneer. She was one of the very first people to see the need for better keeper education, and for improvements in the veterinary management of sick chelonians. She played a vital role in developing many of the husbandry and rehabilitation methods that are now commonplace and accepted as standard, such as effective nutritional management to prevent MBD, the importance of substrates and microclimates, the development of effective indoor/outdoor habitats, and techniques for nursing sick tortoises back to health. Although many do not realise it, Jill Martin was there at the beginning and inspired and developed these techniques from nothing. As a field-worker she was a bundle of energy, with an amazing and acute eye for natural history detail. She was a tireless worker for tortoises and turtles. She worked 7 days a week, and never complained. She answered thousands of phone calls and letters from worried keepers, and was always available to take in any sick or unwanted tortoise. She never turned a sick or needy animal away in all of the 30 years that I have known her. She was a wonderfully talented musician, an artist, and faithful friend and colleague.
Don't talk to me about life.....
When I started this blog a number of people told me that they, too, had started blogs, but although they had begun with a full flush of enthusiasm,, they had soon tired of the task and the blog had fizzled out. I am sure that when any of these Job's comforters see that there is a gap of several days (bloody hell its a week - I hadn't realised that it was that long) in this ongoing missive they assume that I, too, have succumbed to the malaise of would-be bloggers everywhere.
Not so dudes!
Life has just been immeasurably busy, and I have had to prioritise with the calls upon my time. I was ill for several days, then I had the glorious distraction of my darling Corinna coming down for the weekend, and now my father is ill again and taking up much of my
time.
However, Mark North is back in the office together with me and John Fuller this week, and I hope that we shall be able to get a lot
sorted over the next few days.
The CFZ is at a crossroads. We have been going for nearly a decade and a half now, and we have nearly gone as far as we can under the current set up. Over the last week I have received two excellent proposals for expeditions, but they are both expeditions that will need far more funding than we presently have. The Centre for Fortean Zoology, for many years, was a haphazard and anarchic bunch of people - basically “The Last Gang in Town” as Joe Strummer would have said. Now, we are the biggest and fastest growing cryptozoological organisation in the world and have been becoming ever more respectable as the years continue.
However, if we are to achieve the goals that we are now setting ourselves we must achieve a level of mass-acceptance that has to date eluded us. The CFZ has become remarkably succesful, but the time has come for us to court the sort of sponsorship and investment that we will only get with mass acceptance. The CFZ has to become a more `normal` organisation, which is why the Weird Weekend next year will be much larger, but much more community orientated.
We have to tread a fine line between respectability and `selling out`. Although we must gain more credibility in the eyes of the general public, I will NOT let the CFZ become a bland and dull organisation. Whilst the time forsome of the excesses of the past is now gone, I am very much aware ofthe pitfalls into which other organisations have fallen; in trying to be all things to all men, they have signally failed to be anything to anyone. This will NOT happen to the CFZ.
Somehow we have to tread a fine line between credibility and obscurity. "The Last Gang in Town" must carry on, but it is time that we shed some of our most overt eccentricities and became accessible to everyone!
Not so dudes!
Life has just been immeasurably busy, and I have had to prioritise with the calls upon my time. I was ill for several days, then I had the glorious distraction of my darling Corinna coming down for the weekend, and now my father is ill again and taking up much of my
time.
However, Mark North is back in the office together with me and John Fuller this week, and I hope that we shall be able to get a lot
sorted over the next few days.
The CFZ is at a crossroads. We have been going for nearly a decade and a half now, and we have nearly gone as far as we can under the current set up. Over the last week I have received two excellent proposals for expeditions, but they are both expeditions that will need far more funding than we presently have. The Centre for Fortean Zoology, for many years, was a haphazard and anarchic bunch of people - basically “The Last Gang in Town” as Joe Strummer would have said. Now, we are the biggest and fastest growing cryptozoological organisation in the world and have been becoming ever more respectable as the years continue.
However, if we are to achieve the goals that we are now setting ourselves we must achieve a level of mass-acceptance that has to date eluded us. The CFZ has become remarkably succesful, but the time has come for us to court the sort of sponsorship and investment that we will only get with mass acceptance. The CFZ has to become a more `normal` organisation, which is why the Weird Weekend next year will be much larger, but much more community orientated.
We have to tread a fine line between respectability and `selling out`. Although we must gain more credibility in the eyes of the general public, I will NOT let the CFZ become a bland and dull organisation. Whilst the time forsome of the excesses of the past is now gone, I am very much aware ofthe pitfalls into which other organisations have fallen; in trying to be all things to all men, they have signally failed to be anything to anyone. This will NOT happen to the CFZ.
Somehow we have to tread a fine line between credibility and obscurity. "The Last Gang in Town" must carry on, but it is time that we shed some of our most overt eccentricities and became accessible to everyone!
Thursday, September 15, 2005
Counting my chickens
Manic Depression ain't a fun disease and Diabetes ain't a doddle either. I was up a few hours yesterday, but had to give up and return to bed. Apologies to everyone whom I was supposed to do anything for and with yesterday - or today, for that matter. I have been in bed for about 40% of today - but have managed a few bits.
Some years ago, my friend Tim Matthews was talking at the Weird Weekend. For those of you not in the know Tim is one of my closest friends in the bizarre business of fortean journalism, and he is also one its most enigmatic and controversial figures. His shadowy past has been linked with ultra right wing political groups, covert military intelligence, political chicanery and skulduggery, football hooliganism and a long standing feud with self-styled bastion of left wing morality Larry O’Hara. He has been accused of everything from membership of the ultra right wing terrorist group Combat 18 to being an establishment spy sent to “destabilise” British UFOlogy.
As, by and large, British UFOlogy is the last refuge of many people who are so eccentric that their behaviour borders on, and in some cases goes far beyond total insanity, the idea that the British Government (or indeed any other Government) has the slightest interest in destabilising it is frankly laughable. Whatever Tim is, or appears to be, he is one of my dearest friends, and he was on stage, having delivered a fine lecture, when he came out with one of the best bon mots of his career:
"I can state here and now, that it is not true that my research is - or ever has been - funded by the FBI, CIA, MI5, NSA or any other Governmental Body, but this cannot be said about Jon Downes. After all, much of his research has been funded by the DSS"
This brought the house down, but it is true. When I was diagnosed with Manic Depression nearly a decade ago I was signed off sick and told necver to work again - a stricture which I have done my best to ignore. However, I am seriously ill, and whilst my conditions are not life threatening they are chronic, and I will be a semi-invalid for the rest of my life.
Now, I ain't telling this because I want people to be sorry for me. I don't. But as this blog is an attempt to explain what I do and why I do it, I feel that it is better to be honest from Day One! I am a Manic Depressive, a Diabetic, I have congestive Heart Failure, and a dozen other diseases, all of which will probably conspire to kill me earlier than I would otherwise go...
BUT
and this is the big BUT.
I ain't gonna let any of this beat me. For as long as I am able I shall continue to run the CFZ to the best of my ability. However, I received a letter the other day, from an old friend, who asked - straight out what would happen to the CFZ in the event of my demise.
This is a fair question, and particularly so from him (because he is planning to donate a large number of interesting and valuable odds and ends to our putative museum, and he wants to know that his family treasures will be safe). I have arranged the CFZ, so that on my demise (or pernmanent incapacity), the organisation will continue to be run by a three man committee. Graham Inglis (Deputy Director) and Richard Freeman (Zoological Director), will be joined by Mark North who (despite his protestations), is the obvious person to take over my role, should I die prematurely.
Our constitution can be seen on the website, and Chris Moiser and us are planning to put the whole thing in legalese as soon as possible. Also - on my death - the vast majority of my personal property, including houses/land becomes property of the CFZ.
BUT
and this is an even bigger BUT
I have no intention of dying just yet, so you guys are stuck with me for the forseeable future!
PS. To further bring down a blog entry of some degree of maudlinity, some of you will remember Dave Rowe who was married to my Cousin Pene. He attended the 2002 Weird Weekend. Sadly he died on tuesday. Remember him and more importantly Pene and Andy, in your prayers.
Also, our friend Jill Martin from the Tortoise Trust is seriously ill. remember her in your ptayers as well....
Some years ago, my friend Tim Matthews was talking at the Weird Weekend. For those of you not in the know Tim is one of my closest friends in the bizarre business of fortean journalism, and he is also one its most enigmatic and controversial figures. His shadowy past has been linked with ultra right wing political groups, covert military intelligence, political chicanery and skulduggery, football hooliganism and a long standing feud with self-styled bastion of left wing morality Larry O’Hara. He has been accused of everything from membership of the ultra right wing terrorist group Combat 18 to being an establishment spy sent to “destabilise” British UFOlogy.
As, by and large, British UFOlogy is the last refuge of many people who are so eccentric that their behaviour borders on, and in some cases goes far beyond total insanity, the idea that the British Government (or indeed any other Government) has the slightest interest in destabilising it is frankly laughable. Whatever Tim is, or appears to be, he is one of my dearest friends, and he was on stage, having delivered a fine lecture, when he came out with one of the best bon mots of his career:
"I can state here and now, that it is not true that my research is - or ever has been - funded by the FBI, CIA, MI5, NSA or any other Governmental Body, but this cannot be said about Jon Downes. After all, much of his research has been funded by the DSS"
This brought the house down, but it is true. When I was diagnosed with Manic Depression nearly a decade ago I was signed off sick and told necver to work again - a stricture which I have done my best to ignore. However, I am seriously ill, and whilst my conditions are not life threatening they are chronic, and I will be a semi-invalid for the rest of my life.
Now, I ain't telling this because I want people to be sorry for me. I don't. But as this blog is an attempt to explain what I do and why I do it, I feel that it is better to be honest from Day One! I am a Manic Depressive, a Diabetic, I have congestive Heart Failure, and a dozen other diseases, all of which will probably conspire to kill me earlier than I would otherwise go...
BUT
and this is the big BUT.
I ain't gonna let any of this beat me. For as long as I am able I shall continue to run the CFZ to the best of my ability. However, I received a letter the other day, from an old friend, who asked - straight out what would happen to the CFZ in the event of my demise.
This is a fair question, and particularly so from him (because he is planning to donate a large number of interesting and valuable odds and ends to our putative museum, and he wants to know that his family treasures will be safe). I have arranged the CFZ, so that on my demise (or pernmanent incapacity), the organisation will continue to be run by a three man committee. Graham Inglis (Deputy Director) and Richard Freeman (Zoological Director), will be joined by Mark North who (despite his protestations), is the obvious person to take over my role, should I die prematurely.
Our constitution can be seen on the website, and Chris Moiser and us are planning to put the whole thing in legalese as soon as possible. Also - on my death - the vast majority of my personal property, including houses/land becomes property of the CFZ.
BUT
and this is an even bigger BUT
I have no intention of dying just yet, so you guys are stuck with me for the forseeable future!
PS. To further bring down a blog entry of some degree of maudlinity, some of you will remember Dave Rowe who was married to my Cousin Pene. He attended the 2002 Weird Weekend. Sadly he died on tuesday. Remember him and more importantly Pene and Andy, in your prayers.
Also, our friend Jill Martin from the Tortoise Trust is seriously ill. remember her in your ptayers as well....
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Pink wasn't well (he stayed back at the hotel)
Many apologies to everyone who tried to get hold of me yesterday. I was far from well, and spent the day in bed...mostly asleep. I have never made any secret about my poor state of health. To be quite honest it has been a double-edged sword; because if I had not been registered disabled nearly a decade ago, and told not to work again, I would not be in the position that I am now, and the CFZ as we know it would probably not exist.
However, all this is as may be. I was extremely unwell yesterday, but I am better today and ready to get on with another exciting day's labours in the cryptozoological vineyard.
Watch this space....
However, all this is as may be. I was extremely unwell yesterday, but I am better today and ready to get on with another exciting day's labours in the cryptozoological vineyard.
Watch this space....
Monday, September 12, 2005
A country boy again
08.15 Life in the country is different. A testament to that is that Graham and I - historically slugabeds, who would not rise before noon if we could help it - get up bright and early each day, but today is taking it to extremes. I was up and out of bed by eight, and now - twenty past - I am making the old man a cup of tea, before (if everything goes to plan) starting work at nine! I have a full programme to get on with today. I have done absolutely damn all to Tropical World despite Simon wanting it started last week, and I have tons of CFZ stuff to do. Add to that a certain amount of domesticity to be indulged in (Corinna is coming down this weekend and I don't want the place to look like a tip), and one will be aware that I have a full programme ahead of me for the next few hours....
08.45 Memo to self: don't wake Dad up early because you want to have an early start in the office. Despite protestations to the contrary, he is a creature of habit and has got used to not being disturbed before nine! The post has come: a music video for John Fuller, a pile of Pink Floyd bootlegs for me, and an order for two more copies of Dad's book, together with a cheque for eighteen quid. Not a bad start to the day!
10.45 Successfully achieved practically nothing so far. I am seeing the accountant at 11 (something I forgot completely) so I have assembled a trenche of bills and accounts for him. I have also done most of my post, tinkered with my guitar, and stared out of the window a lot. Maybe getting out of bed early isn't a good idea....
19.15 And I thought that it was such a good idea :( I was intending to log on every hour or so and give an update of what I assumed would be an ordinary day at the CFZ. But of course it wasn't any such thing. A whole slew of dull, un-newsworthy things happened, and Graham has spent the afternoon in Exeter collecting the master copies of all the old CFZ yearbooks. So, another bright idea bites the dust.
08.45 Memo to self: don't wake Dad up early because you want to have an early start in the office. Despite protestations to the contrary, he is a creature of habit and has got used to not being disturbed before nine! The post has come: a music video for John Fuller, a pile of Pink Floyd bootlegs for me, and an order for two more copies of Dad's book, together with a cheque for eighteen quid. Not a bad start to the day!
10.45 Successfully achieved practically nothing so far. I am seeing the accountant at 11 (something I forgot completely) so I have assembled a trenche of bills and accounts for him. I have also done most of my post, tinkered with my guitar, and stared out of the window a lot. Maybe getting out of bed early isn't a good idea....
19.15 And I thought that it was such a good idea :( I was intending to log on every hour or so and give an update of what I assumed would be an ordinary day at the CFZ. But of course it wasn't any such thing. A whole slew of dull, un-newsworthy things happened, and Graham has spent the afternoon in Exeter collecting the master copies of all the old CFZ yearbooks. So, another bright idea bites the dust.
Saturday, September 10, 2005
You CAN judge a book by its cover..........
Mark North will be returning to us in a week or so. Then the next wave of CFZ books will be available. I am particularly proud of the production values we have managed to achieve on the books so far. I think that Mark has done a remarkable job, and without blowing our own trumpets, I am amazed that we have come so far in less than ten months. Only a year ago our books were all still homemade and blotchily photocopied.
As we learn more about what we are doing the product is getting better and better. Just look at these:
As we learn more about what we are doing the product is getting better and better. Just look at these:
Its only Rock and Roll..........
Being even more of a klutz than usual, I arrived 24 hours early for my Godson's birthday party. Never mind, I stayed for tea (and btw he was seven NOT six), and spent a pleasant evening en famille, in a way that - sadly - living in bachelor splendour with my Papa, Graham et al, with only visits from Corinna every couple of weeks or so, I have not done for a while. All in all, it is probably a good thing that I never procreated, but it is at times like yesterday evening, when I find myself - almost by accident - sitting happily in the midst of a family teatime, that I come over all wistful :(
Never mind - as Marianne Faithful has been wont to say `what cannot be cured must be endured blah blah blah`, which brings me - slightly tortuously - onto the subject of the new Rolling Stones album. Whereas once upon a time each record was a masterpeice, and until Black and Blue in 1976 they really didn't put a foot wrong, since then, the records have got progressively worse, with the notable exception of 1990's Steel Wheels, which was excellent. Now - with what will probably turn out to be their final studio album - they are back with a vengeance. A Bigger Bang is certainly the best album they have made since the mid-1970s, and for the first time in thirty years, it is possible for an old Stones freak like me to actually proselytise about a new album. Go and buy it, guys - you won't be disappointed.
Apart from bouncing around the office pretending to be Keith Richards (when I am sure that no-one can see me), I have spent most of the day working on Dad's book, and so I apologise to everyone who has written to me, and to whom I have not replied. Graham is having a day off tomorrow, so I shall put my shoulder to the wheel and get on with it properly...
Never mind - as Marianne Faithful has been wont to say `what cannot be cured must be endured blah blah blah`, which brings me - slightly tortuously - onto the subject of the new Rolling Stones album. Whereas once upon a time each record was a masterpeice, and until Black and Blue in 1976 they really didn't put a foot wrong, since then, the records have got progressively worse, with the notable exception of 1990's Steel Wheels, which was excellent. Now - with what will probably turn out to be their final studio album - they are back with a vengeance. A Bigger Bang is certainly the best album they have made since the mid-1970s, and for the first time in thirty years, it is possible for an old Stones freak like me to actually proselytise about a new album. Go and buy it, guys - you won't be disappointed.
Apart from bouncing around the office pretending to be Keith Richards (when I am sure that no-one can see me), I have spent most of the day working on Dad's book, and so I apologise to everyone who has written to me, and to whom I have not replied. Graham is having a day off tomorrow, so I shall put my shoulder to the wheel and get on with it properly...
Friday, September 09, 2005
Cowshit and Creosote
Another day, another dollar.
I am overwhelmed by the response that has happened to the CFZ Volunteers list. Everyone is rushing around being busy little beavers, and I am feeling quite embarrassed that I will be spending the day doing family stuff when everyone else is working. Graham will hopefully have the broken links on the website fixed today, and it looks as if - starting next week - there will be a whole host of exciting new features coming along!
Living in the country rather than the city never ceases to be a delight. Who would have thought that Graham and I would be up early in the morning breathing in the country air (which today smells strongly of cowshit and creosote), and getting to work well before midday? John goes back to Exeter this morning; I am just about to drive him to Barnstaple, but he will be back on Monday. Only another week to go and Mark returns, and the CFZ will have nearly a full compliment here. All we need to do now is to get Richard and the dog up here, work out some way of getting Nigel to leave Exmouth, (and have Mark Martin skulking in the bushes), and the CFZ family will be together again.
I am overwhelmed by the response that has happened to the CFZ Volunteers list. Everyone is rushing around being busy little beavers, and I am feeling quite embarrassed that I will be spending the day doing family stuff when everyone else is working. Graham will hopefully have the broken links on the website fixed today, and it looks as if - starting next week - there will be a whole host of exciting new features coming along!
Living in the country rather than the city never ceases to be a delight. Who would have thought that Graham and I would be up early in the morning breathing in the country air (which today smells strongly of cowshit and creosote), and getting to work well before midday? John goes back to Exeter this morning; I am just about to drive him to Barnstaple, but he will be back on Monday. Only another week to go and Mark returns, and the CFZ will have nearly a full compliment here. All we need to do now is to get Richard and the dog up here, work out some way of getting Nigel to leave Exmouth, (and have Mark Martin skulking in the bushes), and the CFZ family will be together again.
Thursday, September 08, 2005
But what have you done TODAY???????
Hard at work in the CFZ office
The CFZ personnel work out here on a rota. Today Graham and I have been joined by John Fuller (administrative assistant), who lives at the old CFZ base in Exeter.
John hides behind a teetering pile
of copies of Animals & Men#36
John has been printing off copies of the new journal of the CFZ (bloody hell! Is it really 36 issues already??? Graham has been proofreading one of our next book releases: The Beast and I by Paul Crowther. It is an amusing and often exciting look back at ten years of searching for the `Beast of Bodmin` and its kin, written by the one-time lecturer in photographic studies at Plymouth College of Further Education.
A preview of the cover for Paul's book which will be out by the end of autumn
What have I been doing? Well, apart from working on my father's new book - a history of Pre-colonial Africa - I have been working on a project that is very important to me. For years we have had people offering to help the CFZ on a voluntary basis, but we have never made a concerted effort to marshal these resources.
We now have a Yahoo group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CFZ_Volunteers/ and we are actively seeking volunteers - so c'mon guys, sign up!
The CFZ is open to all; young and old...
Dad and John Fuller hard at work
Getting it together in the Country....
For years I have lived and worked in a rather nasty little mid-terraced house in Exeter. It was bad enough living there as a young married couple back in 1985; but for the last ten years, divorced and sharing the place with a succession of mad cryptozoologists, it has become untenable.
Then in June it all changed. My mother died three years back and since then my elderly father has been rapidly declining in health. He has always refused to move out of the old family home or to have a carer live with him, but by early summer he was far too ill to live independently. His condition was so bad that when he called to me for help I thought that he was not going to last more than a couple of weeks. Graham (Deputy Director of the CFZ) and I moved in immediately, leaving the CFZ office in the lurch. However, Dad began to respond to treatmentb and although he will never recover, he is no longer in imminent danger of leaving us.
Within weeks the entire CFZ office was being run from rural North Devon, and it has worked out on every level. Dad now has people to take care of him 24/7, we have room to move for the first time in years, and I no longer have to live in that grotty little house, in that grotty little estate, in that grotty little suburb....
Plea in Mitigation
For nearly a decade and a half I have been running the Centre for Fortean Zoology - the world's largest cryptozoological research organisation. As it says on our website front page:
'At the beginning of the 21st Century monsters still roam the remote, and sometimes not so remote, corners of our planet. It is our job to search for them. The Centre for Fortean Zoology [CFZ] is the only professional, scientific and full-time organisation in the world dedicated to cryptozoology - the study of unknown animals. Since 1992 the CFZ has carried out an unparalleled programme of research and investigation all over the world.'
We have no outside funding, and all our money comes from membership fees, sales of our books, and donations. However, we not only manage to keep going, but over the years have mounted expeditions across the world - most recently to Mongolia (2005) in search of the fabled Mongolian Deathworm, to Puerto Rico (2004) in search of the grotesque vampiric chupacabra, and to Sumatra (2004) in search of a legendary bipedal ape called Orang Pendek.
People often comment that mine must be a wonderfully exciting job - after all, I lead a team of monster hunters, and haven't had a haircut in years! It is very true; what I do can be very exciting indeed, but it is often far more prosaic.
Because we are funded by public monies, I feel that it is only appropriate for us to share our activities with the people who pay for them. Therefore (and I can't remember who's idea it was; probably Corinna, my girlfriend's) I shall attempt to keep this blog going. I don't promise to do it every day, but I shall try to keep everyone who is interested up to date with what we all actually do here at the CFZ.
Once I have managed to keep this going for a while, I shall use my position of moral superiority to try and get some of the other core members of the CFZ team to do blogs as well. In certain cases it might well be the only way I shall ever find out what the buggers actually get up to all day....
'At the beginning of the 21st Century monsters still roam the remote, and sometimes not so remote, corners of our planet. It is our job to search for them. The Centre for Fortean Zoology [CFZ] is the only professional, scientific and full-time organisation in the world dedicated to cryptozoology - the study of unknown animals. Since 1992 the CFZ has carried out an unparalleled programme of research and investigation all over the world.'
We have no outside funding, and all our money comes from membership fees, sales of our books, and donations. However, we not only manage to keep going, but over the years have mounted expeditions across the world - most recently to Mongolia (2005) in search of the fabled Mongolian Deathworm, to Puerto Rico (2004) in search of the grotesque vampiric chupacabra, and to Sumatra (2004) in search of a legendary bipedal ape called Orang Pendek.
People often comment that mine must be a wonderfully exciting job - after all, I lead a team of monster hunters, and haven't had a haircut in years! It is very true; what I do can be very exciting indeed, but it is often far more prosaic.
Because we are funded by public monies, I feel that it is only appropriate for us to share our activities with the people who pay for them. Therefore (and I can't remember who's idea it was; probably Corinna, my girlfriend's) I shall attempt to keep this blog going. I don't promise to do it every day, but I shall try to keep everyone who is interested up to date with what we all actually do here at the CFZ.
Once I have managed to keep this going for a while, I shall use my position of moral superiority to try and get some of the other core members of the CFZ team to do blogs as well. In certain cases it might well be the only way I shall ever find out what the buggers actually get up to all day....