It's March already, and I thought that it was about time to check in with a little news. Firstly, and most importantly, Corinna and I are getting married on July 21st at the Parish Church, Clovelly, and the event will be attended by the great and the good of the fortean omniverse, who will then reconvene in the village a month later for the Weird Weekend It goes without saying that we are both very happy with the state of affairs although there is a heck of a lot to be organised and not much time to do it.
Work on the museum is continuing apace, and we are proud to announce our first sponsor: Travis Perkins one of the leading UK builder's merchants who have donated all the wood for the floor joists. We hope to be able to announce some more sponsors shortly.
We are just about to publish three more books: Catflaps! by Andry Roberts (which we published spiral bound about six years ago), The 2007 Big Cats in Britain Yearbook edited by Mark Fraser, and three years after the last one The CFZ Yearbook 2007.
It is the diversity of people within the CFZ that are its strength, and I think that this is illustrated very well in the diversity of articles in this yearbook. The range of subject matter, and writing style is dazzling, and ranges from the touching personal accounts of Oll Lewis and Lisa Dowley writing about their own experiences, and then extrapolating scientific data and theories from them, to the William Burroughsesque diatribe of Jon Hare, and the surrealchemical writing of Noella Mackenzie. We are also very proud to include the first scholarly examination of the `long necked seal` hypothesis for the sea serpent, to have been published since Oudemans in the late 19th Century.
On top of that, we have revamped the website, giving it the first major design overhaul for three years or so, and the Mongolia movie on CFZtv has now been seen by over 10,000 people. Not bad, when the year is only ten weeks old.
Slainte