I got an email from Darren Naish yesterday. It was a very jolly email, but one line disturbed me. He wrote that he had not seen any new blog postings for a while. I started to get self-righteous about it, until I realised that he wass perfectly right. It has been six weeks since my last entry (bless me blogsphere for I have sinned), and it is about time that I got on with it.
This has been a particularly unpleasant week. Firstly it is nearly the Weird Weekend again, and organising this year's event has been a bloody nightmare. I am several staff down, and have been all summer. One (John F) has gone on to pastures new. One (Mark) is on semi permanent leave looking after his parents. Richard has been in Russia and at the zoo, and Dave has had his GCSEs and work experience to do. In vain did I argue that hanging around with his Uncle Jon was the only work experience that he would ever need because once I have finally worked myself into a premature grave he can take over my job, but his mother seems to think that he needs more conventional qualifications.
So we have shuddered on. Last week the ceiling of the porch collapsed, one of the finches died and I had a disturbing letter from the Tax office. This week one of my dearest friends told me that he has cancer (quite possibly inoperable) and I lost a long-standing dispute with a printing company. So, all in all life ain't good at the moment. On top of that, as anyone who has seen the latest `On the Track` will have noticed I have not been very well, and look like a self-ambulatory member of the walking-dead (and that is not a West Coast beat group c. 1967).
But. The WW is less than six days away. So far we have only lost one speaker - Paul Vella, who has had to pull out due to a family matter. Everything in the garden is rosy (or it would have been if the torrential rain hadn't knacked my roses), and next weekend is looming upon us like an out of control juggernaut.
I am sure that it will all be OK in the end. It always is! However, do me a favour and keep your fingers firmly crossed for me.
My darling wife will be doing a running commentary of events on her blog, so keep her in mind.
slainte
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
For those of you who are interested...
This also includes the last appearwance of `Flump` our Chinese softshell, aho - despite all our efforts - died last night. She is now being overly aggressive and biting all the other inhabitants of Turtle Heaven....
Good hunting Flump.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Open gardens, poorly turtles and other things
Yesterday was the first day of the bi-annual Open Gardens weekend. I have always enjoyed this event, but yesterday was more than slightly fraught.
I have just spent a happy half hour listening to British Sea Power and leafing my way through Menagerie Manor by Gerald Durrell trying to find a specific quote that seems ridiculously appropriate to describe the events of yeasterday. But Sod's Law applies (as it so often does), and I can't find it. But the quote reads something like this:
"Animals, like humans, get ill. But they seem to choose the worst possible time in which to do so".
Flump, the softshelled turtle who has been living quite contentedly at room temperature (in the summer) in my varied premises for five or six years, decided yesterday (in front of a party of old-aged-pensioners from Ilfracombe) that it was time to get a chill and become seriously ill. Luckily (for everyone involved) we had a couple of friends of mine from the zoo mafia on hand, and crisis was averted. This morning she is back to her old self, she tried to bite me, and has tucked into a dinner of prawns like they were going out of fashion. But it was not an auspicious way to launch the first public outing of the CFZ museum.
For, after two years of the top of the CFZ grounds looking like a cross between a particularly unsalubrious building site, and a First World War battleground, the CFZ Museum is finally open for business, albeit in a fairly rudimentary state.
We had about 40 visitors, and even sold a book, so we must be doing something right, and I am limbering up for day 2 of the Open Gardens weekend, which starts in about fifteen minutes..
Hey Ho, Let's Go!
I have just spent a happy half hour listening to British Sea Power and leafing my way through Menagerie Manor by Gerald Durrell trying to find a specific quote that seems ridiculously appropriate to describe the events of yeasterday. But Sod's Law applies (as it so often does), and I can't find it. But the quote reads something like this:
"Animals, like humans, get ill. But they seem to choose the worst possible time in which to do so".
Flump, the softshelled turtle who has been living quite contentedly at room temperature (in the summer) in my varied premises for five or six years, decided yesterday (in front of a party of old-aged-pensioners from Ilfracombe) that it was time to get a chill and become seriously ill. Luckily (for everyone involved) we had a couple of friends of mine from the zoo mafia on hand, and crisis was averted. This morning she is back to her old self, she tried to bite me, and has tucked into a dinner of prawns like they were going out of fashion. But it was not an auspicious way to launch the first public outing of the CFZ museum.
For, after two years of the top of the CFZ grounds looking like a cross between a particularly unsalubrious building site, and a First World War battleground, the CFZ Museum is finally open for business, albeit in a fairly rudimentary state.
We had about 40 visitors, and even sold a book, so we must be doing something right, and I am limbering up for day 2 of the Open Gardens weekend, which starts in about fifteen minutes..
Hey Ho, Let's Go!
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
For those of you interested..........
Here is this year's Weird Weekend poster.....
....and yes it IS a little girl dressed as Captain Beefheart!
....and yes it IS a little girl dressed as Captain Beefheart!
Friday, June 20, 2008
HERE WE GO, HERE WE GO, HERE WE GO ad infinitum
Life is too bloody complicated.
So much is happening at the moment that it is almost too much to take in, let alone document on my sadly neglected bloggything. However, the boys are off to Russia amidst a flurry of terrorist alerts and other high jinks that I am not - at present - at liberty to talk about. You can follow their adventures on The Expedition Bloggything . They leave tomorrow evening, and I expect the first bulletin, telling us that they have, at least, made it through immigration at Moscow, early on sunday.
I am sitting in the office at the zoo at the moment. All the staff have become very fond of Richard in the short time that he has been Head Keeper, and are anxiously looking forward to news from the expedition.
In the midst of this, building work on the museum is just about completed, and we have moved the first four exhibits in; Flump the Chinese softshell turtle, Myrtle the Amboina box turtle, one of our amphiumas (Gumbo), and the alligator softshell. I am sitting here atb the zoo frantically trying to work out where to put a second softshell that we recklessly said that we would have months ago....
And on top of everything, my new book `Island of Paradise` is out next week.
Bloody hell I am exhausted...see u soon
So much is happening at the moment that it is almost too much to take in, let alone document on my sadly neglected bloggything. However, the boys are off to Russia amidst a flurry of terrorist alerts and other high jinks that I am not - at present - at liberty to talk about. You can follow their adventures on The Expedition Bloggything . They leave tomorrow evening, and I expect the first bulletin, telling us that they have, at least, made it through immigration at Moscow, early on sunday.
I am sitting in the office at the zoo at the moment. All the staff have become very fond of Richard in the short time that he has been Head Keeper, and are anxiously looking forward to news from the expedition.
In the midst of this, building work on the museum is just about completed, and we have moved the first four exhibits in; Flump the Chinese softshell turtle, Myrtle the Amboina box turtle, one of our amphiumas (Gumbo), and the alligator softshell. I am sitting here atb the zoo frantically trying to work out where to put a second softshell that we recklessly said that we would have months ago....
And on top of everything, my new book `Island of Paradise` is out next week.
Bloody hell I am exhausted...see u soon
Thursday, June 05, 2008
More on the Mystery Animals of the British Isles series...
Mike's book is being printed as we speak. I am extremely pleased with the cover, so here is a sneak preview...
The publishing information for the first volume is as follows:
ISBN: 978-1-905723-29-4
Title: The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Northumberland and Tyneside
Author: Hallowell, Michael J
The book will be available in the next few days.
We are proud to announce the authors of the next few volumes, which will be published in the next twelve months or so:
The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Kent by Neil Arnold
The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Dorset by Jonathan McGowan
The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Staffordshire by Nick Redfern
The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Co Durham and Humberside by Mike Hallowell
The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Greater London by Neil Arnold
The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Devon and Cornwall by Jonathan Downes
I hope that you will agree with us that this is an extremely worthwhile series, and I hope that you will decide to support us...
The publishing information for the first volume is as follows:
ISBN: 978-1-905723-29-4
Title: The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Northumberland and Tyneside
Author: Hallowell, Michael J
The book will be available in the next few days.
We are proud to announce the authors of the next few volumes, which will be published in the next twelve months or so:
The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Kent by Neil Arnold
The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Dorset by Jonathan McGowan
The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Staffordshire by Nick Redfern
The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Co Durham and Humberside by Mike Hallowell
The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Greater London by Neil Arnold
The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Devon and Cornwall by Jonathan Downes
I hope that you will agree with us that this is an extremely worthwhile series, and I hope that you will decide to support us...
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Light at the end of the bleeding tunnel
This has been a ridiculous year so far! I took on far too much work at the end of 2007 and I just simply haven't stopped. As of today, so far in 2008 we have released:
10 books
2 issues `Exotic Pets`
1 issue `Animals & Men`
5 20-30 minute webTV shows
14 live broadcasts
1 full length documentary (am hour and three quarters)
plus I have written original music for most of the above.
I am bloody exhausted!
However, there is light at the end of the tunnel, and I am nearly in a position where I can rest back on my laurels and shout WOO HOO at my own cleverness.
One thing is sure: I am never gonna take on a workload like that again! However, a lot of it has been one offs. For example, the Yearbooks. This year I have restored, and remastered (and in several cases drastically re-edited six of the CFZ Yearbooks (with one left to go), and these will never have to be done again. By next week I hope that the entire run of CFZ Yearbooks from 1996-2008 will all be out inmatching paperback editions, and that I can then quietly forget about them.
The next regular book to come out is an exciting one, and the genesis of this particular project goes back over twenty years!
More years ago than I care to remember, my first wife bought me a birthday present. It was a book about the mystery animals of Britain and Ireland, and I devoured it avidly. When I finished, I was horribly disappointed. It had covered the mystery cats of the country in some depth, as it had done with the black dog legends, and a smattering of more arcane `things` (as the late, great Ivan T. Sanderson would doubtless have dubbed them) such as the Owlman of Mawnan, and the Big Grey Man of Ben McDhui. But there was so much that I knew that the author had simply left out.
Where were the mystery pine martens of the westcountry? Where were the Sutherland polecats? Where was the mysterious butterfly known as Albin’s Hampstead Eye? This was an Australian butterfly, the type specimen of which was caught in a cellar in Hampstead (hence the name) but no-one knows how or why? Where were the butterflies, moths, birds and even mammals known from the British Isles on the basis of a handful of specimens only? And where were the local oddities; the semi-folkloric beasts only known from a specific location.
Although at the time I had no pretensions to being a writer, I started to collect information from around the country, and with the benefit of hindsight it is probably with my disappointment with my 27th birthday present that the seeds of what would eventually grow into the Centre for Fortean Zoology were planted.
Nearly twenty years later to the day, I was sat in my garden at the Centre for Fortean Zoology [CFZ] in North Devon, sharing a bottle of wine with my wife Corinna, and my old friends Richard Freeman and Mike Hallowell. The subject of my disappointing 27th birthday present came up, and someone suggested that we do our best to redress the balance. CFZ Press, the publishing arm of the CFZ, has become the largest dedicated fortean zoological publishers in the world, and we are now in the position to put my vague daydreams of a couple of decades ago into action. We decided that rather than trying to publish one enormous tome covering the mystery animals of the whole of the British Isles (which, by the way, geographically, if not politically, includes the Republic of Ireland, but excludes the Channel Islands) we would be much happier presenting this vast array of data in a series of books, each covering a county or two. Then we realised the enormity of what we were proposing: The series would probably end up being something in the region of forty volumes in length!
However, never ones to back away from a challenge, we decided to go ahead with the project, and now - six months later - the first books in the series are being published.
It seems fitting, that - as he was there at the inception - Mike Hallowell should have the honour of being the author of the first book in the series. I am glad that he is, because it is a stonker!
We argued the toss for months over how we were going to format the series. For a long time we were intending to have a rigid format for all the books, somewhat akin to the Observer’s books of the British countryside. But then we decided `No`. There are as many kinds of researcher as there are mystery animal, and it would - we felt - be more in keeping with the ethos of the CFZ, if we allowed each researcher to present his or her findings in their own inimitable style. The books, therefore, will reflect the character of the individual author.
Some will be poetic verging on mystical. Some will be matter of fact scientific. Some will be from the point of view of a naturalist, and some from the point of view of a folklorist. Some will be short, some will be long. Some will be full of scientific theorising, and some full of metaphysical speculation. But one thing is sure: Whoever gets one of these volumes for their 27th birthday present…..
....They won’t be disappointed!
In other CFZ related news, the museum really is nearly finished. The first birds will be going in the aviary block today, and - all things being equal - the first exhibits will be going into the museum building itself at the weekend. It will be another few weeks before it is respectable enough to receive visitors, but once again there IS light at the end of the tunnel.
Soon the CFZ (or at least me, Graham, Corinna and Oll) will be able to get back to being researchers, rather than builders and printers. Richard, however, is off on another expedition imminently, but THAT is another story...
10 books
2 issues `Exotic Pets`
1 issue `Animals & Men`
5 20-30 minute webTV shows
14 live broadcasts
1 full length documentary (am hour and three quarters)
plus I have written original music for most of the above.
I am bloody exhausted!
However, there is light at the end of the tunnel, and I am nearly in a position where I can rest back on my laurels and shout WOO HOO at my own cleverness.
One thing is sure: I am never gonna take on a workload like that again! However, a lot of it has been one offs. For example, the Yearbooks. This year I have restored, and remastered (and in several cases drastically re-edited six of the CFZ Yearbooks (with one left to go), and these will never have to be done again. By next week I hope that the entire run of CFZ Yearbooks from 1996-2008 will all be out inmatching paperback editions, and that I can then quietly forget about them.
The next regular book to come out is an exciting one, and the genesis of this particular project goes back over twenty years!
More years ago than I care to remember, my first wife bought me a birthday present. It was a book about the mystery animals of Britain and Ireland, and I devoured it avidly. When I finished, I was horribly disappointed. It had covered the mystery cats of the country in some depth, as it had done with the black dog legends, and a smattering of more arcane `things` (as the late, great Ivan T. Sanderson would doubtless have dubbed them) such as the Owlman of Mawnan, and the Big Grey Man of Ben McDhui. But there was so much that I knew that the author had simply left out.
Where were the mystery pine martens of the westcountry? Where were the Sutherland polecats? Where was the mysterious butterfly known as Albin’s Hampstead Eye? This was an Australian butterfly, the type specimen of which was caught in a cellar in Hampstead (hence the name) but no-one knows how or why? Where were the butterflies, moths, birds and even mammals known from the British Isles on the basis of a handful of specimens only? And where were the local oddities; the semi-folkloric beasts only known from a specific location.
Although at the time I had no pretensions to being a writer, I started to collect information from around the country, and with the benefit of hindsight it is probably with my disappointment with my 27th birthday present that the seeds of what would eventually grow into the Centre for Fortean Zoology were planted.
Nearly twenty years later to the day, I was sat in my garden at the Centre for Fortean Zoology [CFZ] in North Devon, sharing a bottle of wine with my wife Corinna, and my old friends Richard Freeman and Mike Hallowell. The subject of my disappointing 27th birthday present came up, and someone suggested that we do our best to redress the balance. CFZ Press, the publishing arm of the CFZ, has become the largest dedicated fortean zoological publishers in the world, and we are now in the position to put my vague daydreams of a couple of decades ago into action. We decided that rather than trying to publish one enormous tome covering the mystery animals of the whole of the British Isles (which, by the way, geographically, if not politically, includes the Republic of Ireland, but excludes the Channel Islands) we would be much happier presenting this vast array of data in a series of books, each covering a county or two. Then we realised the enormity of what we were proposing: The series would probably end up being something in the region of forty volumes in length!
However, never ones to back away from a challenge, we decided to go ahead with the project, and now - six months later - the first books in the series are being published.
It seems fitting, that - as he was there at the inception - Mike Hallowell should have the honour of being the author of the first book in the series. I am glad that he is, because it is a stonker!
We argued the toss for months over how we were going to format the series. For a long time we were intending to have a rigid format for all the books, somewhat akin to the Observer’s books of the British countryside. But then we decided `No`. There are as many kinds of researcher as there are mystery animal, and it would - we felt - be more in keeping with the ethos of the CFZ, if we allowed each researcher to present his or her findings in their own inimitable style. The books, therefore, will reflect the character of the individual author.
Some will be poetic verging on mystical. Some will be matter of fact scientific. Some will be from the point of view of a naturalist, and some from the point of view of a folklorist. Some will be short, some will be long. Some will be full of scientific theorising, and some full of metaphysical speculation. But one thing is sure: Whoever gets one of these volumes for their 27th birthday present…..
....They won’t be disappointed!
In other CFZ related news, the museum really is nearly finished. The first birds will be going in the aviary block today, and - all things being equal - the first exhibits will be going into the museum building itself at the weekend. It will be another few weeks before it is respectable enough to receive visitors, but once again there IS light at the end of the tunnel.
Soon the CFZ (or at least me, Graham, Corinna and Oll) will be able to get back to being researchers, rather than builders and printers. Richard, however, is off on another expedition imminently, but THAT is another story...
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