Friday five or so
In the midst of everything, this is lovely: Turkey embarks on cultural mission to preserve its fairytales: Mammoth task to collate magical folklore of Anatolian plateau involves thousands of stories: '“In folk tales, the heroes are mostly outsiders who suffer the violence of powerful autocrats; for politicians, their defiant tone is dangerous.”'
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I was also charmed by the tale of Tirpitz the fund-raising pig: this little piggy, destined for the mess on board SMS Dresden, 1915, swam to freedom - or at least, political asylum on board HMS Glasgow when the Dresden scuttled itself to avoid capture by the Royal Navy. (One has heard the myth that pigs cannot swim because they cut their throats on their trotters when they try: obviously not.) After raising vast sums for charitable purposes: The Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette tells of how the Imperial War Museum, in 1926, were arranging to showcase ‘some naval relics‘ to mark Armistice Day. Chief amongst them was ‘the stuffed head of Tirpitz.’ The Western Morning News in 1943 reports how Tirpitz lived on in the ship that saved her life. The HMS Glasgow carried ‘a pair of silver-mounted carvers made from the trotters of a German pig called Tirpitz.’
Bless.
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I do not think we will be skating, even socially distanced, on the Serpentine this January, in fact I wonder when this last was a thing: Ice skating in Regency London. Although the last time the Thames froze over sufficiently for there to be a Frost Fair was 1814, there were several notably cold winters in the early 1820s (?Madame C- and her friends, On Ice!!!).
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Adorable baby rescue wombatt!!!
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