It's Always More Complicated

A couple of typically silly season press reports.

Giant tortoise on railway line (honestly, this is not what 'Normal For Norfolk' usually implies): An African tortoise hit by a 90mph train from Norwich was ‘sex-starved and looking for love’, it has emerged:

A spokesperson for Greater Anglia said two of its trains were held up including the Norwich to Stansted service carrying 125 passengers. Unsurprisingly, this was the first time the company has had to use this excuse for train delays. ‘We are sorry for the disruption caused to customers,’ they added. ‘Someone from Network Rail did try and move the tortoise, but he was too heavy so they had to get help.’

Some while ago I posted on people who grow Gigantic Veggies (often of an urgent phallic nature), but apparently there is also a Giant Gooseberry subculture, which has been going, if not Since Tyme Immemorial, since 1800: Egton Bridge is the oldest gooseberry show in the UK, running on the first Tuesday of every August since 1800, apart from enforced breaks due to foot and mouth and Covid:

Like other growers, she says there is no big secret to growing big gooseberries apart from care and attention, although she has memories of the fertiliser her dad used when she was a child. “We used to go out for the day to Osmotherley and spend all day gathering sheep muck,” she says, possibly joking, possibly not.

No one knows why the passion for growing giant gooseberries started but there is evidence of it being a hobby in industrial areas of England in the late 18th and 19th centuries. The Egton Bridge show started in 1800 and is still going strong, held this year for the first time at the plush Egton Manor, a weddings and events venue. Many of the old traditions remain, with all the gooseberries carefully weighed on an oil-damped, twin-pan scale that has been used since 1937. Graeme Watson, the chair of the society and something of a master grower and gooseberry guru, says growing them is a labour of love. “There are lots of things that can go wrong over the course of a year, so the better you look after them, the bigger they’ll grow. There’s gooseberry sawfly, mice like them, somebody has had rats attacking them on an allotment … blackbirds love them, wasps.” Keeping the show going is important, he says. “We are the custodians. It is our job to preserve it. It’s not everyone’s thing but we are trying to encourage more growers to want to do it.”

Those are indeed Very Large Gooseberries.

In an email exchange the other day I was bemoaning the excessive length that seems to be the Done Thing for so many genre books these days.

It was suggested to me that this was because of the rise of ebooks, but it seems to me that the biblio-BMI has been on the rise since well before ebooks were that much of a thing.

I don't know if you could go along my shelves and date the works by whether they were slimline volumes bringing in their story within a snappy 60K words, because there are doubtless some lengthier works of a similar vintage.

But while I have problems with page-bloat, I think the fact that books are getting so huge is another point in the case against people having No Attention Span because of Internetz.

(Am now wondering if there was a WOEZ WOEZ about the decline of C19th 3-decker novel attributing it to cheap popular titbitsy journalism...)