Roper's Miscellany

 1974 Age 35/36. My team at the English Tourist Board consisted of Bill Richards, Caroline Gillies, Jean Ashton, Pauline Martin, Jean Cuthbertson and Michael Dewing. This year I wrote a little booklet called The Mini-conference Market about, believe it ornot, mini-conferences at hotels. I think I also started the survey of the Wild Service Tree following a Botanical Society of the British Isles conference in Brighton. South East England was in the grip of a drought at Easter and there were many fires inplaces like Ashdown Forest during the school holiday period. In May I went to the Spalding Flower Festival with Margaret Blake on some sort oftourist board business. The town itself was very boring, so I borrowed Margaret’s carand went off on my own to a CAMRA pub down a remote dead end road leading into the Fens. When I arrived there at lunch time it was deserted and I had to call for service. I sat in the corner with a ham sandwich wondering how such a place had earned itsCAMRA re...

These notes were written fifty years ago and are my particularly significant as the ye@r our son Charles (Dobby) was born. 1975 Age 36/37 - from my notes. Early in 1975 we saw our old friend John Newbery, now living (rather unhappily we felt)in Bull Cottage, Battle. He had had a series of strange misfortunes. On one occasion he had been standing in front of a log fire when their had been a loud explosion and he collapsed to the ground.Apparently a tracer bullet had embedded itself in the tree, presumably during war time, and not gone off so the wood had grown round it and beenmissed when the logs were sawn. A piece of shrapnel went right through John’s chest, piercing his lung before coming out the other side. As he lay gasping for breath he had no idea what had happened. Fortunately he was quickly taken to hospital and recovered. A few months later,however, he got out of his car one dark night for a pee and fell into a deep roadside hole. There was a piece of corrugated iron in the bo...

4 November 2025. I have been going back over some of my old notes that I discovered after thinking they had been lost in cyberspace. They stretch back over 70 years and my challenge is how to annotate and present them. Some of the better standalone essays have been copied to my website: www.patrickroper.co.uk

 My daughter has put a pot of tulips by our front path to welcome visitors.  Tulips grow wild mostly in the Middle East and as garden plants they became popular in Turkey before travelling across Europe to The Netherlands and other countries.  In Turkey tulips have a spiritual significance as the letters of their Turkish word for the flower are the same as those in one of the names of Allah.  The flower is still popular there and the month of April is the International Istanbul Tulip Festival.  The Dutch also have various tulip festivals including a Tulip Day in January.  I would have thought ice skating along the canals would be more appropriate,  But the Dutch are suffering from overtourism, so this might be one of the ways of reducing visitor numbers.  However, closer to home there  are plenty of opportunities such as the Spalding Flower Festival with a colourful parade on12th May. Some sources say tulip petals are edible and taste like on...

This mouse lives under a cupboard in our front room.  He, or she, appears to be a hermit mouse and only ever appears alone.  I give it bits of bread crust but it remains unfriendly. it reminds me of that lovely, 9th C Old  Irish poem Pangur Ban about the stand-off between a medieval cleric and his eponymous cat.  I have adjusted one of the verses to apply to me and the mouse, Luch Beag (Irish for Little Mouse). 'Gainst the wall he sets his eye Full and fierce and sharp and sly. 'Gainst the wall of knowledge I All my little wisdom try.