Symbolic Forest

Time to answer some of the questions that have been sent in over the month or so since I revived this site.

Occasional reader Harold from Winchester read yesterday’s post about the Battle of Hastings and wrote:

Didn’t you write about that before?

Well, yes, it turns out that exactly ten years ago today I also wrote a “what might have happened if the outcome of the Battle of Hastings was different” post, including the same story of how the outcome was nearly different, and the side comments on how the battle has always been treated in English historiography. I suppose, if anything, it’s interesting to read the two side by side and see if my opinions have changed much over the past ten years, or if my writing style has evolved in the meantime too. Let me know if you think it’s better or worse than it used to be.

Regular reader Sarah from Ipswich writes:

Can I come with you on one of your trips to Wales?

Frankly, I wish I was going to Wales in the near future. All the nearby bits of Wales are closed to visitors at the moment, though. At some point I need to get myself back up to North-West Wales and visit the trains again, of course. Hopefully that will happen, even if it doesn’t now happen this year. As for the nearer bits of Wales: well, we’ll have to see how things progress I suppose.

And finally, long time reader E Shrdlu of Clacton writes:

Now you’ve brought this website back from the dead, are you still going to keep up the same running jokes and bring back all those series of posts you used to do years and years ago, like reviewing books you hadn’t finished?

Back in the mists of time I did indeed write reviews of books I hadn’t finished reading. I suppose you could call it a deconstruction of sorts, or an exercise in honesty, because they were at least all (I think) books I had tried to read, and failed to finish. Investigating why I failed to finish a particular book is interesting in itself, and admitting I didn’t finish it is more honest than just writing a review and saying “this is a bad book”. Moreover, if you read through those posts, you’ll see there were a broad range of different reasons for not finishing each book. One of them ended up being found by its author, who I had carefully not accused of plagiarism because I knew he was a former top barrister with lots more money than me.

I have to admit, I’m in the middle of drafting the next Books I Haven’t Read article. It’s probably going to be quite a long article, because it’s about quite a long book. I’ve also made sure it’s by a safely-dead author, so I can freely express my opinions about their poor understanding of archaeology or their failed attempt at polyamory. Feel free to guess who, and what, it’s going to be about; it’s a complex book, a complex topic, and it’s probably going to take me a while to finish it.

Keyword noise: Readers Letters, Battle of Hastings, history, counterfactual, alternate timeline, Cymru, Wales, Books I Haven't Read, Francis Bennion, E Shrdlu, blogging, Sarah from Ipswich.

It’s time for an anniversary! Nine hundred and fifty-four years ago tomorrow, give or take a calendrical change in the meantime, was the Battle of Hastings. An all-day affair, it is famously that One Date That Everyone Knows from all of British history. If you believe the more mouth-frothing end of the political spectrum, England has not been successfully invaded since, although that arguably isn’t really true.

Although it has become that one key fixed date in British history, the battle itself was rather more narrow than you might think. In the Traditional Whig History of Britain, that of course is completely forgotten: instead, the battle is something that in essence had to happen so that Britain could be rescued from peasants in brown robes and conquered by knights on horseback to drag us kicking and screaming into the medieval period. This is how I recall it being portrayed even as recently as the 1980s, when everyone became greatly excited about the 900th anniversary of the compilation of *Domesday Book*. However, one of the problems with teaching Whig History is that this whole concept, the idea that everything “good” that happened in history is both inevitable and inevitably a Good Thing, and that everything else in history is a misstep or a mistake, is an enormous fallacy propped up with industrial quantities of hindsight.

What actually happened in detail on October 14^th 1066 is now probably lost to us. Despite what you might think, there have always been a number of conflicting sources as to the progress of the battle and what happened in the confusion of the fighting. Contemporary estimates of the size of the winning side vary by a factor of 10; the winning side’s estimates of the size of the losing side were in some cases 100 times more than a plausible figure. What is clear is that the English forces consisted solely of infantry; the Normans had a mixed army of infantry, cavalry and archers; the battle lasted pretty much a full day from 9am until dusk; and the Normans definitely won. Almost certainly the English king died, although there are stories he managed to escape, but how he died and what happened to his body afterwards has been retold in too many conflicting versions to know which is true. What’s also very likely is that, pretty early on in the battle, certainly before lunch, the Norman army started to think that Duke William was already dead and started to retreat from the field. William took off his helmet so they could see his face, the story goes, encouraging his men to turn around and fight, and so they did. If they hadn’t, or if doing that had led to an injury, the ending would have been very different; we would remember Hastings about as well as, say, the Battle of Largs or the Battle Of The Standard.

The question there, though, is: what would have been different. But in some ways posing a counterfactual nearly a thousand years back in time is itself a pointless exercise. Everything would have been different, yet everything would still be the same. Me, you, everyone reading this: we wouldn’t exist. None of the people you know would. England wouldn’t exist in its current form, or the UK, or the EU, or the USA. The English language would probably sound very different, too. All these things that we take for granted as basic facts about the world around us, all of them would be different in ways that are almost impossible for us to imagine. Other things, though, would be just the same. The Black Death would still have happened, and many more plagues since. We’d still have had an industrial revolution; we’d still have a climate crisis; we’d still have invented nuclear power and nuclear war, reached the Moon, and be talking to each other through an Internet of some sort. It would be in so many ways an entirely alien world, that you would be surprised just how many things wouldn’t have changed at all.

Historians aren’t really bothered overmuch with what might have happened. What actually happened is far too confusing and debatable and unknown as it is, without introducing hypotheticals that would change the world completely. Imagine, somewhere in an alternate universe, someone is reading a blog post about how the Normans might potentially have beaten the English at the Battle of Hastings, and how if so, everyone in England now might be speaking Normande, part of a single great Normandy stretching from the Meditteranean to the Trent. Of course, they wouldn’t be reading it in a language you or I would recognise as English, but they’d probably be using some sort of device like the one you’ve got, some sort of physically similar screen. Humans and physics wouldn’t have changed, after all. Sit back tomorrow, wherever you are, and think about the Battle of Hastings all those years ago. Without it, the world would be completely different even though it would be still the same.

Keyword noise: Battle of Hastings, alternate timeline, anniversary, counterfactual, England, English, Hastings, Battle, history, William the Conqueror.

This is another post in a vaguely-connected series about my dad’s death, just over a year ago now, and the various events and processes that followed as a result. If you haven’t had to deal with a death in the family yourself: you might be vaguely aware of some things, less aware of others, but some parts of it will no doubt be a complete mystery, as they were to me. Moreover, if you do have to deal with a death in the family, then most likely everything you do is through a fog of stress and uncertainty. It has taken me a year to write down some of the things here, partly because of how much work all the things listed here were to do.

The first post on this—which was written shortly after the events—ended with me and The Mother leaving the hospital, Dad being wheeled down to the mortuary carefully out of sight of all of the patients and visitors, the hospital staff not entirely sure where we should be collecting the death certificate from. Probably, though, the Bereavement Office. “Phone ahead first,” they said, “they can take a while to do it.”

What’s the process after that? Well, that’s fairly straightforward to find out, as indeed it should be. You collect the Medical Death Certificate. You take the Medical Death Certificate to the local Register Office,^* local to where the death happened rather than to where the dead person lived, incidentally. The Registrar fills out the Death Certificate itself, hopefully with a nice pen, and you sign it. It then gets filed away to be bound into the register proper, and they print out as many printed copies as you’re willing to pay for. These are the things people think of as death certificates, and they are the things you need to send off in the post to the dead person’s bank, building society, and so on and so forth, to kick off all their death-related processes in turn.

May as well get the ball rolling early, we thought. As I mentioned previously, we popped into the undertakers, who were lovely and friendly and helpful in many ways, but explained that they couldn’t officially act on our instructions until we gave them a green form that the Registrar would write out for us, giving us permission to carry out a burial. We phoned the Register Office to make an appointment. “Have you got the Medical Death Certificate yet?” said the receptionist.

“Um, no. The hospital said they would have that for us later. Or tomorrow.”

“You can’t make an appointment until you actually have a Medical Death Certificate.”

I was tempted to phone back and lie, but it wasn’t really worth the effort. I tried phoning the hospital; they’d gone home already.

The next day, we called and called and eventually the hospital Bereavement Office did pick up and say that yes, they’d written out the Medical Death Certificate, we could come and pick it up at any time that they were open, or weren’t having a meal break, or a tea break. “Oh, and we close at 2 most days.” We hotfooted it back down to the hospital straight away, to have a reasonable chance of catching someone in the office, and wandered around the hospital corridors trying to find the place. I half-expected it would be next to the hospital chapel for efficiency. It wasn’t, but inside there was a churchlike air of slow-moving peace and eternal silence.

We explained why we were there, and the woman behind the counter started shuffling through large boxes of uncollected death certificates (medical). And then shuffling through them again. This wasn’t a good sign.

“What did you say the name was?” A third shuffle. “It’s not here. Have you tried the ward he died on? We might have sent it up there.”

So, upstairs again to the ward we had spent so much time in the day before. Onto the ward by tailgating behind somebody else, as usual: so much for physical security. And to the nurses’ station, where some of them did indeed recognise us. “Oh, I don’t think they’ve sent it up here.”

They had, however, and after much rooting around under more paperwork and through various files lying about at the nurses’ station, we finally had a Medical Death Certificate. What did it say? I can’t tell you. We couldn’t see it. It consisted of a sealed envelope. “Don’t open it,” said the nurses. “You have to take it to the Registrar.” And, indeed, it said the same on the envelope. Deliver to Registrar. Do not open, unless you are said Registrar. Do not pass Go or collect £200, either.

To recap a moment: we didn’t have a choice of Registrar. All deaths at this particular hospital, had to be registered at the same place. Big cities might have more than one—Bristol has an outstation Register Office at Southmead Hospital that only does births and deaths, so if someone is born or dies there it can be registered on-site—but Dad didn’t die in a big city, so we didn’t have a choice. We also couldn’t look at it. Why, then, do the dead person’s family have to courier the Medical Death Certificate around themselves, sealed, with all the associated goings-on with finding out exactly where in the hospital it is?

The registration itself was relatively uneventful. It was in the Cleethorpes Old Town Hall building, by the seafront, not needed as a town hall since Grimsby and Cleethorpes merged into a single borough back in the 1990s. No doubt the big formal rooms are now used for weddings; births and deaths are tucked away downstairs. Naturally, I took the opportunity to take a quick snap of the architecture.

The Registrar left us to wait for a while whilst she looked at the secret contents of the envelope, I suppose in case it said “They did it!” inside. When happy that everything was normal and above-board she invited us in, explained how death certificates are written, took us through what it all meant and asked who wanted to sign it as the Informant. “I don’t think I could write straight,” said The Mother, “my hands are too shaky,” so I signed the register with, as expected, a very nice fountain pen. We collected our copies, warm from the printer, and paid up. We were given the “very important” green form, the one the undertakers were waiting for, the one that said the Registrar definitely wasn’t going to get the Coroner involved in anything, so we were allowed to bury one body. Cremations, apparently, have a lot more paperwork: that nice Dr Shipman’s fault. And then, we were done.

We had a look through all the various RAF memorial boards in the entrance, collected from some of the many closed RAF stations in the surrounding area, just in case Dad’s uncle, who died whilst trying to drop bombs on Frankfurt, was listed; he wasn’t. We went back outside, into the cold wind coming off the sea. Death registered. Achievement unlocked.

* Yes, most people call them Registry Offices. They’re actually called Register Offices. I don’t know why most people call them Registry Offices.

Keyword noise: death, bureaucracy, Grimsby, Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire, North East Lincolnshire, paperwork, Death Certificate, Register Office, Cleethorpes Town Hall.

Today: we went to wander around Leigh Woods, just outside Bristol on the far bank of the Avon Gorge. It’s not an ancient woodland: it is a mixture of landscapes occupied and used for various purposes for the past few thousand years. A hillfort, quarries, formal parkland, all today merged and swallowed up by woodland of various forms and patterns, although you can see its history if you look closely. I love walking around damp, wet countryside in autumn; although today was dry, everything had a good soaking yesterday and earlier in the week. The dampness brings out such rich colours in photos, even though I didn’t have anything better than the camera on my phone with me.

Part of the woods, “Paradise Bottom”, belonged to the Leigh Court estate and was laid out by Humphry Repton, the garden and landscape designer who should not be confused with *Boulder Dash*. It includes a chain of ponds which are now very much overgrown, their water brown and their bottoms thick with silt; and some of the first giant redwood trees planted in Britain, around 160 years ago now.

The ponds drain into a sluggish, silty stream which trickles through the woods down into the Avon, the final salt-tinged part of the stream running under a handsome three-arched viaduct built by the Bristol & Portishead Railway, back when when the redwoods were newly-planted.

If you’ve heard of the Bristol & Portishead, it may be because of the ongoing saga of when (if ever) it will reopen to passengers again. It closed to passenger traffic back in the 1960s, freight in the early 1980s, but unusually was mothballed rather than pulled up and scrapped. At the start of the 21st century it was refurbished and reopened for freight trains, but not to full passenger standards. Although there have been plans on the table for ten or fifteen years now to reopen it to passenger traffic, years have passed, the leaves in the wood have fallen and grown again, and nothing keeps on resolutely happening. The main issues are the signalling along the line (token worked, I understand, with traincrew-operated instruments) and its single track, which limits maximum capacity to one train each way per hour at the very most. Aside from putting in a station or two, these are the main factors which at present prevent it from being reopened to passengers.

When I moved to Bristol, over ten years ago now, the Bristol & Portishead line was busy every day with imported coal traffic. Now that that is fading away, the line itself is much quieter, and indeed can go for days at a time with no trains at all. Its railheads are dull, not shiny, as it curves through the lush green woodland. I walked up to the top of one of its tunnel mouths, and looked down upon it silently.

Keyword noise: Bristol, Leigh Woods, photography, River Avon, railway, bridges, viaducts, Bristol & Portishead Railway, giant redwoods.

If you want to start reading this series of articles from the start, the first part is here. In the previous part we discussed how I adapted Wintersmith to my purposes, adding extra page generators for different types of archive page, and refactoring them to make sure that I wasn’t repeating the same logic in multiple places, which is always a good process to follow on any sort of coding project. This post is about the templating language that Wintersmith uses, Pug. When I say “that Wintersmith uses”, incidentally, you should always add a “by default” rider, because as we saw previously adding support for something else generally wouldn’t be too hard to do.

In this case, though, I decided to stick with Pug because rather than being a general-purpose templating or macro language, it’s specifically tailored towards outputting HTML. If you’ve ever tried playing around with HTML itself, you’re probably aware that the structure of an HTML document (or the Document Object Model, as it’s known) has to form a tree of elements, but also that the developer is responsible for making sure that it actually is a valid tree by ending elements in the right order. In other words, when you write code that looks like this:

<section><article><h2>Post title</h2><p>Some <em>content</em> here.</p></article></section>

it’s the developer who is responsible for making sure that those </p>, </article> and </section> tags come in the right order; that the code ends its elements in reverse order to how they started. Because HTML doesn’t pay any attention to (most) white space, they have to be supplied. Pug, on the other hand, enforces correct indentation to represent the tree structure of the document, meaning that you can’t accidentally create a document that doesn’t have a valid structure. It might be the wrong structure, if you mess up your indentation, but that’s a separate issue. In Pug, the above line of HTML would look like this:

section
  article
    h2 Post title
    p Some
      em content
      | here.

You specify the content of an element by putting it on the same line or indenting the following line; elements are automatically closed when you reach a line with the same or less indentation. Note that Pug also assumes that the first word on each line will be an opening tag, and how we can suppress this assumption with the | symbol. You can supply attributes in brackets, so an <a href="target"> ... </a> element becomes a(href="target") ..., and Pug also has CSS-selector-style shortcuts for the class and id attributes, because they’re so commonly used. The HTML code

<section class="mainContent"><article id="post-94">...</article></section>

becomes this in Pug:

section.mainContent
  article#post-94 ...

So far so good; and I immediately cracked on with looking at the pages of the old Wordpress blog and converting the HTML of a typical page into Pug. Moreover, Pug also supports inheritance and mixins (a bit like functions), so I could repeat the exercise of refactoring common code into a single location. The vast majority of the template code for each type of page sits in a single layout.pug file, which is inherited by the templates for specific types of page. It defines a mixin called post() which takes the data structure of a single post as its argument and formats it. The template for single posts is reduced to just this:

extends layout
block append vars
  - subHeader = '';
block append title
  | #{ ' : ' + page.title }
block content
  +post(page)

The block keyword is used to either append to or overwrite specific regions of the primary layout.pug template. The content part of the home page template is just as straightforward:

extends layout
block content
  each article in articles
    +post(article)

I’ve omitted the biggest part of the home page template, which inserts the “Newer posts” and “Older posts” links at the bottom of the page; you can see though that for the content block, the only difference is that we iterate over a range of articles—chosen by the page generator function—and call the mixin for each one.

The great thing about Pug, though, is that it lets you drop out into JavaScript at any point to run bits of code, and when doing that, you don’t just have access to the data for the page it’s working on, you can see the full data model of the entire site. So this makes it easy to do things such as output the sidebar menus (I say sidebar; they’re at the bottom if you’re on mobile) with content that includes things like the number of posts in each month and each category. In the case of the tag cloud, it effectively has to put together a histogram of all of the tags on every post, which we can only do if we have sight of the entire model. It’s also really useful to be able to do little bits of data manipulation on the content before we output it, even if it’s effectively little cosmetic things. The mixin for each post contains the following Javascript, to process the post’s categories:

- if (!Array.isArray(thePost.metadata.categories)) thePost.metadata.categories = [ thePost.metadata.categories ]
- thePost.metadata.categories = Array.from(new Set(thePost.metadata.categories))

The - at the start of each line tells Pug that this is JavaScript code to be run, rather than template content; all this code does is tidy up the post’s category data a little, firstly by making sure the categories are an array, and secondly by removing any duplicates.

You can, however, get a bit carried away with the JavaScript you include in the template. My first complete design for the blog, it turned out, took something like 90 minutes to 2 hours to build the site on my puny laptop; not really helpful if you just want to knock off a quick blog post and upload it. That’s because all of the code I had written to generate the tag cloud, the monthly menus and the category menus, was in the template, so it was being re-computed over again for each page. If you assume that the time taken to generate all those menus is roughly proportional to the number of posts on the blog, O(n) in computer science terms (I haven’t really looked into it—it can’t be any better but it may indeed be worse) then the time taken to generate the whole blog becomes O(n²), which translates as “this doesn’t really scale very well”. The garden blog with its sixtyish posts so far was no problem; for this blog (over 750 posts and counting) it wasn’t really workable.

What’s the solution to this? Back to the Wintersmith code. All those menus are (at least with the present design) always going to contain the same data at any given time, so we only ever need to generate them once. So, I created another Wintersmith plugin, cacher.coffee. The JavaScript code I’d put into my layout templates was converted into CoffeeScript code, called from the plugin registration function. It doesn’t generate HTML itself; instead, it generates data structures containing all of the information in the menus. If you were to write it out as JSON it would look something like this:

"monthData": [
  { "url": "2020/10/", "name": "October 2020", "count": 4 },
  { "url": "2020/09/", "name": "September 2020", "count": 9 },
  ...
],
"categoryData": [
  { "name": "Artistic", "longer": "Posts categorised in Artistic", "count": 105 },
  ...
],
"tagData": [
  { "name": "archaeology", "count": 18, "fontSize": "0.83333" },
  { "name": "art", "count": 23, "fontSize": "0.97222" },
  ...
]

And so on; you get the idea. The template then just contains some very simple code that loops through these data structures and turns them into HTML in the appropriate way for each site. Doing this cut the build time down from up to two hours to around five minutes. It’s still not as quick to write a post here as it is with something like Wordpress, but five minutes is a liveable amount of overhead as far as I am concerned.

The Plain People Of The Internet: So, you’re saying you got it all wrong the first time? Wouldn’t it all have been fine from the start if you’d done it that way to begin with?

Well, yes and no. It would have been cleaner code from the start, that’s for certain; the faster code also has a much better logical structure, as it keeps the code that generates the semantic content at arm’s length from the code that handles the visual appearance, using the data structure above as a contract between the two. Loose coupling between components is, from an architectural point of view, nearly always preferable than tight coupling. On the other hand, one of the basic principles of agile development (in all its many and glorious forms) is: don’t write more code than you need. For a small side project like this blog, the best course of action is nearly always to write the simplest thing that will work, be aware than you’re now owing some technical debt, and come back to improve it later. The difficult thing in the commercial world is nearly always making sure that that last part actually happens, but for a site like this all you need is self-discipline and time.

That just about covers, I think, how I learned enough Pug to put together the templates for this site. We still haven’t covered, though, the layout itself, and all the important ancillary stuff you should never gloss over such as the build-deploy process and how it’s actually hosted. We’ll make a start on that in the next post in this series.

*The next post in this series, in which we discuss responsive design, and using `npm` to make the build process more straightforward, is here*

Keyword noise: blogging, coding, websites, Wintersmith, Pug, templates, refactoring, performance, optimisation, Agile, HTML, JavaScript.

Yesterday, after the rain had stopped, we went for a walk around Greenbank, the local Victorian garden cemetery. It’s a lovely place to visit whatever the weather, but on a cold day, after a rainstorm, with drips coming from every branch and all of the colours having a dark rain-soaked richness, it is a beautiful quiet place to wander around. Even when the children are pestering you to turn around and head back home so they can have some hot chocolate and watch TV. “It is a very hot chocolate sort of day,” said The Child Who Likes Fairies.

At the centre of Greenbank Cemetery is a connected pair of mortuary chapels: one for Anglicans, and a separate but identical one for other forms of Protestant. They have been derelict and fenced off for a long time, and their central wooden spire was taken down sixty or seventy years ago, but they are still surviving despite the failure of plans a few years ago to restore them and make them usable spaces once more. Above the entrance to the central atrium, between the two chapels, is a finely-carved inscription. “Opened 1871. Enlarged 1880.”

Nowadays when you look at Greenbank on a map it’s surrounded in many places: by roads, by housing, on one side by a disused railway line. So I thought I’d dig into the archives to find out what its original groundplan was, and which parts were extended. Luckily, thanks to the fantastic work of Know Your Place Bristol and their maps, this was relatively straightforward to do. This first map is dated to 1880-81, so it seems to be after the first phase of enlargement of the cemetery. If you don’t know the area, note that it is bounded by an open stream to the west and north, and that Greenbank Road goes up to the cemetery gates and no further. I assume the original area of the cemetery was the part centred on the chapels, and the extension was the area east of the line of trees.


In many ways, even without the big garden cemetery this would be a typical landscape for the fringes of a growing Victorian city: a hotchpotch mixture of farmland and unplanned speculative terrace-building. There are rows of houses without proper streets in some parts, streets laid out without houses in others, and a city-sized workhouse with its own private burial ground behind it. If I’d extended the map to the north or to the south, you’d see a typical Victorian park: Eastville Park on one side and St George’s Park on the other.

If we skip forward thirty years or so, we can see how much the landscape has “filled out”. Moreover, we can see how the cemetery has been expanded to the west. The stream has been culverted; the land to the north and south of the cemetery has been taken by allotments. This map is from 1912; I’ve traced a map from 1902 which doesn’t show this, so we can assume this expansion took place some time in the Edwardian period, more or less.


In that thirty years huge parts of Easton which previously had just been sketched out for development have now become packed terraced streets, and some of the terraces which were built along narrow paths now have proper roads to them. Schools have been built, and a church. There’s a lot less open space, but there’s still some, here and there. Fishponds Road has acquired trams, up in the top-left corner; and the workhouse have stopped burying their dead on their own land.

If you know the area, though, you’ll know that it does still look a bit different today. To see the modern layout of the cemetery, we have to move forward to a 1950s map.


This is the boundaries of the cemetery as it is today. Greenbank Road has been extended, and Rose Green Road has been widened to take traffic. The cemetery has swallowed up the allotments on either side of it, stretching out to reach the roads. This must have happened some time after 1938, as a 6-inch-scale map revised that year still shows the allotments. However, it can’t have happened very long after, going by the dates of some of the graves on the ground. These sections of the cemetery include a number of graves from the Second World War, including civilian victims and enemy prisoners.

What’s always puzzled me about this, though, is that still to this day the emptiest parts of the cemetery include some of the areas which were included in the original 1871 cemetery right from its opening. The north-western side of the original cemetery, which slopes quite steeply down to the course of the brook which marked the original boundary, is still empty of graves. It’s one of the areas being used nowadays for interment, along the line of a path which was put in place when the cemetery first opened. Meanwhile, the late-Victorian and the 1930s extensions are jam-packed with graves, many of them now overgrown and abandoned.

This is the point at which a proper essay on local history would be drawing to a conclusion and discussing what conclusions we can draw about the growth of cemeteries in provincial English cities. As for me, I just like looking at old maps. I think it’s a fair assumption, though, that that city council deliberately bought additional land around the cemetery with the aim of expanding the cemetery into it when required, and in the interim used it for allotment space. Of course, I also like wandering round a cold, damp cemetery, too.

At some point I’ll have to write more about that other burial ground marked on the map. That’s not just disused: for many years there was no sign of it at all on the ground, until a memorial was erected relatively recently. That, though, will be a story for another day.

Update, 2^nd November 2020: We went back to Greenbank the other day, with my proper camera this time, to try to see if I could track on the ground any of the cemetery’s history of growth. Indeed, you can, if you know what to look for: however, it doesn’t quite marry up with the dates of the maps I’ve found. The new post about the cemetery’s history is here.

Keyword noise: Bristol, local history, Greenbank, Greenbank Cemetery, heritage, Easton, cemetery, history, maps, death, The Children, weekend.

Yesterday I said that having more blog posts about trains than about politics would be a good target to aim for by this time next year; and regardless of how frequently I post here overall, that’s probably still a good rule of thumb to aim for. So today, I thought I’d talk about model trains, and how I end up never building any.

I’ve always wanted a model train of some kind, ever since I was small and had a Hornby “Super Sound” trainset with an allegedly realistic chuff, generated by a sound machine wired in to the power circuity. However, there have always been a few problems with this, aside from the perennial problems of having enough time and space for such a space-gobbling hobby. There are two fundamental ones, at root: firstly, I am perennially pedantic, and secondly, I just like such a broad range of different railways and trains that it would be extremely hard to choose just one to stick with as a project. Given the first point, I would always want anything I build to be as accurate as I could make it; given the second, I can never stick with one idea for long enough to build enough stuff to practice the skills sufficiently and be a good enough model-builder to achieve this. Whilst drafting this post in my head, I tried to think just how many railways I’ve been interested in enough to start working out the feasibility of some sort of model railway project. It’s a long list.

• Some sort of rural German branch line (I did actually start buying stock for this)
• A fictitious narrow-gauge line in the Rhinogydd, in Ardudwy (again, this has reached the stock-acquiring level)
• Grimsby East Marsh or somewhere else in Grimsby Docks
• Something inspired by the Cambrian Railways’ coast section (although the actual stations are mostly fairly unattractive, apart from possibly Penrhyndeudraeth)
• Woodhall Junction, on the Great Northern
• Bala Junction (ever since I saw a plan of it in a Railway Modeller years and years ago)
• Wadebridge (come on, who doesn’t like the North Cornwall Railway)
• North Leith on the North British Railway (at 1:76 scale, you could do it to exact scale and it would still fit inside a 6 foot square)
• Something fictitious based on the idea that the Lancashire, Derbyshire and East Coast Railway had actually finished their planned line east of Lincoln, which was always a wildly implausible plan in the real world.
• The Rosedale Railway (although in practice this would probably be very dull as a model)
• Moorswater, where the Liskeard and Looe Railway and Liskeard and Caradon Railways met (ideally when it was still in use as a passenger station, although that means before it was connected to the rest of the railway network)

Even for a modelling genius, or the sort of modeller who can produce an amazing, detailed landscape, then immediately packs it away in a box and starts working on the next one, that’s a lot of different ideas to vacillate between. And some of these would require just about everything on the model to be completely hand-made: Moorswater, for example, would have to have fully hand-made track, stock, locomotives and buildings in order to even vaguely resemble the original. With something like Woodhall Junction or Grimsby Docks most of the place-specific atmosphere is in the buildings rather than the trains, but even so, getting a good range of location-specific locos and stock would be difficult.

Just lately, there’s been another one to add to the list: I read a small book I picked up about the Brecon and Merthyr Railway, and was intrigued. I quickly found it had an intriguing range of operations, reached 1923 without ever owning any bogie coaches, and standardised on using somersault signals. The large-scale OS maps that are easily available (ie, those in the National Library of Scotland collection) show some very intriguing track layouts, its main locomotive works at Machen was an attractive and jumbled mix of 1820s stone and 1900s corrugated iron, and it even had some halts on the Machen-Caerffili branch which were only ever used by trains in one direction. However, on the other hand, the small book I picked up seems to be practically the only book ever written about the line, with very little information available easily about it. I suspect I’d end up writing a book about it myself before I got around to building anything.

I am going to try to build more models, and hopefully the more I build, the better they will get and the happier with my skills I’ll become. I’m going to have to try to stick to one and only one of the above, though, and try not to get distracted. That might be the hardest part.

Keyword noise: railway, model trains, planning, Brecon & Merthyr Railway, Machen.

Very long-term readers, or people who have gone delving around in the archives, might be aware that back when this site started, I used to talk about politics on a reasonably regular basis. Indeed, if you look in the menus (either down below or over on the right), you can see there’s a whole category for it. Since the restart, though, there really hasn’t been anything political that I have wanted to write about, or thought it worth writing about at all.

Fifteen years ago, British politics was in a pretty moribund state. The passion that led from getting a Labour government into power on a landslide win had faded. The Tories flailed aimlessly for a few years before settling on a leader with a shiny, plastic PR-friendly exterior and barely anything on the inside beyond a passionate over-confidence in his own ability. Labour were just…tired, fading away into a party mostly consisting of bland interchangeable technocrats. The feeling I had was: it didn’t matter back then what you thought about politics. Everything was just a bland porridge of centrist-looking parties not wanting to rock the boat, not doing anything too controversial or too likely to upset the press barons, mostly interested in finding some sort of grey consensus. There was a vague sense of religious morality underlying everything, a vague tinge of disapproval of anything sexual that wasn’t straight, cis and vanilla; but otherwise nobody seemed to have any passion or aims beyond their own careers.

I somehow predicted the planned outcome of the 2010 General Election five years ahead of time, and could see that the Tories were slowly and painfully pulling themselves apart as a party, but almost everything else I tried to predict about what might happen to the world, politically, turned out to be wrong. I suppose that’s still a better success rate than most political journalists who actually get paid to ramble, but nevertheless, I still feel as if maybe fifteen years ago I should have realised the extent of the precipice we were on, and just how far we were going to fall, when people realised just how to take advantage of the online world, and of the bland vacuity that was 2000s politics. I didn’t realise the Tories would keep themselves alive by trying to absorb every opinion to the right of them. Eight or nine years or so later, their ploys all played off, and we have been in the nightmare timeline ever since. We should have seen in coming.

So now, why would I want to write about politics, when it is worse, darker, more divisive, than anything I would have ever imagined? Fifteen years ago, you often would hear people saying they didn’t trust politicians, that they never told the truth, that no politician was ever honourable. People have taken advantage of that: if nobody ever trusted politicians, why should they even try to tell the truth? Why should they even try to behave with honour? In Britain the government has made it clear that laws are for others to obey and them to ignore, whether at the level of international relations or at the level of individuals. It seems pointless sometimes to point out just how poisonous this is. All we can do is try to still behave honourably ourselves. In this morning’s news, the American president has apparently come down with the ongoing pandemic disease, one that—given his age and ill health—has a high chance of either killing him outright or leaving him even more mentally impaired than he already is. Given he has recently claimed the disease is a hoax, given that by both accident and design he tells multiple lies every single day, it seems impossible, a few hours later, to tell whether he actually has it or not.

Hopefully, one day, there will be light on the horizon and politics will be boring again. Hopefully one day all the politicians will be interchangeably bland. Looking back, we didn’t realise just how lucky that was. Maybe my ambition for the first year of this blog’s relaunch should be to end up with more posts in the “Trains” category than the “Political” one, because those posts will be much more fun and healthier to both read and write.

Keyword noise: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, David Cameron, pandemic, apathy, authoritarianism, bad news, Tories, Conservatives, Prime Minister, prophecy, xenophobia.

Previously, I discussed some various possible ways to structure the coding of a website, and why I decided to rebuild this site around the static site generator Wintersmith. Today, it’s time to dive a little deeper into what that actually entailed. Don’t worry if you’re not a technical reader; I’ll try to keep it all fairly straightforward.

To produce this website using Wintersmith, there were essential four particular technologies I knew I’d need to know. Firstly, the basics: HTML and CSS, as if I was writing every single one of the four-thousand-odd HTML files that currently make up this website from scratch. We’ll probably come onto that in a later post. Second-and-thirdly, by default Wintersmith uses Markdown to turn content into HTML, and Pug as the basis for its page templates. Markdown I was fairly familiar with as it’s so widely used; Pug was something new to me. And finally, as I said before, Wintersmith itself is written using CoffeeScript. I was vaguely aware that, out of the box, Wintersmith’s blog template wouldn’t fully replicate all of Wordpress’s features and I’d probably need to extend it. That would involve writing code, and when you’re extending an existing system, it’s always a good idea to try to match that system’s coding style and idioms. However, I’d come across CoffeeScript briefly a few years ago, and if you’ve used JavaScript, CoffeeScript is fairly straightforward to comprehend.

The Plain People Of The Internet: Hang on a minute there, now! You told us up there at the top, you were going to keep all this nice and straightforward for us non-technical Plain People. This isn’t sounding very non-technical to us now.

Ah, but I promised I would try. And look, so far, all I’ve done is listed stuff and told you why I needed to use it.

The Plain People Of The Internet: You’re not going to be enticing people to this Wintersmith malarkey, though, are you? Us Plain People don’t want something that means we need to learn three different languages! We want something nice and simple with a box on-screen we can write words in!

Now, now. I was like you once. I didn’t spring into life fully-formed with a knowledge of JavaScript and an instinctive awareness of how to exit Vim. I, too, thought that life would be much easier with a box I could just enter text into and that would be that. The problem is, I’m a perfectionist and I like the site to look just right, and for that you need to have some knowledge of HTML, CSS and all that side of things anyway. If you want your site to do anything even slightly out-of-the-ordinary, you end up having to learn JavaScript. And once you know all this, and you’re happy you at least know some of it, then why not go the whole hog and start knocking together something with three different programming languages you only learned last week? You’ll never know unless you try.

The Plain People Of The Internet: Right. You’re not convincing me, though.

Well, just stick with it and we’ll see how it goes.

In any case, I had at least come across CoffeeScript before at work, even if I didn’t use it for very much. It went through a phase a few years ago, I think, of almost being the next big language in the front-end space; but unlike TypeScript, it didn’t quite make it, possibly because (also unlike TypeScript) it is just that bit too different to JavaScript and didn’t have quite so much energy behind it. However, it is essentially just a layer on top of JavaScript, and everything in CoffeeScript has a direct JavaScript equivalent, so even if the syntax seems a bit strange at points it’s never going to be conceptually too far away from the way that JavaScript handles something. The official website goes as far as to say:

Underneath that awkward Java-esque patina, JavaScript has always had a gorgeous heart. CoffeeScript is an attempt to expose the good parts of JavaScript in a simple way.

Now if you ask me, that’s going a little bit far; but then, I don’t mind the “Java-esque patina” because the C-derived languages like C# and Java are the ones I’m happiest using anyway. CoffeeScript brings Python-style whitespace-significance to JavaScript: in other words, whereas in JavaScript the empty space and indentation in your code is just there to make it look pretty, in CoffeeScript it’s a significant part of the syntax. My own feeling on this, which might be controversial, is that the syntax of CoffeeScript is harder to read than the equivalent JavaScript. However, despite what some people will tell you, there’s no such thing as an objective viewpoint when it comes to language syntax; and as I said above, as Wintersmith is written in CoffeeScript, the best language to use to change and extend its behaviour is also CoffeeScript.

Wintersmith, indeed, is designed for its behaviour to be changeable and extendable. By default it only has a fairly small set of capabilities. It takes a “content tree”, a particular set of files and folders, and a set of templates. Markdown files in the content tree are converted to HTML, merged with a template, and written to an output file. JSON files are treated in almost the same way, almost as content files without any actual content aside from a block of metadata. Other filetypes, such as images, are copied through to the output unchanged. So, to take this article you’re reading as an example: it started out as a file called articles/we-can-rebuild-it-we-have-the-technology-part-two/index.md. That file starts with this metadata block, which as is normal for Markdown metadata, is in YAML:

---
title: We can rebuild it! We have the technology! (part two)
template: article.pug
date: 2020-09-28 20:09:00
...
---

I’ve configured Wintersmith to use a default output filename based on the date and title in the metadata of each article. This file, therefore, will be merged with the article.pug template and output as 2020/09/28/we-can-rebuild-it-we-have-the-technology-part-two/index.html, so its URI will nicely match the equivalent in Wordpress. So there you go, we have a page for each blog post, almost right out of the box.

That’s fine for individual article pages, but what about the home page of the blog? Well, Wintersmith is designed to use plugins for various things, including page generation; and if you create a new Wintersmith site using its blog template, you will get a file called paginator.coffee added to your site’s plugins folder, plus a reference in the site configuration file config.json to make sure it gets loaded.

"plugins": [
    "./plugins/paginator.coffee"
]

The code in paginator.coffee defines a class called PaginatorPage, which describes a page consisting of a group of articles. It then calls a Wintersmith API function called registerGenerator, to register a generator function. The generator function looks over every article in the content/articles folder, slices them up into blocks of your favoured articles-per-page value, and creates a PaginatorPage object for each block of articles. These are then output as index.html, page/2/index.html, page/3/index.html and so on. There, essentially, is the basis of a blog.

If you’ve used something like Wordpress, or if you’re a regular reader of this site, you’ll know most blogs have a bit more to them than that. They have features to categorise and file articles, such as categories and tags, and they also have date-based archives so it’s easy to, say, go and read everything posted in May 2008 or any other arbitrary month of your choice. Well, I thought, that’s straightforward. All we have to do there is to reuse the paginator.coffee plugin, and go in and fiddle with the code. So, I copied the logic from paginator.coffee and produced categoriser.coffee, archiver.coffee and tagulator.coffee to handle the different types of archive page. Pure copy-and-paste code would result in a lot of duplication, so to prevent that, I also created an additional “plugin” called common.coffee. Any code that is repeated across more than one of the page-generator plugins was pulled out into a function in common.coffee, so that then it can be called from anywhere in the generator code that needs it. Moreover, this blog and the garden blog are structured as separate Wintersmith sites, so I pulled out all of the CoffeeScript code (including the supplied but now much-altered paginator.coffee) into a separate shared directory tree, equally distant from either blog. The plugins section of the configuration file now looked like this:

"plugins": [
    "../shared/wintersmith/plugins/common.coffee",
    "../shared/wintersmith/plugins/paginator.coffee",
    "../shared/wintersmith/plugins/categoriser.coffee",
    "../shared/wintersmith/plugins/tagulator.coffee",
    "../shared/wintersmith/plugins/archiver.coffee"
]

The original paginator page generation function has now turned into the below: note how the only logic here is that which slices up the list of articles into pages, because everything else has been moved out into other functions. The getArticles function weeds out any maybe-articles that don’t meet the criteria for being an article properly, such as not having a template defined.

env.registerGenerator 'paginator', (contents, callback) ->
  articles = env.helpers.getArticles contents
  numPages = Math.ceil articles.length / options.perPage
  pages = []
  for i in [0...numPages]
    pageArticles = articles.slice i * options.perPage, (i + 1) * options.perPage
    pages.push new PaginatorPage i + 1, numPages, pageArticles
  env.helpers.pageLinker pages
  rv = env.helpers.addPagesToOutput pages, 'default'
  callback null, rv

This is the simplest of all the page-generators: the others have slightly more complex requirements, such as creating a fake “Uncategorised posts” category, or labelling the archive page for January 1970 as “Undated posts”.

There we go: my Wintersmith installations are now reproducing pretty much all of the different types of archive that Wordpress was handling dynamically for me before. The next time I come back to this topic, we’ll move onto the template side of things, including some nasty performance issues I found and then sorted out along the way.

*The next part of this post, in which we discuss website templating using Pug, is here*

Keyword noise: blogging, Wintersmith, coding, websites, CoffeeScript, refactoring.

Sunday: a trip out to Stanton Drew stone circles. They are a mysterious and imposing group, relatively little-investigated and therefore with little certainty about them. The Great Circle, second in size only to Avebury, appears to be the remains of a complex henge monument containing multiple concentric circles of wooden posts and an avenue down to the nearby river: rather like Woodhenge, if you know it. The precise date or sequencing, though, is very unclear; it is almost certainly at least four thousand years old, possibly five thousand or more, a range of timescales which in the modern day would easily encompass both a medieval cathedral and the latest office blocks with a huge amount of room to spare.

We have no real way of knowing what sort of rituals were held here, just that some sort of ritual presumably was, and that over time it will have changed radically. To the last prehistoric people to carry out a religious act here, it might have said to have been immeasurably old, here before the start of the universe; or it might have said to have been built just beyond the touch of living memory, in their fathers’ mothers’ fathers’ time. What we do know is that in reality it may well have been in continuous use for fifty generations or more. In that time there may have been considerable change in language, belief and ritual, or it may have been relatively static. Modern reconstructions of the site, which you can see on the English Heritage website, show an almost-alien forest of posts, completely foreign when compared to any modern-day religious rituals or structures.

Of course, people still carry out religious rituals at Stanton Drew today. They have no real relationship with the religion the site was originally built for, but they do have a deep spiritual and emotional connection to the site itself, as we today see it: to the land, the landscape, and the goddesses and gods that the people of today call upon.

Walking around and exploring the site, we looped around two-thirds of the Great Circle and wandered over to the North-East Circle, much smaller and on a much more human scale. It, too, had its avenue down to the river, and may have had some sort of four-post structure in its centre. Today, at its centre, we found a dead crow. Wrapped in black silk and placed there carefully face-down.

We had no way to tell if it had been sacrificed deliberately, or had died a natural death. We had no way to tell who had placed it there, or why, other than that they clearly cared, that it clearly meant something, to place it directly in the centre of the smallest circle, its head facing north. “Insects will eat it and turn it into a skeleton,” said The Child Who Likes Animals, and, indeed, we could see small flies on its soft feathers already getting to work and returning it to the soil. We stood back respectfully and let it go on its way, just as the brambles still ripening in the hedge at the corner of the field will in a few weeks time wither up probably still on the plant.

And then, as it was barely even lunchtime, we headed off to the fish and chip restaurant at Chew Valley Lake to dine in style from cardboard boxes and with wooden forks.

Hurrah, even if the peas are a bit too fancy to be proper mushy peas.

Keyword noise: archaeology, Stanton Drew, Ancient Britain, neolithic, stone circle, paganism, religion, sacrifice, fish and chips.