Bobby's Dream: September 2011

Friday 30 September 2011

As good a place as any to harvest potatoes when the oil runs out

The missing punchline from previous post. Jesus, I need an editor!

A.J.P. Taylor dismissed these claims as 'folk ignorance fostered by the nobility to keep the serfs in abject terror and thus increase their power and control'. Barry himself refuses to discuss the matter, insisting he's a scrap man 'pure and simple'.

Thursday 29 September 2011

. Around Woodford Barry Claghen is something of a local legend. The structure pictured is locally known as Barry's shed. Specialising in house clearance and scrap metal, Barry scours the obituary columns and bancruptcy notices of the local papers and works his network of contacts in the nursing homes and scrap metal yards of West Essex. Local legend suggests Barry's shed may contain more than just the sad leftovers of so many broken lives. It is rumoured that Barry is also a seeker of arcane truth. After one particularly fruitful forage through the remants of an auction at a large house somewhere near Piercing Hill in Epping Forest Barry came across a box that would change the course of his life forever. What he found that day in 1986 remains a mystery, although speculation in Barry's local, the Railway Arms, favours the theory that what he discovered was a notebook which had belonged to Thomas Lovecraft. Lovecraft was squire of Copped Hall, an active freemason and rumoured to be a practising magician. A.J.P. Taylor

Adjacent to the Inland Revenue building is the underpass between

Snakes Lane East

and

Snakes Lane West

. Sissons claimed that the tiles in the passage were left over from those used in the Greenwich foot tunnel. Certainly recent analysis from the tiles suggests similarities to the ceramics manufactured in Derby by J.Proudfoot and son. Traces of alluvial clay similar to those that underly the Greenwich delta have also been detected. Cobbing made investigations into the origin of the nomenclature 'Snakes lane'. Thus far he has found no mention of reptiles existing wild or being kept as pets by local landowners in the area. Cobbing did unearth a passing mention of 'the Cult of the Serpent' in a magistrates' will from 1786 but has so far failed to make any sense of this.

Ex-Inland Revenue building nestling the Woodford station car park. Rumoured to sit atop the remains of a Mithraic temple from Roman times and then later the site of pagan rituals amongst the local aristocracy. Apparently when this history was uncovered by a local historian, B.A.E. Sissons, in 1953. The government of the day moved rapidly to scotch what were dismissed as 'the babblings of a madman' and nullify, what it viewed as, potentially at least a dark stain on an area. The sitting MP for Woodford was Prime Minister Winston Churchill, a man still held in high esteem in the country for his wartime leadership of the country. Sisson's work appeared to link Churchill's ancestor, the 1st Duke of Malborough, John Churchill to the rituals and suggested that the 1st Duke may have derived much of his power and influence from his magickal knowledge, particularly in the practice of sex magick. Governmental thinking at the time suggested that building a tax office on the site would symbolically nullify any distasteful associations. Little is known of Mr Sissons subsequent work but local sources that he died quite suddenly in a house fire. The Revenue moved to Swansea as part of the last Conservative governments cost-cutting and the site has remained empty since 1997.