Every Word True
Well, mostly true. You see, for this Intro we have a tale of MalCom, our patented trademark portmanteau version of 'Malicious Compliance', in a tale told on Youtube via Reddit.
Before then, however, Conrad would like to take you back several decades, when he worked as an Archaeological Assistant at Greater Manchester Archaeological Unit, which probably sounds a lot more impressive than it actually was. Art!
I believe this is the Deansgate dig site, not the Castlefield one, which seems to be absent in GMAU's archives. Still, it gives you a good idea of what happens on an archaeological dig site, with people carefully taking down the overburden, painstakingly excavating any finds and documenting everything with cameras.
When I worked there, there were pre-fabs that housed the Finds workers, who assessed what had been sent over from the dig site, usually pottery, which might be plain earthenware or the far more refined Samian ware. Art!
There was also a pre-fab that housed the Drafting Team, who made scale drawings of the dig and monitored progress to date.
One of the occupational hazards was -
Oyster shells. Yes, seriously. You see, this section of Manchester had a history going back millennia, including the Victorian era, and those Victorians loved them oysters, which they consumed in the same way we now consume fish and chips. Art!
There was a layer of discarded oyster shells a good six inches thick across the entire site. That picture above is from Preston, not Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell but gives you an idea of what had to be dealt with. Greg, our team leader, said that technically we ought to process every individual shell - which never happened.
As I said above, most of the finds were pottery, with occasional metal artefacts such as a 'Steelyard weight'. Art!
That's a steelyard with rod and weight.
Glynn, one of the project managers, was present when a passer-by began asking questions about the site, what we'd found and what was being looked for. It turns out they were a metal-detectorist, a rara avis at the time (mid-Eighties) and the very last person you want digging up your excavation looking for non-existent 'treasure'. So, off went Glynn to a hardware shop, to purchase a couple of pounds of steel nails, which he spend the weekend knocking into the whole site. Just in case.
Okay, having set out some background, I will now enter onto the tale of Malicious Compliance, which also involved a group of Archaeological Assistants. They were contracted by construction companies to do archaeological surveys on prospective sites, doing what I mentioned above. AA confirmed that most finds were pot, with rare metal finds, all of which were cleaned, weighed, photographed and reviewed by experts. Art!
Found finds trays
Matters took an abrupt turn for the worst when the original head of Finds went on Maternity Leave, which is a luxury we here in This Sceptred Isle are entitled to by law, yah booh sucks South Canada. 'Alice', fresh from university with a brand new degree, took over.
This is where the "I Am A New Manager So I Will Manage Anew" syndrome kicked in, since Alice wanted to make a name for herself. She toured all the dig sites and introduced herself, explaining that she wanted finds trays used on-site rather than bagging stuff and taking it to be processed. Finds trays, as you can see above, are lightweight plastic things suited for an office environment, not out on a dig.
Alice also went into a frenzy about the AAs on site discarding modern material, loudly declaring that they weren't experts, they weren't able to make decisions on what to discard, they were stealing, etcetera, etcetera, she'd have their tripes, they'd never work in this town again, thunder and lightning, cats and dogs, and so on. Art!
You may see where this is going. When excavating a dig, the topsoil or overburden contains lots of modern rubbish - empty Coke cans, discarded MacDonald's wrappers, chewing gum, broken lighters, cigarette butts, that sort of stuff. Instead of being discarded, it was all bagged for processing. The number of bin bags required to transport it soared, and it all ended up in the head office for Finds.
Understandably, Alice's manager was not happy at this novel practice, mostly because 90% of what was being processed was literally rubbish. He called up the site manager in a state of high dudgeon, wanting to know what was going on.
"Alice" was the succinct explanation.
Alice was instructed to keep her nose out of interfering with AAs who had over 30 years of experience between them, and the previous sensible methods were brought back.
When the previous manager came back from maternity leave, she was showered with love and affection. Alice was demoted and moved to an office job where she couldn't do any further damage and left after a while, not being missed by anyone. Art!
Swanky middle-class Castlefield today
Hide The Ouija Board! Hide The Ouija Board!
Conrad is now up to page 570 of "Heinrich Himmler" by Robert Longerich, and the bloodletting has really begun. Once actual war breaks out, the Nazi's behaviour trawls the depths with mass murder ever present.
So, it's hard to find any levity in this broth of bloodbaths, but it's there as of May 1941. Art!
This is Rudolf Hess, who was Deputy Fuhrer as of 1933, but by the outbreak of war his star had visibly waned, because all the other senior Nazi functionaries were always jostling for power and influence.
To redeem himself, he decided in May of 1941 to -
Fly to Scotland to negotiate a peace between the British and Nazi Germany.
To say that this is a bampot idea is to be excessively kind to it. The senior Nazis and Wehrmacht generals were all terrified that Hess would give away the details for Operation Barbarossa, the June invasion of the Sinister Union. Fortunately for them, he did not.
However - my favourite word again! - the Gestapo immediately began a crackdown on spiritualists, clairvoyants, astrologers and dowsers, in fact all sorts of occult specialists, because Hess had been heavily into them.
Whom else do we know who was also into this gobbledygook? Yes, Ol' Heinie himself, who now had to keep his occult interests even more off the books. Art!
Heinie and Hess, who is totally rocking the jodhpur look
The poor dear.
Meanwhile, Back In The Shire -
Yes, if I can get away with calling Ruffia 'Modern-day Mordor' then I can equally call This Sceptred Isle 'The Shire', because Ol' Tolky conceived it that way. Art!
"The" World War One? Tut tut sub-editor!
Yes, here is Damian Lewis herding sheep across the Thames, in a ceremony that goes back to 1180 AD, where tradesmen - none of that modern PC rubbish back in Medieval times - could transport goods or chattels across the Thames, free from tolls. As an event has ballooned in the past decade and Damian was herding only a small portion of the 1,000-plus sheep.
O Joy Unabated!
We are now into the ballfoot season, a game that Conrad cordially detests, but - BUT! - it does spark off hilarious Comments on the BBC News website's Sport pages, where the invective is ladled out copiously yet without swearing, for the Beeb's pages have to be SFW. Art!
Dai Quietly
18:31
Cruel yet amusing. And it's all free. O delicious schadenfreude, thou of no calories yet so satisfying. Tee hee!
Finally -
It's lashing it down outside, I'm so glad I used the tumble-drier and didn't peg stuff out on the line.
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