TARS IAGM - Feldon Lodge

Last weekend was my annual outside convention (The Arthur Ransome Society IAGM). We had the hottest weekend I think ever for this, yet the book we took as our theme was "Winter Holiday". This was also the shortest travelling time I have had as the location is only 25 minutes drive away.

I was camping as usual, and this time I did all my own cooking. I think it was a condition of booking Feldon Lodge (The Boys Brigade HQ) that only people staying in the house could order meals from them.

We had some interesting talks. On Friday evening, we heard about the life of Roger Altounyan from his daughter Barbara. He had joined the RAF during the war, but then went to work in the family hospital in Allepo. As a doctor, he did great work for asthmatics, developing a medicine and the spinhaler. Monday morning was a talk on Nansen, the arctic explorer, who deliberately froze his ship "the Fram" into the Arctic ice. Later in his life, he did a lot of work for the League of Nations. Sunday night saw our president, Sophie Neville, giving an impropmtu talk about film production. This was because the scheduled start of the video watch was delayed bacause of the campfire.



Before the 2016 mish mash of a film, and before the excellent 1974 film; the BBC had produced a black and white six part adaptaion of "Swallows and Amazons". Someone had managed to get a low grade copy from the BBC archive and so we viewed it over three nights. The acting was a bit old fashioned and it strayed from the book slightly too much at times, but over all it was a worthy adaptation (much better than the latest film).

Saturday was a trip to Bletchly Park, somewhere I hadn't been, but must go again. The home of wartime code-breaking, the first few people working there were explained away as the lord's shooting party. Swiftly the grounds of the manorhouse were taken over by huts, teeeming with mathmaticians and problem solvers trying to crack a seeminlg impossible code. It made my mind boggle that they could even do this without modern computing as Enigma wouldn't code the same letter the same way twice, and there were millions of combinations. They had to look for patterns, possible repeated words and try guesswork to figure out the message. Then there was Lorenze, a code machine I hadn't heard of. Later in the war, they developed the Bombe machine. This would run a 'guess' at the code to see if there were any results and so speeded up the process a bit. The secrecey of the work was so tight that even different huts didn't know what the others were doing. I got to see Turings office.



Saturday night was singing of shanties around the fire.



Sunday began with the official AGM, then in the afternoon I went for a walk around the local area. It is pretty wooded, so we weren't in the sun too much. Late afternoon, we went skating. I only fell down twice.



The Sunday campfire, was storytelling. A couple of people got up to perform. One read a folk tale that AR wrote down, another told the story of Goldilocks using only whistles and guestures. It was very funny. To finish we heard the stories from the story caches. These had been places around the AGM area with the start of a story. People then added on to it, and I contributed to all four. The results weren't too bad.



Monday morning was the Dick Callum cup. After winning it for the last two years, I decided to rule myself out and write a round of questions. I also acted as scorer, announcing the order of the teams. It was a very close competition as the lead team changed almost every round.



We finished by following clues to the North Pole (a box with souveniers in), and the flag handover to the Northern Region for next year in Coniston.