Longlived, Unstable

A little shout out for a new website devoted to that nursery of all the best people, wherever they end up, Dunstable.

The website is http://www.longlivedunstable.com/. Which you could read as "long live Dunstable".
Or you could read it as "long lived" "unstable".
If you consider it's on the crossroads of Icknield Way and Watling Street, and has been inhabited since that crossroads first existed, yes it's long-lived.
And if you walk the length of High Streets North and South on a Friday night, you may decide it's unstable.

But it's old, historic,in the beautiful Downs, the people have a certain strength of character, and it's resolutely not Luton. God bless them.

A Friday in Dunstable

I will say this much for Dunstable. They have no shortage of independent churches of a Baptist theology. Although, since none of them are in contact with mine, they are clearly all heretical and/or simply misguided.

As far as I can understand the people of Dunstable spend all their time eating Bedfordshire Clangers and Dunstable Donuts, and insisting that they don't live in Luton. I set up my soapbox and portable amplification system in the strangely-named "Quadrant" and informed them all that they are damned.

In other towns that normally draws a hail of rotten apples, tomatoes, eggs or, in Melton Mowbray, pork pies. Yet strangely in Dunstable people just shrugged and told me the car factories have gone, the truck industry has gone, AC Delco is just a building site now and the paper company burnt down years ago, so they weren't expecting much anyway.

I don't often say this, but I clearly need a mission plan here. I will have to raise up their expectations first before I can tell them how far they've fallen.

Image -Dunstable: The Quadrant Shopping Centre (Nigel Cox) / CC BY-SA 2.0

Dunstable Downs Bunny Hugging

A truly eventful day.

The sacred associations of bunnies are of course well known - from the sacred hare of the goddess Eostre, from whom we get our English words "yeast", "yesterday" and "erstwhile", to the bunnies that are in fact little gnomes in the prophecies of Madeline Bassett.  Not to mention the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland - leading Alice into a world turned upside down.

So what better way to experience the sacred than in hugging bunnies in a traditional Beaker location such as Dunstable Downs?  Home of the 5 Knolls round barrows, the great Long Barrow and the location for the traditional Dunstable ritual of rolling oranges down Pascombe Pit: a ceremony which we are sure must date back to Beaker Times, when the climate was warm enough to grow oranges in Dunstable.

How were we to know that the bunnies didn't want to be hugged?  Chasing them all over the downs, we managed not to get near a single one.  After an hour or so of trying, we had to deal with an officer from the RSPCA.  By that stage, of course, we also needed medical assistance for Burton who, in the process of chasing a potential hug, fell down Pascombe Pit in the manner of aforesaid oranges.  He only stopped rolling when he collided with a courting couple hidden in a clump of brambles halfway down.  The police arriving and treating Burton as a potential peeping Tom only added to our worries.

There is an unfortunate tendency of small furry animals, when in contact with this community, of being accidentally eaten.  Or even, in one case, implanted with the electronics from a Blackberry and, a weird electronic rodent hybrid, taking part in a shootout on Weymouth seafront.  So I'm going to turn down all requests for us to buy a Community Hug Bunny.  Drayton's offer to dress up in a giant rabbit costume to offer hugs to all and sundry is, I'm afraid, best described as a cry for help.

No, if anyone wants to do any hugging, they're just going to have to hug trees instead.  At least they don't run away.  But due to the Swine Flu policy, we will insist that you wrap cling-film round the trunks first.  And no sharing of trees.