Dates for your Diary
Sat 3rd Dec 10-6pm - Winterfest/Christmas Fayre
Sat 17th Dec - Join us in the café for a free, just for fun, Christmas Quiz!
The museum will close 1pm on Saturday 17th December and re-open 10.00 am Thursday 5th January 2023
Museum opening times
The Museum is open to the public, free of charge:
Thursday* to Saturday 10am – 1pm
November 100 Club
This month’s prize numbers were drawn by member Mrs. Margaret Dyer and the lucky winners are:-
No. 29 Val Rosser £20
No. 53 Liz Ewers £10
If you would like to join our 100 club and be in with a chance of winning, it costs just £1 a month. Ask at the museum for further details.
New Photocopier
Having been ordered since March, our new copier has finally arrived. Our previous one had given excellent service but was now so old that we could no longer get replacement toner. The last engineer to attend it told us it was so old it was in the right place; a museum! With our new machine now up and running we are once again able to offer copying to the community (see table below for prices).
A4 A3
Black & White 15p 20p
Colour 60p £1
Annual General Meeting
Our AGM held last month heralded a few changes. While most posts remain unchanged, Ms Lucy Harding is retiring from the committee and is being replaced by Mrs Elizabeth Ewers. Many thanks to Lucy for her past service and to Liz for taking on the post of Chair. We are also losing Trevor and Margaret Cook and Margaret Dyer and thank them for their long service. We are very pleased to welcome the return of Sharon Saunders.
Annual Membership
It was also agreed to keep our annual membership at £6 for one more year for regular members with Vice Presidents staying at £25 a year. We will also be retaining our popular loyalty card for members meaning a free hot drink in our café every month. In addition we are now offering a new Junior membership for under 16s for £3 a year and this will come with the free gift of a museum pen.
Magic!
What do you think of when you see this stunning red mushroom? Pictures of a fairy sitting on it? Christmas? Well, this mushroom has more to do with Christmas than you might imagine. Read on! This mushroom – the fly agaric – is one of nature's 'magic' mushrooms. The shaman or medicine men of the Arctic regions would eat them for their hallucinogenic properties. This is the same region where reindeer are found. It has been suggested that while under the influence of the mushrooms, the shaman hallucinated that the reindeer, their spirit animals, were flying through the air. Add in the practice that the shaman would give gifts to their tribes people of dried fly agaric mushrooms at the time of the winter solstice in late December and you can see a path to the story of Father Christmas with his gifts being driven through the skies on his sleigh by a team of reindeer.
However, I must add a cautionary note. These mushrooms are very poisonous and can make you very ill indeed. The shaman knew just how much of them to use and how to prepare them. So, let's admire the fly agaric but certainly not touch or eat it. Who needs magic mushrooms to see Father Christmas flying through the sky on Christmas Eve?!
Jen Price
Mince Pies
Mince? Where is the mince in mince pies? Well originally, back in the Middle Ages, there would have been meat in your mince pie. If you were poor it was probably just a bit of rabbit mince and suet and some sort of preserving liquid. If you had more money, you could add in the luxurious contents we know today – fruits and spices. Gradually, the meat was left out altogether. Either way, given the addition of a preserving liquid, it was a good method of using and keeping meat at a lean time in winter when a warming mince pie would have been very welcome. I'm not sure how they came to be associated with Christmas. One suggestion is that it is on account of the spices traditionally used – nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon – as these were considered as symbolic of the gifts given to the baby Jesus. I have also read that the pies were made in an oval shape to represent the crib with the top of the pie representing a blanket.
Whatever their origin, I have yet to meet anyone who doesn't like a mince pie. I buy readymade mincemeat but make my own pastry. If you want crumbly melt-in-the-mouth pastry, this is the recipe to use. This makes 18 small mince pies (not the large deep ones as the pastry is too crumbly for them).
Ingredients
150g plain flour (sifted)
75g butter
75g lard
1 egg yolk
1 – 2 tablespoons cold water.
Method
- Rub the fat into the flour to a breadcrumb consistency.
- Add the egg yolk and water (add the water gradually and don't use more than necessary).
- Mix to a dough. Roll out and put your pies together.
- Baste the top of the pies with milk and sprinkle with sugar
- Cook at 200C, 180C fan for as long as they need. (I start looking at 8 minutes).
Jen Price
It’s not Terry’s it’s Mine!
Christmas just wouldn’t be the same without a Terry’s Chocolate Orange and if you’ve bought one recently you might have noticed the ’90 Jubilee’ on the box in celebration of its 90th birthday this year! It was first produced at Terry’s Chocolate Works in York in 1932 though since 2018 it has been made in Strasbourg, France. It all started in 1823 when chemist, Joseph Terry, joined a York company that made sweets. By 1830 he was the sole owner and on his death it passed to his sons who began making new products, one of which was the Dessert Chocolate Apple, the fore-runner of the Chocolate Orange. This was phased out in 1954 to increase production of the Chocolate Orange. In 1979 Terry’s brought out a Chocolate Lemon but it wasn’t as popular and production stopped after just three years.
The Editor
Loyalty Cards
All of us are feeling the squeeze at the moment and, with Christmas fast approaching, I thought I would run through a few of the better ones. All are free and all can save you money with Asda being the latest supermarket to offer a reward card, joining the likes of Sainsbury, Morrison’s and Tesco.
The Nectar card is most associated with Sainsbury’s and because Sainsbury’s also owns Argos you can collect and spend your Nectar points in either. There are also many other places where you can collect nectar points such as Ebay, Expedia and Vue Cinema’s. You will earn 1 point for each pound spent and 1000 points is worth £5 to spend.
The free Tesco Clubcard (not be confused with the subscription Tesco Clubcard Plus), not only allows the holder to collect points on shopping but also has many items in store at a lower price for Clubcard holders (look out for the blue and yellow stickers). Every three months your points will be converted to vouchers which can be spent in store for their face value though the vouchers can be worth up to 300% more if used with one of their many ‘Reward Partners’. I recently bought a day ticket to Legoland costing £34 and it only cost me £1 plus £11 worth of Tesco vouchers!
Boots has their very generous Advantage card. You earn 4 points for every pound spent and each point earned is worth 1p. There are also lots of opportunities to earn more points with ‘double’ and even ‘triple’ point events. The points (which you will find on your till receipts) can be redeemed on most things in store as long as you have sufficient points and now, like Tesco, they are also offering some items cheaper for Advantage card holders.
M&S have their ‘Sparks Card’ (not to be confused with the M&S credit card) which have offers on throughout the year from money off food items to up to 20% off items of clothing. Plus buy six hot drinks, scanning your Sparks card each time and your seventh will be on the house. And, when you join Sparks, you get to choose a charity to support too so, if nothing else, you will be helping a charity every time you ‘spend and scan’! To get the most out of this card though it is best to download their app to your smart phone and check your offers weekly.
Brewer’s Fayre has their ‘Bonus Club’ card. Each time you dine at a Brewer’s Fayre venue (such as Victoria Park in Ebbw Vale) scan your card to collect points which can be used to have money off your meal, two free desserts or a free bottle of house wine. Plus, as a member of the ‘club’, you can expect extra offers - last month alone hubby and I have enjoyed half price mains all day on Saturdays and two courses for £10 after 6pm Monday to Friday.
Other cards worth consideration are:
- Bon Marche – collect 1 ‘stamp’ for each £5 spent. 10 ‘stamps’ equates to 10% discount on a future purchase.
- Superdrug – 100 points equates to £1 to spend in store (part-payments allowed too).
- Costa – each hot drink is worth one ‘bean’. Collect 8 ‘beans’ and your next drink is free.
- Holland & Barrett – collect 300 points just for joining. Collect a generous 4 points per pound for vouchers to be spent in store and each point is worth 1p.
- Body Shop – receive a very generous 10 points for every pound spent. 500 points equals a £5 voucher to spend in store.
- Maxime Cinema Blackwood – collect points every visit and spend your points on cinema tickets or food and drink.
And if you’re thinking there are too many cards to carry in your purse or wallet then carry them on your phone instead. Download a free app called ‘Stocard’ and all your actual cards can be left at home. You can even store your library card here. If you have a favourite loyalty card not mentioned here, do let me know. And don’t forget the museum has one for members too!
Sally Murphy
The End of the Fax Machine?
OFCOM, the UK’s telecommunications watchdog, is consulting on changing telecom rules which will likely mean the end of the Fax machine.
The ‘fax’ machine (derived from the word facsimile) of today was in its element in the 1980s but its origins go back to 1843 when Scottish inventor, Alexander Bain, patented his ‘electric printing telegraph’. Then in 1865, an English scientist called Frederick Bakewell, having made improvements to Bain’s invention, produced the first commercial wired telefax system with his machine called the Pantelegraph.
It would be another six decades before wireless transmission would be achieved with the invention of a radio facsimile machine by American inventor, Richard H Ranger in 1924 but the big breakthrough would come in 1964 when the Xerox Corporation produced what is now considered to be the first commercial version of the modern fax machine, the LDX (Long Distance Xerography). This was superseded two years later when Xerox produced their Magnafax Telecopier weighing just 46lb (21kg). This machine could be connected to any standard telephone line and could transmit an A4 document in around 6 minutes. It would work by converting the image to a bitmap file which was then transmitted down the telephone line and reconstructed at the receiver’s end. These days of course documents are scanned and emailed and the whole process is much quicker and easier than faxing.
My first two home printers, both HP Officejets, had built-in fax facility which came in very handy on more than one occasion, enabling me to receive important documents instantly, without having to wait for the postman! Which reminds me of something that happened to my sister in the mid 1990s. She had been getting a lot of phone calls and on picking up the receiver all she would hear was the screechy tones of a fax machine. In vain, she would try speaking loudly into the receiver saying ‘Hello, if you can hear me I don’t have a fax machine’. The calls continued for some time until one day she picked up the receiver to hear a rather irate lady say ‘I’m trying to fax you’ to which my sister replied ‘you’ll have a job as I don’t have a fax machine’. The lady then said ‘well go and get one please!’. Bemused, my sister politely but firmly pointed out the lady had dialled the wrong telephone number though what she wanted to say was ‘OK hang on while I pop to Argos’!
Sally Murphy
24 months ago….
T’was a week before Christmas,
And all through the town,
People wore masks,
That covered their frown.
The frown had begun
Way back in the Spring,
When a global pandemic
Changed everything.
They called it corona,
But unlike the beer,
It didn’t bring good times,
It didn’t bring cheer.
Aircraft were grounded,
Travel was banned.
Borders were closed
Across air, sea and land.
As the world entered lockdown
To ‘flatten the curve’,
The economy halted,
And folks lost their nerve.
From March to July
We rode the first wave,
People stayed home,
They tried to behave.
When summer emerged
The lockdown was lifted.
But away from caution,
Many folk drifted.
Then came December
And cases were spiking,
Wave two arrived,
To our disliking.
It’s true that that year
Had sadness a plenty,
But we’ll never forget
The year 2020.
Anon
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