Author of the 'Three Lyons' children's book series. Classic 1930s adventure stories, based around central England, with plucky kids and lashings of ginger beer.
Central England
Joined November 2023
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Today we remember the playing of the last post, the sacrifices of our soldiers and kinsmen to keep our freedom, and the potential cost of not remembering that going forwards.
It is Remember Remember season.
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Jack Ramble retweeted
This seems a strange way to describe someone who fought at the Somme, who lost nearly all his closest friends in battle, who drank the nectar of ancient poetry with C. S. Lewis, who wholly & irrevocably re-invented the fantasy genre.
Jack Ramble retweeted
I have a copy of “Paradise Lost” (actually a whole Milton collection) that is more than a century old. Some working class peasant loved it so much they made a crude leather cover for it once the original binding wore out. It is one of my most prized possessions because it reminds me that we live in the ruins of a greater civilization, a culture which cherished and appreciated art, a culture which allowed even the poor to participate and enjoy the best it had to offer.
What do we have now? Reels that are forgotten in five minutes.
Photo: I found this in a dusty bookstore in New Westminster many years ago. Now it lives beside my bed.
In Fahrenheit 451, the chief book-burner, Captain Beatty, describes how reading became obsolete because the public demanded increasingly fast-paced entertainments, and those entertainments slowly corroded their ability to think. “Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending. Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column … Many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed, ‘Now at last you can read all the classics.’ … School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches?”
In this passage Ray Bradbury foretells the intellectual hollowing out of the working class, the advent of AI-generated “summaries” of classic novels, the attention-frying culture of short-form video, the relaxation of educational standards into non-existence. All of this in a book published in 1953.
Jack Ramble retweeted
The only choice for #PubSignThursday this week - The Guy Fawkes Inn, High Petergate, York - birthplace of the man himself in 1570. Reposts appreciated as ever 🤝. #York #Pubs #PubSigns #BonfireNight
The monarchy and parliament acted as a protection for this country. As such we remember when the plot to remove them was foiled, this 5th November.
It is Remember Remember season. Remember that your country, its history and customs, is important to maintain.
421 years ago today, the Gunpowder Plot was foiled in the cellars beneath the House of Lords.
More than four centuries later, the event is still marked at the State Opening of Parliament, when the Yeomen of the Guard ceremonially search the cellars before the King arrives.
ALT The Yeomen of the Guard beginning their ceremonial search of the cellars.
ALT The Yeomen of the Guard beginning their ceremonial search of the cellars.
ALT The Yeomen of the Guard beginning their ceremonial search of the cellars.
ALT The Yeomen of the Guard beginning their ceremonial search of the cellars.
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Jack Ramble retweeted
18 months. Born on farm. Forage
and milk. Yellow fat. Fat so delicious it melts in the pan. No off flavors from grass only.
850ish pounds live weight.
About $0 to raise.
I want to be on the side of the story that helps get cattle back onto fields across the country. Small herds, lots of herds, healthy herds, strong and resilient communities.
I’m going to say the age here tomorrow - and it’s going to defy what most
People understand grass finished beef and timelines to be.
We are going to sell some
Of this but it’s going to take us time to build the herd to supply it at the demand I believe it will warrant.
This is truly sustainable, profitable, delicious, grass fed only beef with marbling and flavor you would expect from some of the most expensive and genetic intensive breeding programs anywhere - internationally.
For years we have been raising beef but we have not sold any nationwide, only local.
I think we’ve struck “gold” but I need to reveal this appropriately with temperance so we can build this properly.
If this interests you, please join my email list. There will be opportunities and not just to buy.
Jack Ramble retweeted
Buckminster Fuller, who was wrong about a lot of things in a way that was usually more interesting than other people being right, noticed something in the 1930s that still holds true.
He noticed that technology does not primarily get bigger. It gets thinner.
The transatlantic cable got lighter per unit of message. The building got lighter per unit of enclosed volume. The engine got lighter per unit of horsepower. Each generation of a technology tends to accomplish the same function with less stuff, and then with less stuff again, until at the limit the stuff approaches zero and only the function remains.
He called this ephemeralization : doing more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.
And here were it gets interesting. What got eaten, in the first wave, was objects: my door key became a fingerprint.
What's happening today is the second wave: the AI paradigm shift. It’s our thought patterns, our decisions, our generative processes, our creativity, and our communication and coordination with each other that is being ephemerized.
And I think judgment abstraction has two consequences.
First, the output is not checkable at a lower cost than producing it. To verify a summary you must read the document. To verify a strategic recommendation you must do the strategy. The thing that made calculators safe (verification being orders of magnitude cheaper than generation) simply does not hold for the class of work being absorbed now. Which means verification won't happen because the economics forbid it. A check that costs as much as the work is not a check. It's a second attempt.
Second, the stairs are being removed as a consequence of using the lift. The way you stay able to judge a draft is by having written drafts. The capability is maintained by its own exercise and by nothing else. So the fallback and the thing it's a fallback for are the same muscle, and the system that replaces the muscle also stops the training.
This is Lisanne Bainbridge's irony of automation, which she wrote down in 1983 and which the aviation industry spent the next forty years rediscovering at great expense: automate the easy 99% and you have designed a job where a human with no recent practice must handle the hardest 1% with no warm-up, at the worst possible moment, on the basis of a mental model the automation has been maintaining on their behalf.
Airlines eventually responded by mandating hand-flying. No knowledge-work organization on earth currently mandates hand-thinking.
Today is All Hallows.
Today, remember your ancestors.
We are now in Remember Remember Season.
Remember your ancestors.
Remember your monarchy.
Remember your war dead.
Forget at your peril.
Jack Ramble retweeted
After forty years in front of the camera, I’ll be directing my first feature film, SO HELP ME GOD: a Civil War epic about a Union soldier named Albert Townsend, who should have received the Medal of Honor but didn’t.
Clerical error.
I learned of Albert through his descendants’ archival research. What I found was more than an injustice waiting to be corrected. It was a story of friendship and extraordinary courage: an unassuming young man becoming a soldier who held his ground, and his principles, under fire.
That’s a story worth telling on the largest possible scale. And we’re inviting the people who want to see it told to help bring it to the screen, as investors in the film through Republic.
We intend to do it justice: real cannons, one hundred horses, and the cast in period-accurate uniforms. We’ve brought on Mark Huffam, whose work includes Saving Private Ryan, Game of Thrones, and The Martian, to produce it. He knows what it takes to make an epic, and how much depends on the human story at its heart.
At the Medal of Honor Heritage Center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I introduced the project alongside Civil War historian Brad Quinlin, members of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, and representatives of Civil War Roundtables. We’re also supporting the campaign for Albert’s posthumous Medal of Honor. His descendants are still fighting to see his courage properly recognized.
This picture is about friendship, love, and honor — and common people rising to accomplish extraordinary things. I want to give that story everything it deserves.
I hope you will lift the banner with us.
Learn more about the film and the opportunity to invest:
sohelpmegod.film
Jack Ramble retweeted
On the morning before the Battle of Trafalgar Lord Nelson wrote a prayer in his journal:
"May the great God, whom I worship, grant to my country and for the benefit of Europe in general, a great and glorious victory, and may no misconduct in anyone tarnish it; and may humanity after victory be the predominant feature in the British fleet.
For myself individually, I commit my life to Him that made me; and may His blessing alight on my endeavours for serving my country faithfully.
To Him I resign myself, and the just cause which is entrusted to me to defend. Amen."
On this day in 1805, the British fleet under Lord Nelson demolished the Franco-Spanish fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar.
The victory secured British dominance of the high seas - a dominance that would last over a century - but the cost of victory was heavy as we lost our greatest hero...
Nelson was mortally wounded during the battle after being shot by a French marksman.
He expected every man to do his duty, and by God, he did his.
Jack Ramble retweeted
Encore des nouvelles plutôt rassurantes de l'hôtel de Ville de Limoges. Je viens de parler avec Muriel Laskar, adjointe au patrimoine (oui, à Limoges, contrairement à Paris, ils ont un adjoint au patrimoine...) : le salon bleu et son plafond n'ont pas brûlé (1/3)
Jack Ramble retweeted
La Ville de Limoges et la Fondation du patrimoine lancent une souscription publique pour sauvegarder et restaurer l’hôtel de ville.
Plus d'infos 👉 swll.to/8B3s9
Faire un don 👉 swll.to/ynFRl1A
© Photo - Sdis 87
Jack Ramble retweeted
An old ape named Shift finds a dead lion's skin floating in a pool. He sits down with a needle and thick thread, and every time a bird flies over, he stops sewing and waits for it to pass. He knows exactly what he's making, and he doesn't want anyone in the sky to see it.
C.S. Lewis wrote that scene in 1956, in the last Narnia book. It's the one most of us never got to as kids. I only read it a few years ago.
When his friend Puzzle the donkey comes back from market, Shift ties the skin onto him and tells him to stand in the shadows. Then he tells the whole of Narnia that Aslan has come back.
Lewis tells you how it works. No one who had ever seen a real lion would have been taken in for a moment. It only works from far away, at night, by firelight, with the donkey kept quiet while the ape does all the talking.
Puzzle gets scared and says what if the real Aslan comes. Shift laughs and says Aslan never turns up nowadays. Right then there's a crack of thunder and the ground shakes under them. Puzzle says it's a warning. Shift says yes, it's a sign, and it means Aslan approves.
Now Gerwig's Aslan has Bowie's face and Meryl Streep's voice. The lion who sang a whole world into being in The Magician's Nephew, the voice so deep it shook the ground, talks like someone else now.
Shift did the same thing. He kept the lion's face and changed who was talking.
Lewis is gentle with the donkey, and I want to be too. Puzzle isn't evil. He's tired and trusting, and someone he believed kept telling him he wasn't clever enough to judge for himself. Lewis saves his anger for the ape with the needle.
A dad told me he was reading that first chapter to his kids and had to put the book down, because it read like these Hollywood headlines.
Pick up the real books. Read all seven out loud, every night, until your kids know that voice. A child who has heard the real lion can't be sold a donkey in a skin.
C.S. Lewis’ family has issued an official statement supporting Greta Gerwig’s Narnia and praising her lifelong passion for the books. bit.ly/4Buu39d
ALT C.S. Lewis’ Family Officially Addresses Greta Gerwig’s ‘Narnia’ Movie
Jack Ramble retweeted
Some people assume councils or lieutenancies define England’s counties. They don’t.
Every historic county is at least 800 years old; many are over 1,000.
Lieutenancies date only from the 1540s, and county councils from 1889.
So neither can define counties that had already existed for centuries.
ALT Map of England's counties - from RealCounties.com
Jack Ramble retweeted
Out today! The second single from A Cambridge Christmas is Matthew Owens’ arrangement of The Holly and the Ivy. Listen out for the woodwind dancing merrily above the melody – like little Christmas elves!
lnk.to/HollyAndIvy
I would be remiss if I did not mention that today is the feast of St Edward the Confessor.
xitter.gq/Ramble_Jack/status/197…
Here is the original parish church, in town:
Saint Edward the Confessor's.
There is stained glass made by Morris and Co, including designs by George Frederick Bodley (north and south rose windows), Edward Burne-Jones (north aisle east window) and John Henry Dearle (south aisle window).
The wall surrounding the churchyard and the lychgate are listed Grade II. The churchyard contains two early medieval (11th century) crosses which are listed Grade II and are also protected as scheduled monuments.
The churchyard is notable as a place for viewing a double sunset on and around the summer solstice. The sun has been observed to set twice behind a hill some six miles from Leek. The phenomenon was first described by Robert Plot in a 1686 publication.
There is also a story that the Jacobite army sharpened their swords on the gravestones when they passed through the town.
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This here, is the best of what being British is all about.
youtube.com/watch?v=Mbh1Jm_q…
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