Dark secrets #Sunday #ramble

Welcome to another Sunday ramble and today my lead picture is of the mill pool. It looks scenic, but if we dig into it’s past will we find dark secrets ? On the other side of the pool is heathland, but part of it is now a school field for what used to be Menzies high school.

Dark Secret

It’s still a school, but they call it a collegiate now. You may have seen it in the movie ‘Clockwise’ with John Cleese as a headmaster obsessed with time and punctuality. Anyway, there used to be coal mining on this site, but there was a problem with flooding because a brook ran through the site. The site is also close to the boundary of Wednesbury and West Bromwich and in the 17th century, they used to have hangings as far from the centre of town as they could. This place had the town gallows, which was probably shared between the two towns. On the other side of the heath was a dungeon where we can suppose the convicted criminal was held until he met his executioner. So that is the dark secret of Hateley Heath.

Beijing

Subways and tunnels always seem strange places capable of harbouring strange dark secrets to me. People are being warned in Beijing about people in strange clothing on the subway. It seems they have been wearing Halloween costumes to the subway and even clown outfits. It seems people dress up to take part in ‘flash mob’ events that can attract a crowd of people and cause a ‘stampede’. I think subways are scary enough, without making them scarier.

Oklahoma

Schools sometimes have a dark secret and secret societies. In Oklahoma City’s Harding Charter Preparatory High School, the kids have been dancing with dead cats. It’s hardly a secret, they made a video and it’s gone viral on the internet. Apparently this was in their biology class and the cats were for dissection. We’re more civilised in the UK, we used rats and frogs when I was at school. Did you know a frog’s heart will continue beating long after it’s been removed? Maybe that should be kept as a dark secret of my old school? I won’t mention the dead rats society, you might be about to have Sunday lunch!

Zoo thefts

There have been some zoo thefts this week. A baby kangaroo was taken from its mother’s pouch and stolen along with four baby goats from a zoo in eastern Wisconsin, local police said on Monday. The baby Kangaroo is named Joey. I bet police are wandering around High schools looking for the biology labs calling out ‘Joey, Joey?”

Meanwhile on this side of the Atlantic, police are hunting across France for seventeen rare monkeys stolen from a zoo south of Paris over the weekend. I hate to think what has happened to those if they have found their way into a laboratory. They are either wired up to computers or researchers are using them to make a new dance video. That’s another dark secret for future historians to puzzle over.

Meanwhile

While all that’s been going on, I’ve been continuing to make videos with my in car camcorder. It was actually sunny yesterday, so I made quite a good one. I didn’t get stuck behind someone crawling along much either. Usually in 10 minutes, I don’t get more than 2 miles, but I made at least 4 miles yesterday. It seems we are supposed to drive very slowly these days in convoys over speed humps stopping every 30 seconds at traffic lights for people to cross the road. It makes you wonder why car manufacturers make their cars look so sporty and advertise how fast they can go…

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