Rovers Digging For Victory

Following the recent supermarket vegetable shortage, Blackburn Rovers’ footballers could be given a chance of learning a new career for when their playing days come to an end.

This idea is said to originate from the club’s head office in India.  Here Venky’s have a vested interest in vegetables, especially in regard to accompanying their chicken meals.  Their plan is to turn parts of Brockhall training site into a nursery garden, to be used as a horticultural teaching facility.  It would be known as ‘Rooting For The Rovers’.

But to some cynical Rovers fans, Venky’s have already lost the plot.  They may be hedging their bets with another attempt by them to try to sell off part of the training ground land.  This was after a previous attempt to sell off part of Brockhall’s training facility which failed.

This latest scheme includes not only allowing footballers to learn all about gardening and horticulture, it would also encourage local residents to get involved in gardening projects too.  Perhaps if a strong interest in allotments and growing fruit and vegetables could be encouraged, then maybe local residents wouldn’t be as opposed to land at Brockhall being sold off.

Though it must be debatable whether our club owners would receive a similar kind of financial reward for this land being turned into allotments, compared to the kind of returns house building would yield, it sounds like chicken feed.  The plot thickens.

Brian Clough famously said:  ‘We had a good team on paper.  Unfortunately the game was played on grass’.  Footballers are known for having an affinity to the land environment because of this.  After all, they make their living running about on a patch of grass kicking around a bag of wind.  So when their playing days come to an end, what more fitting place could they find to work than outside on a windy green field?

There was one example were the boot was on the other foot though.  One of the most famous Rovers fans ever to have lived, acclaimed author, Alfred Wainwright, said his favourite patch of grass that he had ever walked upon was the centre circle of Ewood Park.

So what kind of fruit and vegetables would Rovers players like to grow, cabbages or turnips?  It sounds like a lot of thought is going into this project and at this stage of the game, nobody is spilling the beans.

Blackburn River Tunnel Hazards

Blackburn’s River Blakewater through the town centre became a magnet for illegal kayakers some years ago.

Many of these kayakers would try their luck following the course of Blackburn’s river as it flowed underneath our town centre.  This gave a new meaning to the term Whitewater kayaking.  It was more like Blakewater kayaking. 

To try and deter these kayakers, hundreds of gallons of seized beer was flushed down drains and into the brook.  This beer had been confiscated from some of the town’s shebeens.  These are illegal drinking clubs which are not licenced to sell alcohol products but do so anyway.  Licencing authorities are fighting an endless battle against these illegal drinking clubs.

It seems this beer was so badly made; it gave people rotgut and other ailments.  One man’s drink is another man’s poison, but in this case, it was every man’s and woman’s poison.  But for some reason this liquid was like nectar to midges which lived in the river tunnel.  For our local council it killed two birds with one stone.  Not only did it dispose of this illegal booze, it also created an explosion in the number of midges breeding in this tunnel.   It was enough to put off illegal kayakers from using this water course for their highly dangerous and unlawful sporting activities.

Unfortunately when you try to interfere with nature, not everything always goes to plan.  Due to this explosion in the midge population, it was decided a predator was needed to reduce their vast numbers.  This led to laboratory bats being introduced to feed on these tunnel midges.  Having bats in our River Blakewater tunnel also had by-products, such as their guano and a way of studying their radar.

One by-product which nobody wanted was what happened when these bats started feeding on the tunnel reared midges.  Their diet of rotgut beer affected the bats, causing them to mutate into aggressive blood sucking predators.  They started attacking kayakers passing through the tunnel, leaving grisly remains in the river.  Fortunately these didn’t last long in the water as mutant Piranha fish, also living in the river, disposed of any remains.

Due to well-known fears of this infamous fish, it wasn’t felt to be such a good idea informing the public a creature like this had somehow been introduced to the Blakewater.  It is thought Piranha fish were introduced to our town’s central river by accident.  Some tourists may have brought a few home, didn’t like them, so flushed them down their toilets.  A bit like what allegedly happened with alligators in New York City’s sewers.

Good news is kayakers seem to have been put off using Blackburn’s River Blakewater in pursuit of their sport.  A small matter of biting Midges, mutant Vampire Bats and Piranha Fish may have left them thinking they might end up the Suwannee without a paddle.

Blackburn Pubs DNA Boost

Blackburn’s town centre pubs could be given a boost as one of a number of chosen places to receive a licence to collect DNA.

This followed success of the town’s Covid 19 vaccination programme, which was put down to Blackburn’s above average footfall in its town centre.  Now it is hoped to capitalise on this success by taking things a step further and collecting DNA for scientific study.

Blackburn people are no strangers to giving their data for analysis.  Rovers fans, along with home supporters, gave voluntary saliva swab samples some years ago when they were playing a match down at Chelsea.  Sample results indicated Chelsea fans were mainly descended from Normans while most Rovers fans who participated were descended from Vikings.

There was also the infamous June Anne Devaney murder case in Queens Park Hospital grounds, where the perpetrator was caught by mass fingerprinting many of Blackburn’s adult male population.  It was the first time this kind of exercise had been used to solve a murder in Great Britain.

Certain pubs in Blackburn town centre will roll out state of the art smart glass washers.  These have a dual action process of first collecting DNA from recently used glasses, then washing them in the usual way.  By the time these glass washer’s contents become clean and sparkling, their accumulated DNA fingerprints will have been biometrically recorded and sent off to their online databank through cyberspace for processing.

There have been questions raised about this form of personal information collection and its legal implications.  But it seems to have been going on for years.  We all leave traces of DNA  wherever we go and this is known as ‘Shed’ DNA.  It doesn’t come from a shed but is one of the most used terms for abandoned DNA.  Police and forensic teams collect it at crime scenes and elsewhere from discarded cigarette buts, plastic cups, cans, chocolate and sweet wrappers, the list goes on.

Therefore, it stands to reason when you go in a pub for a pint, you do so voluntarily.  You are then served a drink in a polygenic pint glass belonging to the hostelry you are in.  When you sup up, you discard your glass for collection and washing and you can’t help but leave your DNA all over the place.  This same rule can apply to near enough everywhere you go, including where you live.

There is expected to be an enormous demand for this kind of data.  Not only will law enforcement authorities be interested, but so will medical, insurance, dating and family ancestry organisations.  Mining this kind of data from public houses could be seen as appropriate due to quite a lot of the latter often being an end product of what is sold in a pub.  So it seems quite fitting for  this information to be gleaned from one of its primary sources.

Blackburn Gold Fever

Few people in Blackburn realise where they live was once a centre of coal mining.  This was one reason why the Leeds Liverpool Canal was routed this way, connecting these latter large cities with mining towns such as Wigan, Burnley and our own Blackburn.

Due to the Industrial Revolution, coal was needed on a vast scale and this led to most of Blackburn’s mines being worked until their black gold was either exhausted or they became economically unprofitable.  It created a problem of what to do with these empty coal mines.  Some were able to become quarries, providing valuable building material to construct cotton mills and housing for our town’s expanding population.  But with so many redundant mines, various uses of them were put into place, including dumping building spoil and other waste material.  After all, out of sight, into mine.

Sadly during these changing times, many people became victims of this Industrial Revolution.  Death and disease were an occupational hazard, almost as a way of culling Britain’s expanding population when their usefulness had run its course.  Many people came and died in Blackburn.  Those who died of infectious diseases, such as fever, or could not be identified, were laid to rest in these redundant coal mines.  They became known as fever pits.

This seems a convenient solution, but nature is not as simple as that.  These bodies decomposed and returned to earth.  But not everything went back to nature so easily.  Due to these corpses’ reasons for expiring, no scavenging was allowed to be carried out because of a risk of catching and spreading fever and diseases.

Normally gold teeth would have been prised from corpses’ mouths, along with removal of rings, ear rings, chains etc.  This was not allowed in fever pits and gold items passed into the soil along with their hosts.  Gold, unlike other metals, does not corrode and can lay in the ground until it is eventually discovered by treasure hunters or metal detectorists.

One such fever pit was believed to have been in a redundant mine in Blackburn.  It was somewhere near what is now Shadsworth Industrial Estate.  But records have been lost over time pinpointing its exact location.  Local folklore tells of this particular mine being very difficult to work due to Knuzden Brook, which goes on to become the River Blakewater, causing subsidence and making it very dangerous for miners.  This led to its closure even though coal reserves were not totally exhausted.

Unconfirmed reports have been received recently of discoveries of gold in the Knuzden Brook.  This has not only led to an influx of metal detectorists, but gold panners too, although permission needs to be granted before treasure hunting is permitted.  We might find ourselves in a situation where Blackburn could be a new Klondike.  After all, both the Klondike River and Knuzden Brook both begin with the letter K, as in knife.

It would be strange if one form of fever could lead to another – here in Blackburn.  This might create a situation of Fever Pit to Gold Fever.

Blackburn Cathedral Claimed By Samplers

An ancient order of monks is claiming ownership of Blackburn Cathedral.

Members of the Order of Samplers claim Blackburn Cathedral was promised to them as reward for saving lives of many Kings and Queens of medieval England.

This order was founded around a similar time as their more famous fellow monks, the Knights Templar.  This latter order were fighting monks who made their name during the Crusades and accumulated vast amounts of wealth.  This made them fall foul of ruling religious elites in Europe and they were eventually imprisoned, executed and had their wealth confiscated, or so history states.

Samplers on the other hand were seen as friendly beer brewing monks.  They spent their time in monasteries brewing beer for other monks and nuns and local people who inhabited areas where they were based.  Unlike Templars, Samplers were very popular with everybody, including both royal and religious elites.

What particularly ingratiated them with these ruling elites was their uncanny knack of being able to distinguish between beer and wine which was safe to drink, or whether it had been poisoned.  This was where their name came from.  It was said many Kings, Bishops and Lords of the Manor had been saved by Samplers.

During those turbulent times of King Henry VIII, it is believed his Samplers really had their work cut out tasting beer and wine served to England’s most recognisable monarch.  Henry was extremely pleased with this service they provided him, especially with them helping to keep him alive.  So when it came round to his Dissolution of the Monasteries Act, Henry promised them they would not be evicted from any of their residences.

It seems one of their residences may have been the old parish church upon what now stands present day Blackburn Cathedral.  It is possible with Samplers being an order of Black Friars, based on land next to the black burn, very handy for washing their dirty habits, this may be one of the sources from where our town’s name originates.

Now it seems this ancient monastic order has appeared from the depths of time, claiming what they say is rightfully theirs.  Unfortunately for the Samplers, all records of their order were destroyed when Blackburn’s townsfolk supported Oliver Cromwell during the English Civil War.

Sadly for Blackburn’s Samplers, it was said they kept sparse records and these were very limited due to their historian enjoying produce of the grape and the grain, which they brewed, far too much.  He wasn’t very good at spelling either.  He said their address was Blackburn’s Church of the Naivety.  This made people think he lived up to his order’s name way beyond his remit.

But in these changing secular times, were religious belief and influence is diminishing, perhaps today’s Church of England may be open to accommodating their former occupants somewhere within their Blackburn site.  It would be nice to see a brewery return to our town centre and start brewing beer once more.  It could become a major tourist attraction, giving us all a chance to become samplers.

Blackburn Clothing Waste Idea Won’t Be Mothballed

A recent BBC Countryfile programme featured flax growing in Blackburn and production of linen being spun from this homegrown product.

Unfortunately due to an air of excitement following the success of their project, the makers of this programme failed to discuss what should be done to dispose of clothing replaced by this new linen alternative.  A suggestion has been put forward to use an unusual but organic method of disposing of unusable and spoilt clothing material – feed it to the butterfly of the night – our humble clothing moth.

Adult moths themselves don’t actually feed on your gear; they haven’t got mouthparts.  It’s Junior, i.e. their larvae who does all the munching – they do have this necessary equipment.  They gain nutrients from natural and animal fibres, being particularly attracted to moist and dirty clothes, so should have no difficulty finding plenty of material in lots of households.  They also like dark and undisturbed areas, so what better environment could you find than a wardrobe?

This endless battle between humans and moths has been raging for thousands of years.  Shakespeare tells us that:

‘All the wool that Penelope spun in Ulysses’ absence did but fill Ithaca full of moths’.

So you can imagine what kind of state his clothing was in Ulysses’ wardrobe when he returned home twenty years after fighting this war in Troy and his subsequent trip home, known as the Odyssey.  All for Helen – the face that launched a million moths!

After the Ancient Greeks, it is possible their conquerors and ours too, the Romans, may have brought clothes moths to our shores.  Not everything the Romans did for us was beneficial – although we did end up with a textile industry, which might have helped the situation.  But clothing moths soon got stuck into King Cotton.  This led to a continuing war which continues to this day.  Every form of technology, including chemical and biological warfare has been used to outwit our destructive clothing moth enemies.

There are around 2,500 species of moth found in Britain.  But only two, the common clothes moth (also known as the webbing clothes moth) and the Case-bearing clothes moth, cause damage to fabrics.  Most of us know all about what it’s like to come across moths living in our wardrobes.  There is nothing worse than digging out your best suit for some one-off function only to find big holes in its fabric, thanks to moths having made a meal out of it.

Now we have a chance to utilise these moth’s voracious appetite as a natural way of clothing waste disposal.  It’s about time these little blighters started earning their keep for a change.

Rovers Ventriloquist Hypnotised By Own Dummy

Many years ago Blackburn Rovers gave a job to a coach who had been brought up in a travelling circus.  Like all circus children, he picked up many of those performing skills associated with this profession.  These included flying trapeze, tight rope walking, juggling and even being a clown.  But our former coach was also a master of other less physical arts, but no less skilful –  ventriloquism and hypnotism.

After a decent career as a professional footballer, management beckoned.  This is where he really could have come into his own, thanks to his circus skills.  It is often said every manager walks a tightrope.  But in the case of most football managers, there are no safety nets, just a sack.  Our coach started off by being put in charge of our youth and academy teams.  Almost immediately he found this could be a poisoned chalice.

He found a unique way of solving those problems of capturing the attention of this demanding audience.  A room full of Rovers youngsters thought something strange was going on when their coach brought a suitcase in with him and took out a ventriloquist’s dummy.  He put his hand inside it and started opening its mouth and rolling it’s eyes around.  By now the room had gone quiet and all eyes were turned on this dummy and its handler.

The trick for our coach was to hypnotise his dummy.  But it had been a long time since he worked with his wooden friend.  He ended up putting himself into a trance and being hypnotised by his own dummy.  We also had a strange situation where every child in the room was also briefly hypnotised by this dummy.  Eventually everybody woke up from their shared trance.  It was like they had all lost half an hour from their lives, nobody could remember what had happened before, during or after their trance.

Things were even worse for the man who was supposed to be in charge.  This hypnotic trance appeared to have done some kind of temporary psychological damage to him.  He seemed to be more worried about the lads losing their kit and equipment from this training session.  He tried to reassure them that he had saved their equipment and kept muttering:

“I got all the gear, I got all the gear, I got all the gear”.

After this incident our football club dispensed with his services and he was never seen again.  At least there were no lasting effects on these young players.  Many of them went on to become successful footballers in their own right.

As for our former coach, things didn’t turn out so badly for him either.  He landed on his feet after mesmerising a rich and beautiful celebrity actress who was more than half his age.  The media couldn’t understand what she saw in him.  But he said his powers of hypnosis didn’t always let him down.

Blackburn’s Corpy Park Lake Landfill Option

Due to pressing financial cutbacks, Blackburn’s proposed new tip has had to be thrown on the scrap heap.

Plans by Blackburn with Darwen Council included shutting down its two existing tips at George Street West in Blackburn and Spring Vale in Darwen.  These would have been replaced by a new £5M household waste recycling plant at Chapels in Darwen.  Unfortunately these plans have had to be temporarily put on ice due to the current cost of living crisis and no money being available.

But an alternative solution may be available.  One of Blackburn’s Corporation Park lakes is ideal to serve as a landfill site for certain types of household rubbish.  The larger of its two lakes, known as the ‘Big Can’, is reputably over 100 feet deep.  It is a damned stream valley and could be drained of its water to become a landfill site.

It is also a damned problem with people walking over its ice when it occasionally freezes over in winter.  Due to the depth of this body of water, anybody falling through its ice would face difficulty being rescued and could easily be drowned.  So filling up the lake with refuse could kill two birds with one stone.  Not only could it help with disposal of rubbish, it would also vastly reduce how deep this lake is in its present state.

Having a shallow lake also creates an option for many opportunities in various leisure pursuits.  Not only rowing, sailing and other boating activities, but curling and skating could take place on those rare occasions when these two lakes freeze over.  Also, having greater use of this lake would deter vandalism in the park and other anti-social behaviour, such as feeding its ducks.

Vehicle access to the larger lake wouldn’t be much of a problem.  It is very close to East Park Road on one side and already has wide footpaths available all around its perimeter, making it also accessible from West Park Road and Preston New Road.  Once the lake had served its function as a landfill site, it could easily be returned to its former self, only nowhere near as deep as it used to be.

What became Corporation Park was an area previously known as Pemberton Clough.  Its two lakes were originally reservoirs, built around 1839 then administered by the Blackburn Water Works Company.  They were known as the Big Can and Little Can because local people would visit them with cans to collect water.

Wouldn’t it be very handy if Corpy Park’s Big Can became Blackburn’s Big Bin.

Rovers Shot Stopper To Thwart Pitch Invasions

Blackburn Rovers, along with other football clubs have recently been plagued by fans entering their playing area.  Unfortunately for Rovers, this could lead to disciplinary action from the FA, including points deductions or even ground closure if this problem is not addressed.  But help may be at hand from an unlikely source halfway across the world.

On their chicken farms in India, Rovers’ owners, the Venky’s, have had a conflict of conservation and commercial interests as regards one of India’s most famous wild animals.  There has been a revival in fortunes for India’s tiger population, following years of decline, nearly ending in these big cats extinction.  But thanks to a programmed survival plan, Indian tigers are starting to make a comeback.  On the other side of the coin, this has led to a rare phenomenon of man-eating tiger attacks on people, along with domesticated animals.  But Venky’s believe they may have found a solution to this problem.  It is known as ‘Operation Shot Stopper’.

At their egg hatcheries, various trials have been carried out on prototype eggs with hardened shells.  This followed complaints from consumers moaning about flimsy shells falling to pieces when people dip their soldiers into their eggs.  Results have proved successful, not only in producing eggs with more robust shells, but scientists also created a by-product from this research.  This super-hard egg shell has been invented which makes a wonderful projectile.  Not only that, it is able to be used as an alternative for producing silicon chips.

Trials were carried out on the tigers by expert marksmen shooting them with these new eggshell projectiles.  One of the pellets contained tranquiliser treated eggshell.  This was used as a way of incapacitating tigers when they strayed into certain restricted areas.  Various dosages of knockout drops were impregnated into the eggshell.  This led to various strengths of tranquiliser, incapacitating even the largest big cat very quickly.

The other eggshell projectile used was not a tranquiliser, but contained a mini tracking chip.  These were fired at selected tigers and proved to be extremely successful.  Not only were they able to be used to track these tigers, but being eggshell, this material is totally biodegradable.  So after a matter of time, it disintegrates into the animal’s metabolism, then follows nature’s usual removal process.

If such successful experiments were able to be used on an animal the size of a tiger, there is no reason why this process could not be used on human beings.  If ever anybody encroaches illegally upon the Ewood Park playing surface, they could either be taken down with a tranquiliser or allowed to temporarily escape, with their movements able to be tracked at a later date. So the answer to Rovers’ pitch invasion problem could be a right good helping of chicken and chips.

Blackburn’s Rock Box CAMRA Members Discount

Blackburn town centre’s Rock Box, across from the old town hall on King William Street, has brought in a special discount for Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) members.  On production of a  current valid membership card, 20p will be knocked off the price of a pint of real ale.

This is part of the CAMRA Real Ale Discount Scheme (RADS).  It was set up following a request by licensees across the country as a way of promoting their real ale to card carrying CAMRA members.  It gives them a discount off the price of a pint, or half, of cask beer.  This means the price of a pint of real ale will be less than £3 in the Rock Box for CAMRA members.

Founded in 1971, the Campaign for Real Ale is one of Britain’s largest and most successful consumer groups.  It has over 150,000 members.  CAMRA not only fights for making real ale available in pubs and clubs, but for the promotion and protection of pubs and clubs themselves, along with breweries.

CAMRA members already receive £30 of beer tokens as part of their membership subscription.  This in effect means CAMRA are actually giving you £1.50 to be a member of their campaign.  But in Blackburn the only place you can redeem your vouchers off a pint of real ale is in our local Wetherspoon’s, The Postal Order.  For reasons best known to themselves, not all CAMRA members wish to frequent Wetherspoon’s pubs.  At least now they can get something back on their membership by calling for a pint in the Rock Box.

The Rock Box has been open nearly four years, since Andy and Karen Joss bought the former cocktail bar: Tiki Monkey.  In that time they have established their pub as a fixture in Blackburn town centre, especially for lovers of classic rock music.  They have also championed the cause of real ale with three hand pumps of cask beer being made available to real ale drinkers. Along with being able to watch classic rock music on the large TV monitors, there is also a dart board and pool table in the pub’s upstairs room.  So if you’re a CAMRA member, why not call in with your membership card and get 20p knocked off a pint.  In these times of austerity – every little bit helps.