Monday, September the 13th, 2004
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First, my friends, a potted history of Bodger's Spinney, which has, turn and turn about, and not chronologically, been the site of boar hunts, medieval skirmishes, skulking footpads, burning bushes, luminous UFO landings, dark and desperate and demented deeds, root vegetable cultivation, lovers' trysts, the world's first public telephone box, experiments with balloons, barometers, and bauxite, a short-lived pencil sharpener factory, revolutionary uprisings, torchlit pagan frenzy, subterranean explosions, dismal grey skies, uninterrupted rainfall or, as our pals in the United States of Pining and Pothorst Land call it, precipitation, thunderstorms, an Emerson Lake & Palmer concert, sudden sprouting of snapdragons, phenomena both inexplicable and tiresome, a hideout for criminal gangs, revenge in the night, fangs in the mist, and much, much else besides.
Until about 1504 it was known as “that spinney over there”, or simply “yon spinney”. In his List Of All The Spinneys In The Land published in 1507, however, the Latvian expatriate scholar Arpad of Latvia dubbed it “A Spinney of Corncrakes and Glue To The North Of Inky Black Pond”. This, like all Arpad's coinages, was far too unwieldy a title for the illiterate peasants who shuffled about the spinney in their stinking rags at that point in history. Most of these peasants were covered in boils and buboes and pustules, and had lost most of their teeth, but that need not concern us here.
A century later, Dr Tarquin Shuddery tore up Arpad's fairly useless compendium and created his own list of spinneys, and he it was who first called it “Bodger's Spinney”, naming it after someone he met while out on horseback one summer's afternoon looking for signs of trampled earth and hornets' nests for no apparent reason. This passer-by, this Bodger, was not in fact named Bodger at all, for he was a felon bent on subterfuge, and too clever by half to give his real name to a gent on horseback who dressed like a magistrate and may be up to his neck in the legal profession. As for Bodger's real name, that is not something anyone knows, nor, indeed, does anyone care, for he was a grisly wretch steeped in crime, and he came to a bad end, a very bad end. Today birds are singing in the spinney that bears his pseudonym, birds are tweeting and carolling so loudly that they can be heard for miles, even in the relentless downpour.
Source : Copse & Spinney Nomenclature : A Guide For Tiny Tots by Dobson (edition of twelve, printed on rotting parchment, hand-stitched)