Parish Notices #3 - and some other numbers

Here at Feel It two milestones are just around the corner. For one this blog is nearly two years old. More of that soon, and if you have been around from the beginning you will know what to expect.

Also, by my reckoning this is post #99. So just to be different I will mark this fact rather than #100. It’s only a number after all. This means you can have a picture of a 99. You can read about this very British ice cream here. No one really knows for sure where the name 99 came from. (One suggestion is that the flake bar was 99mm long. But of course their introduction predated metrication in the UK by seventy years or so. However, putting this together with the fact that many ice cream sellers were Italian and I am now starting to conjure up this image that ice cream vans around the country were in fact Metric infiltrators, insidiously undermining the great Imperial system! I read somewhere else that another possible source of the name came from the fact that the flake bars came in boxes of 99. That’s the most likely theory I think, it sort of adds up – excuse the pun!)

Off the top of my head I can also suggest a couple of other famous British numbers – 10 and 42 – that The 99 can fairly share win place or show with. In the British icon stakes they are all up there with the London Routemaster bus, Marmite….. (drifts off into nostalgic reverie).

I was going to make a case for this being post #99 ½ as my first ever post was a sort of test/precursor/introduction and didn’t feature any music. Then, being clever, I thought I could feature Wilson Pickett singing 99 ½ Won’t Do. Then I found this. The Brown Eyed Handsome Man has beaten me to this idea. I can’t remember reading Rob’s post at the time, but maybe I did and it sort of lodged in my sub-conscious.

So “99 ½ Won’t Do”, er, won’t do! I need to clear memory and think of something else. Stay with me now.

I picked up Claudia Lennear’s album “Phew!” the other day. I had recently been alerted to its existence by the guys over at Lost-In-Tyme (If you scan the comments on that post you will see that I had my anorak on and zipped up tight under the chin when I made mine!). What’s in the grooves of “Phew!”is OK but nothing to get the heart racing, the cover on the other hand…... (drifts off into… phew… that’s private!).

It is said that Claudia inspired David Bowie to write “Lady Grinning Soul” after he met her for the first time, and also that she was the subject of the Rolling Stones “Brown Sugar”. But as far as “Brown Sugar” is concerned the smart money appears to be on Marsha Hunt. Wait a minute – quick, press the equals button – two little ducks - Marsha Hunt’s 22.



Marsha Hunt’s 22 – Oh, No! Not The Beast Day 1973