What it means to be a Geordie

This is a story of absolute heroism and bravery of the Newcastle Whitecoats and its not from a fictional book or film, it is indeed a true story.

Date: 2nd July 1644

Place: The Battle of Marston Moor

With both wings of Royalist cavalry defeated, Cromwell joins forces with the Earl of Manchester and the Eastern Association foot and begin destroying the remaining Royalist infantry.
As the defeated Royalist’s flee, Newcastle's regiment of Whitecoats made up of the North's hard and stubborn men made a heroic last stand as a desperate rearguard action to cover the Royalist retreat towards York.
All alone they held out in a ditched enclosure called White Syke Close.
They refused to surrender, and against hopeless odds resisted repeated and devastating charges by Cavalry.
Cromwell then sent in the infantry and dragoons to tear them apart.
Those brave Whitecoats still refused to give in, and that one lone regiment fought bravely against Cromwells army until no more than 30 from a possible three thousand souls were left alive.
This last stand of the Whitecoats is one of the most famous and bloody episodes of the civil war.
Yet sadly most Geordie's don't even know it happened.
That to me is the biggest shame of all.
It is my intention to change that.
Thank you for reading and if your a Geordie pass on this story.

Binding the Book, Codex Seraphinianus

I have the pleasure of owning the 2006 edition of Codex Seraphinianus, picture shows how it was.

This is one of the most unusual books ever created and is also an exceptional work of art in itself.

I decided the binding on the book should be as special as the work inside, so I passed it on to a master bookbinder who had appeared on Channel Fours Time Team.

His name is Owen Bradford his details are below, the link will take you to some pictures of what was achieved, the
binding is Calf skin, it has been highly polished which gives it the effect of wood, the centre panel is brown silk with 22 carat gold lettering on the spine, and its all wrapped up in a very stylish box, the pictures don't really do it justice but check it out

For Bookbinding:

CALL: 07852277388
EMAIL: thebookbinder@talktalk.net

Codex Seraphinianus

Codex Seraphinianus.

Here are some of my observations and miserable attempts at translation, its quite long so apologies to the reader.
I strongly believe that if a translation or decryption is possible it will very probably have French as the base language due to what looks like a couple of clues in the book.

Clue 1.
The only recognisable words are French and it is believed to be from the book
À la recherche du temps perdu vol 6 by Marcel Proust

Clue 2.
We have a clear depiction of a Rosetta stone the original Egyptian stone was first translated correctly by a French Gentleman named Jean François Champollion

With this in mind we have what appears to be an index section at the back of the book, the title of the page is a 5 character word which if we take it to represent the word INDEX then it could be in English or in French as other European languages have an incorrect letter count see examples below.
Dutch: register (het)
French: index (m)
German: Register (nt)
Italian: indice
Spanish: índice (de materias)
I do believe the artist would have used a language he was comfortable with because he apparently took only 2 years to produce the work and there does not appear to be any precursors to this work that I could find, but I could be wrong especially if its Asemic writing.

The word on the page below could be INDEX.

It is confusing due to the fact characters 1,2 and 5 are the same.
They are set out like this $$£%$ which would make a straight forward translation very difficult.
With this in mind I believe it could be a form of encryption that was used.
Now it seems quite clear we are dealing with the word "index" so with that in mind the Seraphinian representation has many unusual coincidences, such as if you write down the alphabet then put the symbols at the point where each letter of the word index appears ($=I, $=N, £=D, %=E, $=X) the characters that appear the same are divisible by the number 5 which could be a key to the code used, this is also the same number of letters in the word INDEX itself, from I to N we have 5 letters and from N to X we have 10 letters.
So the characters used may not actually represent letters but are just pointers to the encryption code itself.
This next bit is probably stretching it but I will add it just for kicks. From the letter N counting backwards to the letter D you have 10 letters and from D counting backwards to E you have 25 letters also divisible by 5, very strange or could be a load of tripe, you decide.

I tried one other word in the book, on the Rosetta stone page below.

The paragraphs are split by an 8 character word set out like this $$%&&£$* once again we have 3 characters the same, but we also have 2 other characters in the middle which are the same, which is a little confusing, the middle letters have dots included in them which may be a clue to a 2nd decryption code used.
Once again I use French as the base language.
As I do not speak French I had to stupidly rely on a French dictionary in this test.
I started from A through Z trying to match all the words that included letters divisible by 8 (the number of letters in the word on the stone) e.g.: A to I to Q all equal 8 letters.
I trawled through the whole French dictionary for 8 letter words containing the letter sets I had written down. I had managed to break it down to 3 possibilities, but there is a lot of room for error as the dictionary does not cover the full language properly.
Finally I ended up with the following possible words EMPEREUR, EMETTEUR and SARRASIN which translate to EMPEROR, TRANSMITTING and BUCKWHEAT. As we are dealing with a representation of a Rosetta stone, which shows us how to do something and the picture has an electronic gadget look to it I opted for the word EMETTEUR (TRANSMITTING) which actually looks correct in the form of the word, having the 2 letters the same in the middle like the Seraphinian letters that included the dots.
These are probably pure coincidence but I got a kick out of the research.
Thank you for reading.