Anselm's Eagle

By Peter D Wilson

An ancient document presented at an "Antiques Roadshow" session purports to describe the journey of a party of monks from Lindisfarne led by Anselm, fleeing with the relics of St. Cuthbert from possible Viking attacks in the early Middle Ages, setting up a decoy casket at Ripon and, guided by a sea eagle, taking what they believe to be the genuine relics not to their supposed destination in Durham but for greater safety to a small settlement further inland in northern England. Even more improbably, according to legend the eagle returns many years later and dies at about the same time as Anselm himself. However, some time after the appearance of the document, a farmer in the now substantial village turns up what appears to be the dual burial of Anselm together with the eagle, not only arousing archaeological interest but inspiring the chairman of the hitherto ineffective local Tourism Committee with the idea of an exhibition that does attract visitors and enables him at last to escape gracefully from his reluctantly-held position.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter D Wilson
• Release date: Sep 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311725653

Peter D Wilson

Peter Wilson was born in Nottingham, England, in 1936. After education at Nottingham High School, where he changed course from classics to science because he couldn’t get on with Greek, he gained an open scholarship to St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, to be taken up after National Service (1955-57) in which he was a radio mechanic at the SHAPE military headquarters near Paris. At Oxford he gained first-class honours in chemistry, then took a PhD at Leeds University.In 1964 he was appointed to a research position at the nuclear reprocessing site at Sellafield in Cumberland (the north-western corner of England), then operated by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Agency (UKAEA) of which the relevant division became British Nuclear Fuels plc (BNFL) in 1971. He remained there until retirement in 2001, mostly working on process chemistry development. For the last dozen years he was chiefly concerned with certain aspects of long-term waste management and related strategic issues, helping to form the company technical policy thereon and presenting its rationale in international discussions. He was also the technical member of a team representing the UK in gaining acceptance of an extension to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to cover a possible loophole. His book "The Nuclear Fuel Cycle" (Oxford University Press, 1996) has become the standard text on the subject. Following his retirement, BNFL set up and financed a "Peter Wilson Medal and Prize" for research and communication, to be awarded annually for ten years at Leeds University.He lived in Seascale, a coastal village near to the Sellafield site. His interest in amateur dramatics dated back to the 1960s and for many years he was an active member of the society based in Gosforth, the next village inland. His collection of stories, plays and film scripts along with some factual material may be found at https://peterdwilson.wixsite.com/peterwilsonscripts

Book preview

ANSELM’S EAGLE

A story by

Peter D. Wilson

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Contents

Start

An ancient document

Anselm’s Letter

The grave

Matchmaker

Tour operator

Proposition

Author

ANSELM’S EAGLE

George Fairbrother, permanent chair of the Ernscar and District Tourism Committee, mopped his brow, earnestly wishing that the long-threatened thunderstorm would actually break and clear the air. He might then have the energy to devise some sensible proposal to put before the next meeting a couple of days ahead; on past experience, no one else was likely to have anything constructive. 'Permanent chair,' by the way, was not actually his title, just a recognition of the unwelcome reality that no one else was fool enough to take a job he had been trying to shed for the past five years. Not that it had required much actual work in that time: Ernscar was not on any of the major tourist circuits, nor for that matter even minor ones, and he often wondered whether his contributions were worth the effort.

The hour he had mentally allotted to contemplating possible tourist baits had passed, and he realised with some shame that in fact the main object of his contemplation had been the memory of young Sophie Hodgson sunbathing the other day in rather less than was really decent on the other side of his garden wall. She would be a bait all right, but not for the sort of fish they wanted to catch. He hoped the mental image would be less distracting when he had to present at least an appearance of attention to more serious matters, and in an attempt to dismiss it he decided to take a walk in the other direction.

Thus he happened to bump into his friend Geoffrey Randall, a retired businessman who had settled in the village and owned the little castle on the Scar. It was the nearest thing to a stately home within forty miles, and for that reason alone he had been co-opted a couple of years earlier to the Tourism Committee. The castle, although externally spectacular, was too small to accommodate visiting coach parties, and in any case there was nothing of much interest inside; however, after racking his brains for a positive contribution to the committee’s work, he had now come up with the idea of inviting an Antiques Roadshow; what did George think of it?

Though privately doubting the chances, George agreed