© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

Ed Tonks: lessons from local history

I like to flatter myself that I'm a little bit like my friend Ed Tonks. We're both very interested in good beer and in local history and geography. Both of us sometimes also get highly focused on narrow topics which we then follow in whatever odd directions chance dictates. Ed and I are both comfortable with the idea that many people would say we are "on the spectrum". That's fine. As Ed smilingly says: "The world should be thankful for enthusiasts". Enthusiasm is one of Ed's defining characteristics, and it's what has made him such a…

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The charm of local ephemera

Ephemera - items that were made for brief and fleeting purposes and never intended to last a long time - has always interested me. Perhaps it comes from working at a newspaper, where the product you work hard all day to create becomes, famously, tomorrow's budgie cage liner or chip wrapper. Is it the tiny glimpses ephemeral items give of times and places distant or lost? Or is it the design effort that went into making them appealing to the eye of buyers or users? Probably both, plus an element of compulsion in the personality: the…

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