The Revenge of The Tally Sticks

Tales of History and Imagination

Warning: The following is a long, shaggy dog tale about money, Anglo-Saxon England, things manufactured and things callously discarded. Mostly it’s about Tally Sticks, willow trees and revenge. It’s not me taking a new direction with the show so much as trying to write a ten minute ‘firebreak’ episode to get my second wind for the last couple of episodes and, oh boy did this one take off on me… Just like the ‘great fire of 1834’ did, by the way. Apologies for that I thought this one would run to about 10 minutes… it tripled on me when putting pen to paper.

We’ll be back to regular programming in two weeks’ time, if this worries you.. If there is something a little quirky you like in this episode, a reminder the Patreon tends to be a little quirkier than the main show in a similar way.

Sources this week include: Tim Harford’s ‘Fifty Inventions That Helped Shape the Modern Economy’
Jacob Goldstein’s ‘Money; The True Story of a Made up Thing’
Marc Morris’ ‘The Anglo Saxons’

This British government website article on the great fire of 1834
A British Library article on Tally Sticks
Prof Richard Murphy’s blog post on Charles II’s questionable financial behaviour in 1672, at Tax Research UK
And this one from some company called Glint.

The blog post of the episode is here.

Support the show on Patreon for just $2 US a month and get access to exclusive content. I’m currently revamping, and will be dropping re-recorded bonus content weekly for the next two months. December 1 I’ll be dropping the equally unusual tale of the Enfundu.

Please leave a like and review wherever you listen. The best way you can help support the show is to share an episode with a friend - Creative works grow best by word of mouth. I post episodes fortnightly, Wednesdays.

Tales of History and Imagination is on Facebook, Twitter (for now), Pinterest and Instagram. The show has a YouTube Channel, largely for Audiogram advertisements.

Music, writing, narration, mixing normally all yours truly.

In this episode I use my own take on Ella Fitzgerald’s Lullaby of the Leaves (Bernice Petkere & Joe Young).

I also use excerpts from NZ hard rock band Ishtar’s ‘Secret Love’ and ‘South of Sanity’ (S. Whitlow, D. Cannon, M. Wright). The rest of the music is all mine.

For more information on Simone click here.