I guess the problem is just me.
I have read too many details about beavers for far too long and that just naturally makes them connected to random details in my life and as a result I feel my entire existence is just some big coincidence designed to make me serve beavers.
It’s just random. A coincidence. There is no pattern here.
I mean sure the fact that the famous beaver trapper is buried half a block away in a grave site overlooking our beavers, that could be a fluke right? And the fact that the author of the most famous beaver book came to Martinez 112 years ago and had to cross the very creek where the beavers live to do it, that’s just random, right?
But this? THIS?
So I’m starting Derek Gow’s great new book, bringing back the beaver. it it starts with a quirky mention of an obscure take I’ve never heard, about how St Felix when he was traveling to East Anglia to bring christianity in 631. He wrecked his boat in the river Babingly in Norwich and was hopelessly disoriented and unable to find his way and might have drowned.
When he was rescued by a colony of BEAVERS who helped him find his way safely home.
In gratitude St Felix made the leader of the beaver clan a bishop. No I’m serious. And the now decayed town is still contains a sign post documenting this.
Okay, sure. A beaver bishop. That’s a pretty random fact but hardly fate or anything. I pulled out my map to see where Babingly even is.
And that’s when the room started to spin.
Since Jon is from England, I didn’t meet his parents until after we were married. His dad was a retired navy dental surgeon and his mum a nice older women with that liked car boot (rummage) sales. They lived in Swaffham where his eldest sister was head mistress of a girls school, and when we finally took a trip to visit them they took us on a very english outing to the nearest ruined castle and pub lunch.
So the castle we visited was castle rising which it turns out is about a block from Babingly and the pub we ate lunch in was in King’s Lynn which is right there alongside. And gosh here is a photo of a much younger Jon and his father staring off into the tiny river Babingly where St. Felix we reportedly rescued by beavers.
But sure. It’s just a coincidence, right? Not destiny or anything.
This is how Derek’s book begins:
“According to an old folk tale, when a ship carrying St. Felix of Burgundy was wrecked in a storm on the River Babingley in Norfolk in 615 CE the saint was saved from drowning by a colony of beavers. The village which is now abandoned records this event upon its signpost where a large beaver wearing a bisops mitre adminsiters to another more junior candidate.”
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