Out and about on patrol, me driving and the Boss up in the turret, and we'd taken the grandchildren, who are staying with us for a week, out shopping in a small village in Cambridgeshire. Surprisingly I rapidly got bored. Cue a wander around the village. Then suddenly there it was, a monster sundial, the blade angled to the south for accurate timekeeping, perfect and what an absolute cracker. I want one for the back garden.
Now I'm nowhere near being a classical scholar and I am trying to find out what the text means, hazarding a guess it looks like Greek and I must say it's all Greek to me. I asked a passer-by, who had lived in the village all his life what it meant, predictably the answer was that he'd never even noticed the sundial before.
I give up. Maybe I'll have to find the vicar and ask him.
Stop Press A message has come through on the magnetic mists that our farmer friend calls the interweb. The communication did in fact come from the far flung edges of Roman Britain, Newcastle as we call it now, and it reads as follows:
Kairon gnothi translates to 'know your time' - in the sense of opportunity. Now you know. However I might add that the spell-check tried to change it Kairon gnocchi.
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