Alas! It is 29 years since the world was deprived of one of its more colourful culinary characters: Phyllis Nan Sortain Pechey – better known as double bigamist, child abandoner, amphetamine user, dangerous driver and celebrity cook Fanny Cradock Fanny’s eccentricities presented themselves early. She was sent to private schools, where – according to her Telegraph obituary – she “was on intimate terms with the court of Louis XIV”. She was expelled from one for encouraging her fellow pupils to contact the spirit world

4 August! 446th anniversary of the documented and very real appearance of the Terrifying! Satanic! One-Eyed! ghost dog Black Shuck at two churches in Suffolk, where he wilfully murdered “two persons, as they were kneeling uppon their knees, and occupied in prayer” We know this happened, because a pamphlet was published (which I haven’t been able to find a copy of, so I’ve put the text in an old-looking typeface). Apparently, at 9am, there was a huge thunderstorm, and the beast manifested himself at St Mary’s Church, Bungay

21 May – the anniversary of an unusual synod. It was 641 years ago, and involved heresy, nonconformism, and an earthquake in the Straits of Dover. The full story also takes in a little light beheading and posthumous excommunication... The men of the cloth were gathering to try renegade priest John Wycliffe, who had dangerous ideas about translating the Bible into English, opposing the wealth and power of the church, and – gasp! – rejecting transubstantiation

Today is the 113th anniversary of a small dog taking part in Edward VII’s funeral procession, which “endeared him to the nation” and gave rise to one of the most powerful literary emetics ever published According to the Victoria & Albert Museum, “The King and Cæsar adored each other and were inseparable. Following The King’s death in May 1910, Cæsar was inconsolable and roamed the corridors of Buckingham Palace looking for his master” vam.ac.uk/articles/caesa…

Ah, 20 May: 86th anniversary of some of the most splendid radio commentary ever delivered. You may have heard it before, but it is always joyful. “When I say lit up, I mean lit up by fairy lamps!”

https://twitter.com/BBCArchive/status/1263031713460039680

Lt. Cdr. Thomas Woodrooffe was “aloft in the foretop” (not a euphemism, but it should be) to commentate on the Coronation Review of the Fleet at Spithead. Being ex-navy, he’d met up with old colleagues beforehand and had... one or two sharpeners theguardian.com/media/organgri…

Ah! 19 May – the feast day of St Dunstan, of course, famous for grasping Satan by the nose with a pair of hot tongs That joyous illustration is from William Hone’s The Every-Day Book (1825), which also reproduced a folk rhyme about the incident

Ah! 19 April – 123rd anniversary of the day William Butler Yeats kicked Aleister Crowley downstairs in the Battle of Blythe Road – a fight for control of the British branch of the not-at-all-ridiculous Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn The Hermetic Order of Fabricated Nonsense was founded by a trio of late-19th century freemasons on the unreliable foundations of the Cypher Manuscripts – a collection of coded piffle of dubious origin about Qabalah, astrology, tarot, geomancy, and alchemy en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_…

If it’s 18 April, it must be time to do several things. Firstly: to wish this headline a very happy 10th birthday hamhigh.co.uk/news/highgate-… It’s seven years since the Telegraph either forgot who was at the top of Nelson’s Column (unlikely), or (more likely) forgot about the existence of the Oxford comma, which might have helped us distinguish one bit of their tweet from another

https://twitter.com/Telegraph/status/721972995649073152

This one’s a bit of a fudge, because I can’t find the actual date it happened on, but it was late March, apparently, so it’s something in the region of... The 28th anniversary of lapsed aristocrat Jessica Mitford releasing a cover version of Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, featuring a band of kazoo and cowbell players and an accordion

28 March – 49th anniversary of the time Paul McCartney and John Lennon met up in a recording studio in LA, patched things up, and recorded some songs together – except, sadly, everything after the first comma there is balls This is the anniversary of a recording session known as A Toot and a Snore in ’74. You can hear Lennon on the surviving bootlegs saying, “You wanna snort, Steve?” because many of those present had been at the old Colombian incoherence powder

A plethora of exciting anniversaries today. Obviously, we can ignore the 169th of the start of the Crimean War, because that region now enjoys nothing but peace, justice and prosperity... ...and the 60th of the Beeching Report being presented to Parliament, because this nation’s railways – in common with all of our public realm – have never been healthier