The intrepid Nicholas John…and his fiancée Andrea...left Stockholm on Wednesday morning, flew into Le Bourget airport in Paris, spent the afternoon sizing up the Palace of Versailles and then rode Eurostar from Gare de Nord to Ashford International to meet up with me on Platform Two at Rye Station at ten to eight. I took them to their overnight accommodation…the Windmill Guest House. It was a historic night for the visiting Swedish couple.

Rye Windmill sits on a site in Gibbet Marsh by the River Tillingham with the Ashford-Brighton trains rolling gently past twice an hour. The mill was there before the railways. In fact a wind energy contraption has been on the site since the sixteenth century...if not before. There is one marked on the 1594 Synmondons Map of Rye as evidence. The mill’s first recorded owner was Thomas Chatterton who built a Post Mill in Rye in 1758. His widow Mary sold it to Frederick Barry who demolished it in 1820 to erect a Smock Mill. Milling continued until 1912 when the Webbs of Rye bought it to use as a working bakery. In 1930 the bakery ovens overheated and destroyed the wooden structure on the mill…leaving just the two-story brick base. The mill was rebuilt in 1932 and continued as a bakery until 1976 when it became a pottery...so the ovens had a final lease of life until the mill became a guest house in 1986.

The fire took place on Friday the 13th…and a Friday and the 13th falling on the same day is bad news…but only in English-speaking cultures. In Greek and Spanish cultures Tuesday the 13th gets the bad press…begging the question of how Brussels plans to harmonise bad luck across Europe. Thirteen has a long history of bad luck because the Lunisolar Calendar needs 13 months some years for it to work and both solar Gregorian Calendars and lunar Islamic Calendars stick to 12 months. At the last count there seemed to be three superficially plausible explanations.

In the Norse Myths twelve gods are a-feasting in the hall of the sea-god Aegir when Loki gate-crashes the party as an uninvited thirteenth guest. He persuades the blind god of darkness Hod to throw some mistletoe at Balder the god of joy and gladness which kills Balder and plunges the Earth into darkness and mourning. So the tale goes at least.

The trouble with this version is that the Old Norse original is Lokasenna in the Edda of the Icelandic Sagas and the poet lists not twelve but seventeen gods by name…and Baldur fails to put in an appearance. But Feminist Literature likes this version because Friday is named after a goddess in most European pagan calendars and thirteen has to do with lunar cycles. Hence fear of Friday the 13th is a patriarchal invention where femininity equals bad luck. QED.

Next comes the Christian version…and Christianity is adept at cloaking pagan traditions with a Christian veneer. Their focus is The Last Supper. Thirteen people present; Jesus crucified on Good Friday; hence Friday bad and Friday the 13th worse; Quod Erat Demonstrandum. This might sneak past George Bush and his Bible-Bashing Literalists but the problem is that Friday the 13th was not particularly unlucky until Victorian times and the timing is wrong when the Crucifixion is placed in its Jewish Passover setting and removed from the Church’s liturgy. And so to the Jewish version…the Book of Exodus 12:6…and the first Passover of them all with the death of the first born in Egypt. This took place on a Shabbat on the 14th of Nisan in the evening. As the Jewish calendar counts days from sunset to sunset this would have been Friday the 13th in Gentile reckoning. It gets worse. The Da Vinci Code next.

It was on Friday 13th October 1307 that Philip IV of France arrested, tortured and massacred hundreds of the French Knights Templar to get their money for the French treasury. Perhaps we should not dismiss too readily these echoes from the massacre of the Knights Templar 623 years earlier when contemplating the fate of our windmill in 1930. One must be rather careful about dismissing such synchronicities…even when separated in time and space. John Seymour…the guru of self-sufficiency…cast his Order of the Knights of Gaiaeyes upon the mill in 1993 and shortly afterwards established his . He was distinctly unimpressed with Rye’s pride and joy. As he expressed it to myself and John Papworth at the time ‘There are enough damn museums in this country! Get the bloody thing working!’

To Indians Friday is Shukravar and derives from Shukra the Vedic Venus. Frigedæg in Old English means the Day of Frige…the Germanic goddess of beauty that the Norsefolk call Freja. After the Angles and Saxons invaded Britain Frige replaced Venus the Roman god of beauty as the fifth day of the week in Northern Climes. But in the Beautiful South and their Romance languages Venus lived on as vendredi in French, venerdi in Italian, viernes in Spanish, vineri in Romanian and so on while the Germanic languages insisted that Frige rule their weekend world…Friday is freitag in German, vrijdag in Dutch, fredag in Swedish and…oy vej…pity Les Pauvres Bureaucrats de Bruxelles.

Enough of Fraser’s Golden Bough. Here were the four of us…Ilbereth was there…thirteen years on from The Private Papers of Crocodile Uppsala sipping Strongbow Cider and Harvey’s Home Brew at The Ship Inn. By the time the chairs were on the table, the music dead and the lights dimmed we knew that catching up on two years in one evening was not to be. Sufficient unto the day be the evil thereof. Tomorrow will be today too. Think digital radio. In cyberspace everything is relative. There was not enough time and space for Friday. Einstein has a lot to answer for.