What's in a name?

I was recently directed to this website by a friend who had inquired about the origins of the Conibear name. I had very little or no real knowledge other than its main origins in the UK are from the South West. It turns out that the National Trust have published a study by UCL documenting the changes in surname distribution in the UK from the 1881 and 1998 census data. Simply plug in your surname and find out many interesting facts about its distribution, frequency and ethnicity and other such fascinating statistics.

Looking at the origins of Conibear, it gives it as a "locational name" which is further categorised into either Compass position; generic feature; place; or settlement ending; of which we fall into the latter. Examples within this same category are -brook, -tree, -cliffe, -house, -bush etc etc. From their data it appears that the "-bear" portion of our name maybe a derivation of the word "beer", and names that fall within this same category are Bradbeer, Conibear, Conybeare, Godbeer, Sedgebeer and Shillabeer. All very interesting, and something that I have never considered before. Unless I am missing a now unused definition of the word beer, am I descended from a line of villagers who ran the local brewery?

If you check the census for 1998 there is a very light shading in the Manchester area to show our presence but clearly the majority of our clan are still down in the SW. In 1998 the Conibear name was only found in 6 per million names in the UK (this was down by 3 names per million since 1881)! This by my calculations is only is only about 35-40 in the whole country, of which we probably knew personally around 30% of! Scarily there is another Tim Conibear from Bristol who is on Facebook but I havent been brave enought to say hello to yet.

New Car

Yes indeed, eagle eyed S&N readers will have picked up my earlier clues that I have finally bought a car. My budget was very limited and for the price (£700) this was head and shoulders above the others on offer, although not necessarily my first choice looks wise. But hey, it has four wheels and an engine that works (for now) so I am going to make the most of it! Hopefully this Swedish beauty should cope well with the cold, retain her beautiful exterior (galvanised body don't ya know) and run and run for ever. We will see, but for the moment it is a whole lot of fun and convenient in for the bargain. With the help of my man on the inside track of the car world (my very own brother) I was steered in the right direction; away from all that French rubbish; and given confidence that it probably wont all go wrong at once and if it did, I can probably fix it for not that much either. I am planning to buy a Haynes manual for the simple stuff, but have the number of the garage in my phone now... just in case.

I did my first supermarket shop ever with my own car since I moved to Southampton and it was liberating to know that I didnt have to consider if I had room in my backpack for that extra banana, and still have the energy to cycle home with it all afterwards!


The chap I bought it from is a Prof at the university I work at, and after meeting him I was filled with confidence about the purchase. Full service history. Four new tyres. New exhuast last year. Bah, its all luck in the end I think, and I have read many Saab forums where guys claim they have a 9000 with well over 250,000 miles on the clock?! Here's hoping I can get that far! He had advertised on Ebay too but I signed the deal before that really took off. More pictures available on the Ebay site. This incidentally is not the registration as it is his private plate and my car has reverted back its original P plate.

Hopefully the first pictures of my first of many adventures in her soon.

Jazz and Trumpet

Off roading adventure

These are from Jeff's camera documenting the off piste walk that we
did after seeing the Three Sisters... some of it, as you can see from
the pictures, was a little bit improvised. We had to scramble up
quite a few odd cliffs and piles of dead branches. Kelly did very
well and managed the whole walk without a single complaint or request
for a helicopter.

Damn flies!

More random shots from Sydney trip

These were some shots from the Blue Mountains trip with Jeff and
Kelly. Pictures of the Three Sisters and some nice fleurs by Jeff
with his fancy SLR.

Fantastic Young Export.... from NEFYN!

Ya ya, I know... I've got to get back into blogging and this is the ideal springboard. I was listening to Radio1 on the radio in my car (see later post) and I heard this song that I liked. Of course get home and look it up and it turns out she is was born in Nefyn and lived a lot of her life there! Anyway, her name is Duffy, and a video of her on Jools Holland's show (a high accolade in itself) is below.