Six Things, Volume 147

Table | Toy Cupboard | English | Spurious Correlations | Sandboxels | Colour Match

Feb 22, 2026

Thing 1 – Table

Once upon a time, there was a very tall tree.

Let’s be specific. It was 5,000 years ago in the Fenland Basin of East Anglia, the tree was an oak, and by very tall I mean like whoa dude that’s some tree, I mean shit.

55 metres, if you want figures. Approximately a Nelson’s Column, to use traditional measurements. (For reference, an average modern oak probably grows to about half that height).

Sea levels rose, as they do, the forest floor flooded, and down came the tree, with – one can only assume – a not insignificant crash. It buried itself deep in the peat, and there it stayed, protected in anaerobic conditions from the kind of things that break down organic matter. Until 2012, when routine excavations uncovered it. And it quickly became clear what a remarkable finding it was. It yielded ten consecutive 13-metre planks of Black Oak – the black, I learn, comes from the reaction of soluble iron with tannins in the wood.

What to do with such a thing?

Make a table, obviously. That way the planks can be kept intact at their full length, and shown off to best effect while also serving a practical purpose.

The table in Rochester Cathedral in 2024

The making of the table was far from straightforward. Excavation of the tree had to be carried out with utmost care; a sawmill, generously loaned by a Canadian company, had to be constructed in situ to saw the planks; drying them took nine months and yielded 1795 litres of water, reducing their weight by 1.8 metric tonnes. And the design had to be ingenious – a thing of beauty that could also be folded down and moved about the place with the minimum of fuss.

Since its manufacture in 2022 the table has spent a year in several English cathedrals – Ely, Rochester, Lincoln, and now Lichfield. It is a splendid thing and you can read more about it here.

Thing 2 – Toy Cupboard

Beautiful, this. A short film by Blair Stewart called Stephen and David’s Toy Cupboard, it’s about David McGurk’s tribute to his late brother in the form of an action figure.

I’ve explained it badly.

It’s about family love and loss and regret and creativity and I found it deeply moving.

Thing 3 – English

Hwaet!

This, by Colin Gorrie, is terrific fun, a written companion to Simon Roper’s exploration of spoken English through the ages I posted a few weeks ago. It is in fact, I read in the footnotes, inspired by that very post. So there’s nice.

It’s a straightforward story, but it spans 1000 years of English, getting 100 years older with every section, from a modern blog post to a medieval chronicle.

I was fine until about 1200, when it became more and more like reading a foreign language learned at school and dredged unwillingly from the memory banks. 1100 was mostly incomprehensible, although “strong” stood out and I could work out the gist of things like “manige gode men he hæfð fordone”, and 1000 was basically gibberish.

But don’t worry – Colin explains it all at the end. Lovely stuff.

Thing 4 – Spurious Correlations

This has been around for a while, but it’s always worth dropping in just to see what two completely unrelated things track uncannily close to each other.

These are some of my favourites.

Thing 5 – Sandboxels

Anything from Neal Agarwal is worth exploring, and the latest thing to appear on neal.fun is this, which he describes as “a falling-sand game with hundreds of elements, heat simulation, electricity & a lot more.”

But what is it for, Neal?

“I like making little cities and then adding tons of rats.”

Everyone’s different, of course. My scant memory of O-level chemistry immediately prompted me to add magnesium to water.

Then I made a chocolate mountain and added humans (the chocolate disappeared terrifyingly quickly).

Then I laid down a thick layer of mulch and a load of lifeforms. After an hour, everything seemed to be still alive, which I’m taking as a win.

Your instincts might be different – the lure of the ‘Weapons’ tab will, I’m sure, prove irresistible for many. But make sure you do the noises. You have to do the noises.

Thing 6 – Colour

This was one of the good ones.

A colour matching game. Not a new idea, but very nicely done. There are two basic skills at play: the ability to remember the colour, and the ability to manipulate the sliders towards that colour before the memory of it disappears from your head (which it does remarkably quickly).

I got 40.9/50 on today’s, by the way. Do let me know how you get on.