In the 1940s England gave birth to the British Snail Watching Society.

The British Snail-Watching Society is an organization dedicated to the theory that
man, harassed by the mounting tempo of modern life, has something to learn from contemplating the snail.

The society’s whimsical propaganda has fascinated England and even resulted in editorials in the [London] Times.

A recent meeting of the society, at which the pictures on these pages were taken, featured a snail race which, to snail lovers, is the
equivalent of the Kentucky Derby.

Read more: http://life.time.com/curiosities/life-visits-an-english-snail-watching-society/#ixzz2MaaHb61L

What other weird but wonderful associations, societies or groups from the past can you find that have kept us amused and entertained in the ever increasing amount of leisure time afforded to us since industrialisation began.

How about the Cloud Appreciation Society?

http://cloudappreciationsociety.org/

Many ladies joined the Women's League of Health and Beauty. Here they all are at Wembley in 1939, led by the redoubtable Lady Prunella Douglas-Hamilton.

http://www.britishpathe.com/video/health-and-beauty-display-at-Wembley

Love the weird and wonderful big knickers. Bet Lady Prunella and her gals put the fear of God into Hitler.

But seriously the League was enormously popular - in fact I think it's still going.

Again, probably not the sort of thing you are after, ID, but one day I'll get round to joining this very English club. I very much want to go to the big meeting at Fortnum and Mason at the end of this month.

http://www.puddingclub.com/

It's been going for years, but the organisation has kept up-to-date; it now offers a Wikipudia (recipes) and regular Pudcasts.

Lord Randall's Pudding is something I've never had. It's like jam steamed pudding, but with marmalade. I wonder who Lord Randall was, and whether he was famous for anything else besides his pudding. He's not the ballad bloke, is he?

A portion of Lord Randall's Pudding, with lashings of custard.

Looks like a nice pudding Temp, but that is not the "Pudding club" I have heard of!! which is to be avoided if at all possible.

Somewhere between weird and wonderful.  I came across this on "sewhistorically.com".  The lady who writes the blog often gives sewing and crafting tutorials but this article consists of quotations - from articles written in the Edwardian era - about Edwardian ladies' walking skirts and dresses www.sewhistorically.com/edwardian-walking-dresses/  I couldn't find it again but there was something in one of the features to the effect that with the right equipment and clothing ladies should be able to walk as well as men!  I can't see something like that going down very well with modern young women.  Another article suggested that "dark serge or stockinette knickers should be worn" (serge doesn't sound very comfy!!!!!) Also what what was then considered a "short" or "shorter" skirt is vastly different to what is thought short nowadays.

Greatly missed Scottish Islands stone skimming  competition back. Just thought you should know. To win it's distance after at least two skims. I'd have thought the number of skims accomplished of more import. Perhaps that is and East Anglian variant - and we do not have handy bits of slate for it. I'll not be taking a team, anyway. Anyone can do distance - we are 7 skim perfectionists about here.

Temperance wrote:

Lord Randall's Pudding is something I've never had. It's like jam steamed pudding, but with marmalade. I wonder who Lord Randall was, and whether he was famous for anything else besides his pudding. He's not the ballad bloke, is he?

That is something of a mystery. Marmalade puddings have been around since at least the mid-18th Century and probably date from long before that. The name Lord Randall (presumably from the ballad) being associated with a particular recipe for marmalade pudding, however, is something which only seems to date from the 1980s.

Also from the 1980s was the Curry Club which made such headlines with accompanying television and radio airtime when it was founded in 1982. It was in effect really just a specialised supper club which emerged just at the time when the number of Indian restaurants in the UK was exploding. Quickly realising that it was actually trying to sell ‘curry to the Brits’ (i.e. sand to the Arabs, coals to Newcastle, leeks to Lincolnshire etc) the club’s publication The Good Curry Guide soon turned itself into a restaurant review magazine:



It was surprisingly long-lived with its final issue being sold in 2013.

Yes, while the consensus seems to be that Lord Randall's pudding was probably named after the philandering chap in the ballad, it's not entirely clear why. The earliest published recipe I can find which calls a marmalade steamed pudding 'Lord Randall's pudding' is that given in The Pudding Club Book (publ. Headline, 1997) which was apparently based on a recipe sent, sans titre, to the Pudding Club's creator Simon Coombe in the 1980s, which rather suggests that the pudding's name is entirely the creation of the Pudding Club itself.

In the ballad didn't Lord Randall dine on a dish of eels? Serves him right if he then got ill, he should've stuck to sticky suet pudding. Even the 18th century French traveller Henri Misson, who could be often be rather sniffy about English cuisine, thought pudding was wonderful food. Writing in his 'Memoirs and Observations in his Travels over England' (the English translation being published in London in 1719), he said:
"... the pudding is a dish very difficult to be described, because of the several sorts of it: flour, milk, eggs, butter, sugar, suet, marrow, raisins etc, are the most common ingredients ... They make them fifty several ways: BLESSED BE HE THAT INVENTED PUDDING, for it is a manna that hits the palates of all sorts of people ... Ah, what an excellent thing is an English pudding!"

Misson's English contemporaries were of course not unaware of what a culinary treasure they possessed in pudding, as is shown by this curious little book, 'A Learned Dissertation on DUMPLING - its Dignity, Antiquity, and Excellence, with a Word upon PUDDING, and Many other Useful Discoveries, of great Benefit to the Publick.' by an anonymous author (although possibly by Henry Carey, 1687-1743) published by J.Roberts of London in 1726:

This is linked to ID's beginning of this thread: From our local newspaper is an article about glowworms. It says, "Glow-worms are in fact insects. the 'worm' being the larval stage of what grows up to be be a small fly, known as a 'fungus ghat'.
Their life cycle is an example of holometabolism, with four stages that look completely different: egg, larva, pupa, and fly. This sort of developmental change, also called complete metamorphosis, is thought to have only evolved once, since all the insects in which it occurs - beetles, flies, ants, bees, wasps, butterflies, moths, fleas and several other groups - are each other's closest relatives...Adult glow-worms, titiwai, the flying fungus gnats, live just a few days and also do not eat." There's a lot more - it is a full page article - but also says their focus is on mating. They just live in dark places, but are quite an attraction when you go into places like Waitomo Caves and Te Anau. I have only seen them once when I was working in the student holidays at Waitomo. Now I don't go into anything like caves, being claustrophobic. 

Oh but Caro, caves are great. As Moley in 'Wind in the Willows' eloquently explained:

'Once well underground,' he said, 'you know exactly where you are. Nothing can happen to you, and nothing can get at you. You're entirely your own master, and you don't have to consult anybody or mind what they say. Things go on all the same overhead, and you let 'em, and don't bother about 'em. When you want to, up you go, and there the things are, waiting for you.'
The Badger simply beamed on him. 'That's exactly what I say,' he replied. 'There's no security, or peace and tranquillity, except underground.'

As well as occasional moles and badgers, caves can contain some other interesting inhabitants, many spending most, if not all their lives, in complete darkness unless, like the Waitomo insects, they bring some light with them. I've never seen anything like your bioluminescent fungus gnats but I have once encountered faintly glowing fungi which were growing on rotting wood that had been washed deep into a cave. Why I wonder do they glow, is it possibly to attract spore-dispersing insects perhaps? But whatever the reason, in the total darkness and silence of the cave, they were absolutely beautiful.

However even I will admit that its not always so calm and idyllic underground. One type of troglodite that will really give you the willies (as it does me too) is the cave racer snake that is quite commonly found in the caverns of tropical SE Asia. These are slender constrictor snakes (so actually completely harmless to humans) that can grow to about 5 feet in length and which spend a lot of their time deep underground where they are safe from predators in the forest above. As agile climbers they are able to scale near-vertical cave walls where they hunt roosting bats and nesting cave swiftlets (the small birds whose nests, glued onto cave walls and ceilings, traditionally go to make birds' nest soup). The snakes have even been recorded stationing themselves upright in narrow cave passages or reaching out from cave walls, to pluck bats and swiftlets from the air as they fly past, and all in complete darkness. Having a bit of an irrational phobia of snakes, for me they are the stuff of nightmares despite being rather wonderful. Having never been caving in Asia I've thankfully never encountered them.

I still find the plant world a bit of a mystery. In my conservatory I have a massive geranium. It has dark leaves and was in flower when I bought it with dark lush red flowers. Three years on it has just sat in the same place and got bigger and bushier and darker. Four days ago I had a strongly worded one way conversation with it. The essence being it would be potted outside and replaced with another who performed better. Today there are red flowers coming out on it - and more buds. Mmmm.