The SheepRug’s real name is Peter Hughes. Thus it’s not a serious attempt at remaining anonymous – it’s more of an internet non de plume which I’ve used for many years now. It provides a very modest amount of uniqueness, privacy and insulation from internet data miners and other annoying people. I live in the small village of Hasketon in Suffolk with my wife, Heidi and son, Alfie.

Why?

Many years ago, whilst playing with an anagram generator over a cup of tea, a colleague pointed out that an anagram of my name was ‘Rug the sheep’. I think he was using ‘rug’ as a verb and seemed very amused by it, though personally I’ve got no idea what he thought it meant.  I simply moved it around a little and ‘The Sheeprug’ has been my internet persona for about 25 years now. The main reason for this is it’s a little bit silly and so nobody else has used it. It avoids ending up with usernames I’d easily forget like ‘phughes_564325’. Like Tigger, I’m the only one!

That said, I recently discovered an online ‘decorative hide’ store called ‘Sheeprug’, which you can find at www.sheeprug.co.uk. As far as I can see, if you want the soft furry outer layer of a dead antilope or reindeer on the floor in front of your fire, it’s probably an excellent place to start. Personally, whilst I’m not a vegetarian, I very much like it when beautiful animals remain intact, and I can assure you that no animals were harmed in the making this website.

Background.

I retired from my job in the R&D dept. of a large telecommunications company in September 2017.  I’d been there for over 42 years and had had many wonderful experiences, met some great people from all over the world and been lucky enough to work on some really interesting technologies.  I was part of teams that developed some of the underlying technologies that make the interweb possible,  developed voice communication services and I also got involved in running experiments to evaluate voice quality.    It was mostly pretty good fun.   But I was starting to feel very jaded with it all, and eventually the niggles of the negative issues (e.g  performance management and other corporate crapulence)  began to outweigh the positives.  So I jumped at the chance of a slightly early retirement. Apparently the Spanish refer to retirement as ‘jubilation’!  (I’ve not verified this – I think somebody in a pub must have told me).  It’s great, of course, and I now have is a bit more time to follow interests such as woodwork, photography, cooking, home brewing, local history and, somewhat more reluctantly, gardening.  It’s also great for developing procrastination skills – I can now easily get to lunchtime without achieving anything at all.

Why a website?

A particular driver in the development of this site has been the Hasketon section. This began life in about 2016 when the Centenary of the World War 1 Armistice was on the horizon. Heidi and I thought a good contribution to this would to find out a little about the 26 men from WW1 who are remembered on the Hasketon War Memorial. This we did, and we set up a small exhibition in the Victory Hall to show off what we’d found out. Everybody seemed to like what we’d done and some asked if we were going to publish any of it. This really hadn’t occurred to us, so we thought about it over a well earned Sunday lunch in the Turks Head. We decided that if we did, we’d like to also take a look at the Hasketon people who fought in the war and survived, and also try to get a better picture of Hasketon village life in the decades before WW1. We’d then write a book… or something.

Over the next 18 months we collected all the information we could find and ended up with a stack of papers several inches high and a spreadsheet with over a hundred names in it. There was a load of fascinating stuff out there! But at the current rate of progress we’d be publishing in time for the Centenary of the Korean War, rather than any time in the near future. There was also the issue that writing down the information is one thing, but writing something that anybody might actually want to read is a lttle more challenging! A much better alternative then seemed to treat it as a live project and publish ‘chapters’ when they were written. That approach worked for Charles Dickens, and had the added benefit that we could get feedback from people as we went along, and update pages when new facts became available. For example, the 1921 Census was published in January 2022, and provided some interesting post war details.