There is usually something to surprise you in the garden at The Secret Acre.

Earlier this year, Emma was joined by a very curious pheasant in the Greenhouse.

A male pheasant first turned up in the garden during lockdown, when the lack of commercial shooting allowed them to escape and spread. Two female mates appeared about a year later, and now we seem to have a little family protectively sharing the land.

We’ve also turned up a number of interested objects, coins and bottles when digging or hoeing the veg beds over the years. Mostly the standing joke is that you seem guaranteed find a sparkplug every time you dig.

However, recently, cleaning up what I first took to be a coin of some sort, it revealed itself to be a most curious looking badge. Fortunately I could just about make out the letters ‘WLOG’ to have a Google.

Turns out it’s a “Wilfredian League Of Gugnuncs” badge, a children’s club linked to a carton strip run by the Daily Mirror newspapers from 1919 to 1956, with the WLOG fanclub beginning from 1927. You can read all about it here.