A Little Glastonbury Mystery

Here’s a conundrum for you

I found this pile of letters and numbers on Saturday afternoon outside St John’s Church in Glastonbury High Street.

I felt a bit sorry for these lost letters, all jumbled up and meaningless in a heap. Of course my next thought, this being Glastonbury, was that they must ‘mean’ something.

Along came a friend, I’ll call her Margo. She’s a bit older than me and (I mean this as a compliment) she’s a strident person – loud, bossy and opinionated. When I first met her, in my mid-twenties, I developed a sneaking suspicion that I would grow up to be rather like her. Suffice to say that, 24 years later, I still haven’t grown up, but I’ll let you make your own mind up about the other bit…

Anyway, ‘Margo’, having (like me) an enquiring mind, peered at the letters too. She was similarly distressed by their confused state, so we laid them out on the pavement, to see if we could make some sense of them. We couldn’t, except to assume they originally formed a shop sign and that the numbers were a phone number – I’m guessing a mobile as there is no 8 and the Glastonbury code is 01458.

It looks to me that we have the following letters:

ATRROOSHLTINBOMOSUN

But what does it mean????

I put it into an anagram maker and it offered thousands of suggestions. Among them ‘A Bluish Monsoon Trot’ and ‘A Hobo’s Moonlit Turns’. Or they could be formed into ‘South Albion Moors‘, ‘Boom! Our Hot Snails’, or even ‘O, So A Moonlit Shrub’. I arranged the letters into ‘A Brutish Loon Oms Not’, which seemed quite appropriate for Glastonbury.