Mad old bats in stereo
Uncle B’s mother is in the hizzouse. Okay for me; I get along with her just peachy, but I think the poor bastard feels like he’s in a mad old bat sandwich, and he’s the olive loaf.
Today, we all drove to the beautiful, haunted town of Winchelsea in East Sussex. Old Winchelsea was a large and important medieval town, until it was swept into the sea by a massive flood in 1287. Edward I ordered Winchelsea rebuilt on the hill above. A newfangled planned town, with the streets built on a grid.
The new Winchelsea was likewise a thriving port. But it was sacked by the French and the Spanish a few times and especially hard hit by the Black Death of 1348. When the harbor silted up in the 16th C, that was pretty much it. Winchelsea today is tiny and spooky and lovely and full of terribly, terribly rich people.
The surviving church — actually, the surviving chunk of the surviving church — is at the center of the grid, and it’s spectacular. For two months in 1855, John Everett Millais stood about where I’m standing inside and painted L’Enfant du Regiment, a wounded little girl asleep on the tomb of a knight (from a fictional story about an orphan adopted by her father’s regiment).
Well, he painted the tomb on this spot; he painted the little girl later in his studio. And a damn fine job he made of it, too. Millais is hit or miss — when he’s good, he’s very, very good and when he’s not, he isn’t so much. This one is very fine. It’s oil on paper laid on canvas mounted on board. It lives in Connecticut at the Yale Center for British Art.
And tomorrow? Dunno yet. Presumably, two old bats and Olive Loaf hit the road again…
August 25, 2009 — 6:55 pm
Comments: 2
Sssschwaaaaa…!
So we’re minding our own business, tooling down a country lane when all of a suddenly, out of nowhere, there’s this almighty howl — the kind of hypersonic roar you don’t so much hear as feel in your breastbone and molars — and I look up through the sunroof to see the goddamned Red Arrows scream over our heads. By some astonishing chance, framed exactly in our sunroof.
Low. Real low. Low enough to scare the sheeps and the cows. Low enough to induce poor Uncle B — doing his best to keep his eyes on the road — to make hisself a little puddle.
The Red Arrows are the RAF’s Blue Angels. I saw them in Rhode Island last year and they were awesomely awesome. It’s a big ol’ nine-jet flying group. They shot over us in a formation of five, pause, four. They were coming back from an air show in Eastbourne (we saw them, way off in the distance, headed toward it yesterday).
Oh, hey, I remembered the blog Bruce writes for: And Still I Persist. Okay, no I didn’t. He wrote and told me. And what’s even more embarrassing — as I suspected — I never blogrolled it in the first place. Which is dumb because it’s a good ‘un.
Go. Read it.
I called Bruce “Poindexter” once, and he’s never let me forget it. Also, I may have threatened to beat him up and steal his lunch money. Or something. It was a long time ago and I’m unclear on the details.
And so ends a lame week in lameness. Good weekend, everyone!
August 14, 2009 — 7:40 pm
Comments: 27
Twirlin’, Limey style!
These poor girls haven’t fallen down or anything. This is a deliberate part of their baton-twirling routine, thenkyewverymuch. It was the worst exhibition of twirling expertise I have seen since…ummm…the one before it.
Yep, it’s the village fête season! Do we have a similar phenomenon in the States? In the Midwest, perhaps? I don’t know.
I remember we had a state fair in Tennessee, which was a big ol’ 4H-meets-midway-carny kind o’ thing. Seems like every year, they announced on the news that somebody had found a black widow in the bathroom. I got lost at that fair one year, when I was five. That was fun.
Then there was the Fiddlers’ Jamboree in Smithville, which was a musical cornpone county fair sort of dealie.
But here, pretty much every village around picks a Saturday in Summertime and holds itself a little fair, in varying degrees of size and lameness. They’re built around stalls selling baked goods and used books and knick-knacks. Local charities are usually represented. There are a few rides, maybe. Perhaps some livestock or other beasties. The antique car people turn out to show off their handiwork. And then some kind of live performances; a band, performing animals. Twirlers. Lawnmower races.
There must be a dozen of them inside our usual roaming territory. Sadly, we can’t go to them all — they cluster on particular weekends.
I can only imagine what I’ve missed…
July 27, 2009 — 6:20 pm
Comments: 16
Partners in crime
They work as a team. Dude on the left pinches scones; dude on the right clotted cream. I don’t think the lady who owns them spends a whole lot on chicken feed or Friskies.
Heh. Yeah. That’s right. I managed to screw two posts out of this one time a few weeks ago when we stopped for tea. That’s what a lazy sack of shit I am this week.
Have a good weekend, everyone!
July 3, 2009 — 6:57 pm
Comments: 26
Please help me. I’m trapped in an episode of the Avengers.
…and I look complete shit in a leather catsuit.
We stopped for cream tea (!) one afternoon and this steam train (!) hooted down the tracks behind the parking lot. It isn’t part of an antique steam fair or anything; that’s a genu-wine scheduled train service. Toot toot!
That wasn’t today, though. Today, I have been practicing conservation of energy. If you’ve noticed a certain lack of oomph in my efforts this week, our little corner of England has had itself a by-god heat wave. Nothing compared to Tennessee or <ugh> Louisiana — or even Rhode Island — can do, but I reckon it got into the nineties. And humid. And almost no-one here has air conditioning.
It hit the crescendo today and it’s supposed to break tonight. The moon was orange when I went out earlier, and it’s vanished altogether now. We hear the occasional rumble from the direction of France.
Yep. That there’s another build-your-own-joke.
July 2, 2009 — 8:04 pm
Comments: 21
Never send a pussycat to do a weasel’s job
Stoator, God of Weasels. Nobody ruin Weasel’s fun pointing out it’s probably an otter, ‘K?
Another Kinkadian run in the country today. We stopped in a little village for refreshments in a self-consciously quaint tea shop (this part of the country is lousy with such places: grossly overpriced and fatally twee, but the food is usually excellent. Even I pronounced the fruitcake edible). We found this lil’ feller in the antiques shop next door.
Later, while Uncle B enjoyed a well-deserved nap, the cat hooked a paw under my chair and pulled out a little mouse. Then he got away. Again and again and again. We chased that poor little bastard from the chair to the couch to the bookshelves and back again for an hour before I gave up and woke up The Badger. (I needed someone to lift the couch while I threw a tea-towel over the bugger).
After another half hour of this roundy-round, the cat got bored and wandered away, Uncle B declared himself not an expert on the catching of mice, and I finally managed to slip a flowerpot over the exhausted rodent. Hardly as big as my thumb, he was, and panting hard.
Somewhere in the hedge tonight, a sadder but a wiser mouse is telling a breathless tale about a cat, a badger and a weasel.
God, I’ve died and gone to Toontown.
May 14, 2009 — 7:59 pm
Comments: 17
Today we made a mayor! Want the recipe?
The Antient town of Rye (totally their spelling) was once a busy seaport. Then the sea hiked her skirts and tripped away, leaving the town, more or less, high and dry. Now it rises up improbably on Rye Hill surrounded by green flat farms that were once beaches.
I love Rye. Touristy on the surface, rough and crusty underneath. It’s an earthy, bawdy place. If we were going to live in a town, Rye would be high on my list.
Once a year, on the first Monday in May, the mayor of Rye takes the oath of office in a ceremony known as the Mayor Making. The office of mayor goes back to 1289, but nobody knows how far back, or whence came, this particular tradition.
First the town crier comes out of the town hall and hams it up for a while. That’s the prat in the hat here. (I think “crier” might be this dude’s full-time job description; he’s available for weddings and Bar Mitzvahs).
Then, about noon-thirty, the new mayor appears in the window above and — in a ritual described as part sadism, part charity — throws scuttles full of hot pennies to the children below.
Pennies. Heated in the fire.
One assumes the custom dates from a time when a penny was a lot of money. One further assumes that the pennies were originally heated painfully — if not dangerously — hot. One assumes the children wanted them very badly. One is cynical about these things.
Today we could see the rest of the town council in the background, milling about in their civvies (they all wear robes on some occasions), drinking alcoholic beverages. After the Right Worshipful the Mayor of Rye’s pitching arm got tired, the rest of this worshipful assembly moved forward and began tossing their small change out the windows.
Something about standing in the street while elderly drunken plutocrats pitch small boobytrapped coins at me from on high seems a refreshingly honest demonstration of the role of government.
May 4, 2009 — 5:51 pm
Comments: 10
Recycling: not just for urine any more
Please enjoy this graphic from last Christmas. Today, I am closing on my house and leaving on a jet plane.
Um…I hope. I wrote this a week ago and set it up to auto-post.
November 25, 2008 — 4:00 am
Comments: 45
Nature is so freaking relaxing
These things always look so easily do-able on the trail map. A short, sharp climb from the car and then a gentle meander along the ridge-top to Mount Tom.
Hahaha. Idiot.
It was an evil mile and a half of basalt towers, crumbly shale and thousand-foot plunges. This section of the Metacomet-Monadnock Trail runs right along the Western edge of this huge pile of rock to Mount Tom. I’m mildly acrophobic (my hiking buddy is slightly more so, lucky for me or I might have been dared into something stupid).
There were parts of the trail we both blinked at in stunned disbelief, while clinging each to a tree twenty feet away. One memorable section was a rock three feet long and eighteen inches wide on which half of the white paint blaze had crumbled away and fallen into the abyss. I did some bits on my hands and knees, and some bits on my butt and a lot of it nowhere near the official trail markers.
None of my pictures show the full horror, as I was generally yards inland, clinging to something and making low moaning noises, so I stole a more representative picture from somebody else (and I didn’t even have the grace to note who I stole it from). I mean, c’mon…this is a trail?
So we got all the way down to the toe and suddenly realized it had taken us three and a half hours to get where we were, there was an hour and a half before dusk and the closing of the gates, and there was no way on God’s crumbly basalt earth we had the stamina to turn around and go back the way we came. In the dark. With a pocket flashlight.
I voted we go West, to the foot of the hill. There was a paved forest road at the bottom that would make an easy walk back to the car in plenty of time. I mean, sure, it was 1,200 feet down, but I felt certain we could find a tree-line spot where we could safely butt-surf to the bottom.
But no. We went down the gentler slope East and landed on the main road several miles from the car, half an hour before gate-closing. We didn’t exactly hitch-hike, but we found a man walking in the woods with several children and made with the doe-eyes until he gave us a ride to the car.
And that was the stupidest day hike I have ever done. The end.
November 3, 2008 — 10:35 am
Comments: 22
And wet? My dear, the smell…
I took my poison ivy and my new cold for a spin on the river today. I rented a kayak with a bunch of friends. It was a GORGEOUS day — sunny, light breeze, low eighties. I’ve never paddled a kayak before, but I was pleasantly pleased that it wasn’t as tippy as I expected (cue music from Jaws).
I didn’t take a camera, which is just as well. After successfully paddling six and a half miles (per the GPS), I tipped the fucker over within fifty feet of shore. I was last one in, and my friends stupidly stood on the bank and watched me flail around uselessly for awhile before someone asked if I needed help. Frankly, I think those bastards were all laughing too hard to put back in.
Once the kayak tipped, it had next to no bouyancy. And I was wearing sneakers, so I had next to no traction.
Eh. My new GPS is (reasonably) watertight, and I had wisely left my wallet and stuff in the cargo area of somebody else’s kayak. Somebody not quite so retarded.
More booze, please.
August 23, 2008 — 7:18 pm
Comments: 26