Day of Suck
Right. Here we go. This is an absolute asshole of a journey, on so many levels.
I am not a happy bunny. I am, in fact, a pretty hungover and sad bunny. My plane doesn’t leave until 6, so we can have a leisurely morning of it, but that makes everything all the later out the other end.
Heathrow is a multiculti snake pit. The gate is miles from the check in. The moving walkways are a sort of Möbius strip; you walk and walk without getting where you’re going. And somehow keep bumping into that bastard MC Escher coming back the other way.
The brisk tail wind that wafts me gently into England is a head wind going back, adding an hour at least to the flight. By the time I arrive and make it through customs, I will just miss one bus and wait an hour for the next. Then it’s a short cab ride home. Have you ever grabbed a cab for a short hop? They don’t thank you for it.
By then, it’s midnight local time. Five a.m. in my head. Shuffle through two weeks worth of voice messages and bills and into bed. I have to go to work bright and early tomorrow. No, really.
And that’s if everything goes as well as it can.
I suppose I’ve ruined my intercession prospects with Saints Buttelf and Rumpswab. If you have anything interesting you pray to, a weasel would be grateful for the thought.
May 29, 2007 — 6:57 am
Comments: 10
Steam-powered Britannia
Once and sometimes twice a year, on Hope Farm in Sellindge, Kent, Britain comes out to play. The old Britain. The steam powered one.
There are vintage cars and motorcycles and tractors and musical automatons and, older still, shire horses pulling the plough. There are people selling old screwdrivers and thumbplanes and tires (or tyres, if you prefer) and cakes and teacups and books. There was a Magic Accordeola playing Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”
And there are steam engines. Steam tractors, steam motorcycles, steam rollers.
We ate a good Dutch cheeseburger and listened to a bad garage band. Mostly, though, we looked at, listened to, smelled the bitumenous exhalations of and otherwise enjoyed keeping company with steam engines.
It was a happy end to a happy two weeks. And then the rains came. And the weather, which had been sunny and fine the whole time, turned mizzly and cold and entirely appropriate to my mood. London tonight in the drizzle, Boston tomorrow night in the…whatever.
Oh, well. That’s tomorrow.
May 28, 2007 — 6:44 pm
Comments: 6
Special bonus weekend report: Mr Brain’s Faggots
Because if you can’t trust a weasel to keep a promise, what is this world coming to?
When I first saw Mr Brain’s fine product, I’m sure it was labeled “Mr Brain’s Frozen Faggots.” I can’t work out if “pork faggots” is more or less funny than “frozen faggots.” Anyhow, of all the absurd things in the British supermarket that make an American fall to the floor and bark like a hound, Mr Brain’s offering takes the prize.
I’ve always meant to try them. I almost left it too late; we had to visit several supermarkets before finding one down-market enough for MBPF’s.
I was pretty sure I was going to be okay with the pork balls, but the “rich west country sauce” worried me a good deal. Looks like some unholy mash-up of moose testicles and Shoney’s strawberry pie filling. Frozen, it was a symphony of shit brown and ice crystals.
Cook from frozen, 30 to 40 minutes at 230 Eurodegrees.
On the whole…not bad. Tasted very strongly of sage and onion, like country sausage but less firm. Subsequent research has turned up worrying information about the traditional composition of faggots, but it looks like the Brain variety involves nothing more terrifying than pig liver. Ugh. Liver.
I ate all four. I’d do it again on a bet, but I won’t crave them in the middle of the night. Just as well, really.
I leave you with this classic BBC news item about the Doody family and their famous love of the British faggot.
If I die in the night, tell the weasels I love them.
May 26, 2007 — 7:13 pm
Comments: 10
An embarrassment of mustelids
We visited Wildwood Trust today, an animal sanctuary outside Canterbury. Not the best in some ways, but the staff is friendly and it’s awfully heavy on mustelids, so we like it. Stoats, weasels, badgers, otters, pine martens, pole cats. One elderly graying mink, who slept splayed out on top of his cage box like he didn’t give a shit, which he didn’t.
I saw my first real, live stoat here. His name was Socrates (“Soccy” to his friends) and he came out and did the weasel dance for us that day and everything. It’s one of those golden weasel memories. We went back to visit Soccy many times.
Of actual weasels, we saw hide nor hair. Not that day, nor any other. (Well, they’re all weasels to me. Brits call regular sized weasels “stoats,” and only the little teeny ones “weasels”). Anyway, the teeny ones always hid from us, even at feeding time (now with extra bunny asses!).
Today, Soccy’s cage was full of weasels! Well, two. Curled up in a happy sleepy funtime weaselball behind the glass wall of the hidden lair.
Get the size of these guys! Fully grown, they aren’t much bigger than mice. This little vicious killer dude could curl up and nap in a teacup.
Soccy, alas, has gone on to that great Weaselheim in the sky. We asked.
Got some great pictures of the lynxes (which are new, I think) and the wolves, who howled for us prettily when an ambulance went by. And the harvest mouse (surely, they must be on the sixth or seventh harvest mouse by now). The Scottish wild cats have had themselves an adorable vicious psycho killer kitten (beautiful and famously untameable, those things. They look like big stripey housecats and think like Ted Bundy). I started to post more pictures, but this blog isn’t a particularly good gallery.
Anyhow — farewell, Soccy! I lift my glass of…whatever the hell this is I’m drinking.
He was a stoat. The very stoat. The stoatiest of stoats.
May 25, 2007 — 7:05 pm
Comments: 24
Shapnots: Botolph’s Bridge
Eep! It’s enough to drive you to drink, this sign. It’s monks, burying the body of St Botolph at midnight.
Or, as we have taken to calling him, St Butt-Elf. Because, all things considered, we’d rather go to hell together.
Botolph was born in the 7th Century…sometime. He died in 680 and was buried in the foundation of the church he founded in Icanho. Wherever Icanho is. Nobody knows. In 970, King Edgar moved his remains to Burgh. In 1020, Cnut moved them to Bury St Edmunds. Later, parts of him were moved to Thorney, parts of him to Westminster Abbey, and his head was taken to Ely.
Not surprisingly, he’s the patron saint of travel.
Botolph led to Botolphston led to Boston. Uh huh. Weasel don’t make this up.
— 1:00 am
Comments: 4
Shapsnots: St Rumwold’s Church
The thing about this corner of England is not that there are wonderful old buildings about — that, you would expect. The astonishing thing is that there are so very many wonderful old buildings. They can afford not to be precious about them. There’s nothing the least unusual about an 18th Century home, a 15th Century pub or a 12th Century church. In fact — at least as far as churches and pubs are concerned — there seem to be more from those particular centuries than any other. Perhaps it was a fad, like hoola hoops or the environment.
Kent and Sussex are dotted all over with little churches with their distinctive squat steeples. You see the square outlines poking out all over, surrounded by quaint villages, being squeezed by vulgar modern cities and way, way out by themselves in the middle of sweet nowhere at all. They have many structural features in common, not least of which that they always stand unlocked. Point of religious principle, I suppose.
We’ve turned the latch and stepped inside many of these empty little churches (and we haven’t been struck by lightning or nuffink). They all feel heavy with the passage of time. More by the passage of time, certainly, than any great burden of religious piety. These aren’t great and ancient cathedrals; they’re very old, very small churches for small and rural people. Generation after generation of ’em. Somehow, I have a more vivid sense of the flirtations that have surely taken place inside than of the prayers.
Maybe that’s just me.
Anyhow. This one is St Rumwold’s. As usual, there is a list of past rectors posted in the entryway. The first was S. deWeston in 1286. That, children, is what you call very fucking old. Though, as usual, chunks of it have been replaced and repaired over the years. More of this one than most, actually — the stone tower has, at some point, been replaced by a wooden one, and the steeple by lead one (early Nineteenth Century, that…I could read the dedication from below).
St Rumwold, I discovered, was a 7th C saint who only lived three days and fell out of the womb preaching sermons. Hey, I don’t make this stuff up. People 1,400 years ago made it up.
May 24, 2007 — 10:00 pm
Comments: 6
Tea, old school
It was fine and hot today. We walked along the shingle beach at Littlestone to Romney Bay House, a big square pile built for Hedda Hopper in the late ’20s. Then, it was painted bright yellow and nicknamed the Mustard Pot. Now it’s white and a hotel. It stands off by itself right on the edge of the Channel.
We sat in the sunshine and ordered cream tea for two. It was us and the waiter, a dark man of indeterminate nationality. Not even the cook showed up today, so we couldn’t have sandwiches, but scones and jam and clotted cream would do us fine. Presently, a little fluffy dog trotted out of the house, curled up in the shade under our table and begged the occasional bit of scone.
To the North, the white cliffs of…Folkstone, actually. Dover is the next promontory up. Behind us, the local golf links. In front of us, the neat green lawn stretched right down to the beach and thence the sea. Big ships and little went up and down the Channel.
We heard subdued applause, and turned to see the English Women’s Golf Tournament had stolen up behind us and were making neat ladylike putts across the dunes. I shitteth thee not.
“Right! That’s it!” I banged on the table with the pommel of my Bowie knife, “somebody’s got ten seconds to find me a goddamned deep fried ‘possum barbecue sandwich before I start kicking limey ass!”
You really can’t give these people an inch.
— 5:01 pm
Comments: 7
Shapsnots: The Alfriston Knob
They describe this object as a market cross but, really, who are they kidding?
A truck driver jumped the curb and shattered it in the…Fifties, I think. They pasted it back together again. So it’s the Shattered Knob of Alfriston, even.
Alfriston is an ancient and beautiful little town. Very old, very unspoiled. Morning Has Broken, Cat Stevens’ signature tune, is a hymn written in the Thirties by Eleanor Farjeon, supposedly about the beauties of Alfriston.
May 22, 2007 — 4:01 pm
Comments: 9
Up in flames
The Cutty Sark.
Which is not my charming way of telling you I’ve killed a bottle of cheap hootch this morning. The great ship Cutty Sark caught fire today. She was in the process of major renovations so much of the planking was off-site, but most of it was there and is very severely damaged.
The Cutty Sark was the most famous tea clipper ever built and the only one still afloat. Well, afloat in a special dry dock built for the convenience of 13 million tourists and one weasel. We went to see the Cutty Sark on my very first trip to London in 1997. I’ll never forget it, because…well. London! Greenwich! Cutty Sark!
She was launched in 1870 and traded tea with China. Then wine, spirits and beer. She plied the wool trade to and from Australia from 1885 to 1895, setting speed records from Sydney to London every year. She began losing money and was sold to the Portuguese, where she ran between Rio and Lisbon. She was in London for a sprucing up in 1922 when an Englishman saw her and bought her back. She finally retired after WWII and was towed Greenwich, where the dry dock was built.
The name Cutty Sark comes from Burns’ poem, Tam O’ Shanter. There’s a beatiful witch in it wearing a short (or cut) shirt — “cutty sark” (the Portuguese crews called her “Pequina Camisola”). That’s the witch, up there on the figurehead, though why she’s clutching a horse’s tail or a hunk of hair or whatever, I do not know.
I haven’t heard whether she survived the fire.
May 21, 2007 — 6:55 am
Comments: 17
Beer of the Day: Fursty Ferret
Beer: Fursty Ferret
Brewery: Hall and Woodhouse
Alcohol: 4.4%
Pros: It has ferrets all over it!
Cons: Tastes distinctly of ferret.
I had the t-shirt, time to sample the beer.
Have you ever picked up a product and suddenly felt the warm throb of a marketing drone humping your shin? Such a product is Fursty Ferret. Here’s the back label:
When in decades past the idyllic country home of Miss Rose Gribble became a local inn, legend has it that the inquisitive local ferrets frequented the pub’s back door on a mission to sample its own reputed brew. In their honour it was named Fursty Ferret, and today it’s brewed in greater quantity — so now you can enjoy the celebrated ale that still eludes the ferrets of Gribble Inn.
I think I just fwowed up a little. England is an exotic land, but insufficiently exotic to support roving bands of alcoholic ferrets congregating behind hotels to cadge beer. More’s the pity. Still, my favorite beers are dark red bitters, and this one looked like Mr Goodferret.
The label describes it as sweet and hoppy. I found it bitter and skunky. Which is, I suppose, entirely appropriate.
“Skunking” is what it’s called when light strikes beer and transforms some junk in the hops with a big chemical name into a sulfur compound very similar to eau du skonk. Skunking can happen in less than a minute in clear glass bottles exposed to sunlight; it happens in dark brown bottles exposed to fluorescent light, too, but it takes a few days. Which means that pretty much every import you’ve ever drunk from a glass bottle is at least a touch skunked. It might even be fair to say that a whiff of pong is a proper and intended part of the bottled beer experience.
Well. It’s not like I was going to pour it down the sink. I give it:
two and a half drunken weasels.
— 1:00 am
Comments: 1