*spit*
One last bit of ironmongery. Sorry the focus is none too good, but it’s dark in the kitchen. Note the whirring thingamabob on top: this is a clockwork mechanism to turn the spit, to roast the beast before the fire. The rope leads to a weight which would have to be cranked back to the top periodically. Put some boy out of a job, this newfangled contraption did.
One of our cookery books points out that most of us have never had real roast beef — what we call roast beef is really baked beef. And when you think about the difference between a rotisserie chicken and one from the oven, you’ll realize that’s true.
The posts this week are from Michelham Priory, which we visited on Sunday. As the guide explained to us, a priory was kind of like the social services of the day. Unlike the monasteries, which were shut off from the public, the staff in the priory were priests intended to minister to outsiders. They gave food and shelter to the poor and nursed the sick.
Like all the others, this one was disbanded by Hank the Eighth, but luckily for us lived on as a private residence. Or a piece of it lived on, anyway.
Right. What time is it, kids? It’s Dead Pool time! Well, it will be tomorrow at 6WBT!
May 8, 2014 — 11:05 pm
Comments: 17
Forty whacks…well, nearly twenty, anyway
Hey, I bought a Lizzie Borden hatchet! We went to a big nursery today, set in an old Victorian walled garden with beautiful ornate greenhouses. It was part of a gorgeous old estate, now a school. That would have been an awesome thing to post about but, ummm…I forgot to take pictures, so here’s the thing I bought from the antique tool shed.
I used to be a Lizzie Borden aficionado. I’m not usually a fan of (technically) unsolved cases, but you have to love a prim Sunday-school-teaching spinster who wakes up one fine August morning and takes a hatchet to the old folks.
I do think she did it, though she was acquitted. Everyone in Fall River thought she did it, too, which made her later life a misery. Though her father left her rich, she was nicked for shoplifting not long after the murders. And may or may not have had a fling with a famous actress of the day. What’s not to love?
Well, in the end, lots. I lost interest after many years readying when it dawned on me that most of the mystery surrounding the case was due to the extreme incompetence of the police. Even by the standards of the day, they sucked. They didn’t search the house or anybody in it for days, didn’t verify the whereabouts of the principals. The whole business would be a lot more fun if it weren’t full of stupid, unnecessary holes.
Still, the sheer lousiness of the investigation has made the Borden murders a healthy cottage industry for upwards of a hundred and twenty years. I was amazed when I did an images search just now, how much stuff has come to light just since I last looked into it just a few years ago…including an autopsy photo of Andrew Borden. You can search for yourself, if you’ve a mind-ta.
As for the hatchet, it was never proved to be the murder weapon. It was found in the basement, snapped off just below the blade, covered in ashes. Still, I’ve always had a hankering for one like it. And not to bury in any particular skull, neither.
September 2, 2013 — 9:22 pm
Comments: 17
And finally…
The circus. Our semi-official end of Summer.
We’ve been going to this one since before we lived down here, so it’s about as old a tradition as we have together.
This year’s show was excellent. I mean, for a little podunk small town circus. As usual, everybody did multiple acts, and when the jugglers weren’t juggling, they were selling balloons and popcorn.
Every year we hold our breath, waiting to see if the circus comes. The owner (and ringmaster) wants to keep going; the rest of the family is tired and wants to quit. That’ll be a sad year, my friends…
August 28, 2013 — 9:47 pm
Comments: 13
Escaped!
We’ve promised ourselves we’ll get out and Do Stuff as much as possible while the nice weather lasts, so today we took a field trip to Pevensey Castle. Haven’t been there in years.
This is an old one. It started its life as a Roman fort some time before AD 300, and it looks as though something big and pissed off has been teething on it ever since.
To the East is the Church of St Nicholas, where this man lies in effigy. They had held their flower festival over the long weekend, so the was church full of flower arrangements. Also, someone had laid close-cropped living turf down either side of the central aisle, so grass was growing in the church, for all the world like the opening chapter of Phantastes (a story that freaked infant me out a little). Spooky.
We walked West past the castle to the Church of St Mary, Westham, which calls itself the first church built by the Normans after the Conquest. Unfortunately, it was locked — which is quite unusual. I hope it doesn’t mean they’ve had vandalism trouble.
And we also visited the old courthouse and jail (now museum), which was being minded by a daft old Yorkshire woman, for some reason. There I bought a half crown from my birth year. And I gave the old lady two bantam eggs I discovered in my pocket (Violet laid them under the lavender), for her tea.
And then we went to Mickey D’s and had a Big Mac. The End.
August 27, 2013 — 9:41 pm
Comments: 30
The last of the village fêtes
It’s a long weekend here in the UK (euphoniously described as the August Bank Holiday), the last long weekend — believe it or not — until Christmas. Really, we need to jigger our vacation days around a little.
We went to two of the last village fêtes today. Probably the very last; must have Uncle B consult his calendar.
I bought a picture frame, a cut glass wineglass to drink my mead from and a little embroidered Chinese bag to put my pencils in. Uncle B bought a cherry pitter (don’t ask).
Also, I haggled with a bookseller. He wanted to sell me four hardback books for 40p, but I persuaded him to take a pound. Because that’s just the way it is here.
Yes, there was maggot racing. No, I didn’t bet on the maggots, though I believe Uncle B has played the slimy ponies in years past (and won).
On the way through Rye, we noticed the circus tent pitched in a field. The circus. That really is the very end of the season, right there.
Where did the Summer go?
August 26, 2013 — 9:22 pm
Comments: 38
WooooOOOOoooo…!
Good article in this month’s Smithsonian magazine (full article online) on the Great New England Vampire Panic.
In the Nineteenth Century, rural folk around Southern Rhode Island and nearby Connecticut got it in their heads that TB outbreaks were actually vampire attacks. Which, when you think about it, must have made a certain twisted sense: one by one, people inexplicably sickened, wasted away and died. What did a farmer know of bacilli?
Many, unknown, maybe hundreds of people were dug up and mutilated all over that area of New England. Many of the corpses were in suspiciously good shape, thanks no doubt to the cold.
I took a little pilgrimage to Mercy Brown’s grave in Exeter, RI when I lived nearby. She was the last to get The Treatment. They dug her up, cut out her heart, burned it on a nearby rock and fed the ashes to her ailing brother (who died).
Here’s the thing: this was in 1892, a stone’s throw from fancy pants Newport and a whisker from the 20th Century. Her father, who didn’t believe a word of this vampire shit but felt pressured by his neighbors, lived until 1922. America was really, really embarrassed by the whole business.
Mercy’s grave was in an ordinary little stone in an ordinary little rural cemetery in the middle of nowhere. The only sign it might be something were the little coins and candles and bits of tat around the stone. (Same as H.P. Lovecraft’s, on the other side of the state. But not Lizzie Borden’s, for some reason).
If you like that sort of thing, the article is well worth a read.
Damn. I should have saved this for Hallowe’en, shouldn’t I?
October 8, 2012 — 10:25 pm
Comments: 15
Aw, now, ain’t that purty?
This week is predicted to be sunny and warm — and we haven’t gotten a lot of THAT this Summer — so we decided to go out and roll around in it.
This glittery bit of postcard-perfect Disney fru-fru is Bodiam Castle, one of the prettier ruins in the neighborhood. You may know it as the Swamp Castle from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where they deliberately cropped out the moat and made it look…less than fabulous, on account of it was the establishing shot for:
All the kings said it was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same! Just to show ’em! That sank into the swamp; so I built a second one, that sank into the swamp; so I built a third one, that burned down, fell over and then sank into the swamp; but the fourth one…stayed up!
It’s roofless and spent a lot of years as a ruin, but it’s about the prettiest ruin I know (possibly after Battle Abbey). You’re allowed full access (the bridge over the moat is ’round the back) including to the surviving upstairs rooms. It’s covered in graffiti which, being hundreds of years old, is worn illegible but laboriously carved in tidy Times New Roman.
We ate sammiches by the moat, much of which went to the ducks. I wish we’d thought to throw a bit in water, where there were carp the size of toddlers. On the other hand — considering how many ducks tried to follow us back to the car — maybe not feeding the big ugly fish was a smart idea.
Oh, hey, we passed about TEN trucks on the road, loaded to the overflowing with hops. This area (and particularly Kent) were once gigantic producers of hops, but after the war, most were bought in from other countries. So what does a big local crop of hops mean? ARTISAN BEER!
September 5, 2012 — 9:46 pm
Comments: 26
Wherein Weasel channels Madame Blavatsky
I feel a little mean poking fun at this enormous, shabby floral crown. It was undoubtedly done up for the Jubilee in June and I’m sure it was lovely and not at all huge and tacky. Something of the Delta Dawn/Miss Havisham about it today, though.
We took a picnic to Bateman’s today — the house Rudyard Kipling lived in for the last thirty plus years of his life. It’s a 17th Century pile built for an ironmaster. Kipling loved the place at first site. It’s all paneled in rough-hewn old oak paneling and stuffed full of beautiful period antiques (pretty much as Kipling left it).
And yet…I really don’t like the place. This is the second time we’ve been, and we didn’t like it the first time, either. I’m about as psychic as a potato, but there is something very sinister about that house.
So I was surprised and not surprised to read this in his Wikipedia entry:
[Kingsley] Amis and a BBC television crew went to make a short film in a series of films about writers and their houses. According to Zachary Leader’s ‘The Life of Kingsley Amis’:
‘Bateman’s made a strong negative impression on the whole crew, and Amis decided that he would dislike spending even twenty-four hours there. The visit is recounted in Rudyard Kipling and his World (1975), a short study of Kipling’s Life and Writings. Amis’s view of Kipling’s career is like his view of Chesterton’s: the writing that mattered was early, in Kipling’s case from the period 1885–1902. After 1902, the year of the move to Bateman’s, not only did the work decline but Kipling found himself increasingly at odds with the world, changes Amis attributes in part to the depressing atmosphere of the house.
No, I wouldn’t like to spend 24 hours in Bateman’s, either.
August 22, 2012 — 10:36 pm
Comments: 30
Run, it’s a cyclops!
Yeah, these two butt-ugly abominations are the Olympics mascots, Wenlock and Mandeville.
Wenlock was named after the Shropshire town of Much Wenlock. It is thought that the Wenlock Games, founded around the mid 19th Century acted as a catalyst to the modern Olympic Games that we all know (and love?)
Mandeville is named after the Stoke Mandeville Hospital, Buckinghamshire where in the 1940s, Dr Ludwig Guttmann established the Stoke Mandeville games at his Spinal unit at the hospital. From here it is said the foundations were laid for the modern Paralympic games.
Now don’t you like them better? No? Me neither.
The Olympic torch is in Sussex at the moment, passing through into Kent tomorrow. I couldn’t give the proverbial at a rolling doughnut about the Olympics, but when Stuff happens near me, I have to be there in the front row waving a flag, yelling, “yay whatever!” It’s an American thing.
It’s trudging through Hastings before nine in the morning, so I have to be up bright and early to catch it. A friend is driving me in. Uncle B would rather floss with rusty barbed wire than turn up and wave a flag.
Nighty night!
July 17, 2012 — 8:50 pm
Comments: 45
Oops!
Oh, hi. You didn’t wait up did you? Oh, you did? Because I told you I’d be…
Look, I was only…
But the bus was…
GROUNDED?
That is so totally unfair!
-=SLAM=-
Sorry. We went to see these guys. Which are sort of these guys. At least, they play their old material and include that guy who played the Flying V in the original band. But the old bass player has formed these guys under the same name and there’s lawsuits and bad feelings and all kinds of shit.
Anyway, they were really good. And it’s really late.
Have a great weekend!
October 15, 2011 — 12:05 am
Comments: 9