Every 16th Century farmhouse…
…needs a 40″ widescreen TV.
Okay, this isn’t quite the act of aesthetic vandalism it looks. Instead of having a big glommy tube television perched like a shrine in the focal point of the room, this will fold flat against the wall when we aren’t watching it. And…display a slideshow of classic Tudor portraits, or some shit.
And it isn’t quite the act of devil-may-care profligacy it looks, either. Uncle B’s been saving for quite some time. It’s amazing the sweet deals you can get in the teeth of a global financial meltdown!
Me, I played this one just right. “A widescreen TV?” I yawned, languidly flashing a full set of gleaming weaselfangs, “oh, I guess that would be okay. I guess.”
Hahaha! Stoopit badger! I’m a Namerican! The moment he hit the ON switch, I *pwned* that sucker. My eyeballs stuck to that big boy like duct tape sticks to duct tape. Eet ees so verra verra beeeg and shiiiiiiny!
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to watch the latest installment of CSI:Pulaski. Or the Wheelbarrow Channel. Or…whatever. Does it fucking matter?
December 22, 2008 — 9:22 pm
Comments: 25
Dis-graceful
Okay. I confess. The general lateness and lameness of posts lately? I’ve been…
…umm…
…asleep. And that’s not a metaphor for hot, hot mustelid sex or anything. Uncle B and I have passed out comatose a minimum of ten hours a day since I got here, snoring and farting like livestock.
Seriously, it’s whack. It’s Britain-induced narcolepsy. Turbojetlag. Even the cat can barely lift her head off the pillow to cadge Friskies. I knew I had some catching up to do after a year of low drama and high anxiety, but this is stupid. We haven’t spent eight hours awake in a row since November 26.
Tonight, I struggled awake to the sound of, “oh my god…it’s ten o’clock!”
And I go, “I dreamed I was having lunch with Mrs Rockefeller and Bette Davis.” And I really was.
And he goes, “I dreamed I was watching the Prime Minister put on a conjuring act.” And he really was.
Well. We’re a well-matched pair, I guess.
Surprisingly, that’s not as happy a thought as you might imagine.
December 16, 2008 — 8:30 pm
Comments: 25
Curiously incurious
There are 200,000 listed properties in the UK (I forget where I read that). I’m pretty sure we looked into at least half a million of them before we found what we were looking for. No, it wasn’t one of these pricey horsey things — I just needed a screencap.
There are still LOTS of wonderful, heartbreaking properties that anyone with a fistful of money can buy — and many need LOTS of heartbreaking repair and renovation. Outside (most) royal palaces, these homes have been continuously lived in and altered throughout their lives.
We looked over one house with a 13th Century cellar, a 15th Century kitchen, and a fine 18th Century façade stuck on the front. Heh. Modern architecture.
I really liked that one, but it needed a lot. We still drive past it often, and the new owners haven’t done much with it. Uncle B calls it Hell House. He worried about the drains. And the funeral parlor next door. (“It’s very quiet,” the tenants told us, “but sometimes late at night, you can hear the refrigerators kick in.”)
We were told there was “probably” a 16thC smuggler’s tunnel connecting that house to the (still extant) pub across the street. And I’m like, “what the FUCK is the matter with you people?!?” You tell me there’s “probably” an ancient tunnel under my house, and I’m “probably” out back digging a hole with a spoon within 15 minutes of signing papers.
Jesus. You can take the whole blasé English thing too far, you know.
So it’s just as well we didn’t buy a house in one nearby lovely, haunted old town. Most of the houses there, you have to sign an agreement not to dig more than 18″ deep in your own garden. On account of you’ll almost certainly dig up something important and Roman. Or the plague.
They were really hard hit by the Big One of 1348.
December 10, 2008 — 8:18 pm
Comments: 17
Putting the ‘suss’ in Sussex
Well, you didn’t think we’d put the ‘sex’ in Sussex, did you? Too much hard work.
I have to be cute about the exact town, since that plus the name of the house (not really Badger House) is sufficient unto a mailing address. Houses with names are common here, but our whole neighborhood is houses that are named but not numbered. That’s just how special we are. I think I can safely say Sussex.
Heh heh. Weasel make funny. The county of Sussex is so wide that, for administrative purposes, it has been divided into West and East Sussex since the Twelve Century. Had to be, since you couldn’t ride a horse from one end to the other in a day.
The motto of Sussex is “We wun’t be druv” — which means I shall end my life as it began: in the company of stubborn, illiterate rednecks
Badger House is walking distance from the nearest good sized town and a few miles from the English Channel. On a clear day, we can stand on the shore and see France, but not well enough to get a missile lock. We are surrounded on all sides by acres and acres of sheep. This is serious farming country, for reals.
Our usual roaming territory is wider, stretching from Canterbury in the East, where the Cathedral is, to Salisbury Plain in the West, where Stonehenge is, to London in the North, where there are no British people left at all.
That covers many impossibly cool places and things, about which it will be my pleasure to blog — as I am all politicked out for a while and sick to death of the stupid economy.
December 8, 2008 — 7:20 pm
Comments: 26
Pragmatic in the attic
Imagine the excitement when I discover the rough wooden door to the attic, high in the wall in the oldest section of Badger House. Imagine the delight when I discover that it contains a cistern.
Yes, this is the thrilling plumbing post that I promised Brigette earlier. Sweasel.com is all about the minions.
Houses in Britain are generally designed with a cold water storage tank in the attic. This is filled from the mains (what we’d call the ‘city water’) and in turn is fed by gravity into the bathroom taps, toilets and the hot water heater. Only the cold tap in the kitchen sink is fed directly off the mains.
WHY this is so, I haven’t discovered. Not definitively, anyway. So that individual households had a supply of water in case that nice Mister Bonaparte came calling, maybe. To avoid everyone in London getting up at six in the morning, enjoying a fulsome dump, flushing the toilets simultaneously and whooshing the whole United Kingdom down the Thames some morning, perhaps. Anyway, they’ve done it this way for a long time.
Modern water storage tanks are completely enclosed plastic dealies, but the older style cistern is open to the air. I’m going to have to get a ladder and find out what’s what up there. I might be brushing my teeth and washing my face in mousewater. Yum!
It’s probably modern, though. We know Badger House was without indoor plumbing until as late as the 1960s and major renovations were done in the 1970s and again in the 1990s. As per law for historical buildings, the inlet and outlet pipes are all exposed and run across the ceilings and down the walls. From the time we get up in the morning and begin using water, Badger House gurgles and chuckles to itself as water moves around the pipes.
It’s like living in the alimentary canal of a big dozy beast.
December 4, 2008 — 5:35 pm
Comments: 33
S. Weasel proudly presents…
Weasel’s playing hou-owse, Weasel’s playing hou-owse!) remindened me of something I hardly needed remindening of: it would be a HELL of a lot easier to approach Britain if it were just a little more frankly foreign. When you’re stuck up the Zambezi or the Po, you damn well know you’re not in Kansas any more (I assume) and you adjust accordingly. Britain is like…Kanzace. It’s so almost-but-not-quite right, it makes my nerves hum on a low, uneasy frequency.
Some of the differences are deliberate, for god knows what marketing reason. You can buy britches at TK Maxx. You can rub Oil of Ulay onto your face. Same companies, a tiny bit utterly fucking wrong.
Some of the differences are because we are not as same as we think we are. Brits and Yanks watch so much of each other’s television, share so much of each other’s history, that we forget the 200 years and 3,500 miles that separate us.
It’s inevitable — for some months, anyway — that this blog will be about an American houseweasel in darkest Britain. The trivial, pointless shite on which I thrive.
But what the hell. You don’t really want to read any more blogs about politics right about now…do you?
November 28, 2008 — 8:40 pm
Comments: 86
And a very happy Thanksgiving from Merrye Olde!
This time when Charlotte vanished, I knew where she’d be. High in the inglenook is a small opening that opens into a great, dark hole lined with brick, a yard all around. It was once the bread oven — though whether there is a fireplace beneath it, or it was only used for proofing dough, we do not know.
Now it’s warm and dark and dirty and hung with cobwebs. I can’t imagine any place on earth more likely to call Charlotte’s name. And there she was, sitting demurely way in the back, blinking green at me through a fringe of spiderweb.
I walked into town all by myself today, like a real grownup. I got money out of an ATM (silly, colorful wampum with some lady in a tiara on) and strolled down the High Street (Woolworth’s has gone into bankruptcy this week, at last; that leaves only the Aussies to worship at the altar of Frank W.) and met Uncle B at the open air market. It was a little damp today, but they were out gamely selling anyhow.
A wind off the sea is howling around the house tonight. The fire is warm, the booze is soon and the turkey is waiting for the combined ministrations of a weasel and a badger. Much to be grateful for, this little mustelid.
You too, even if you are not lucky enough to be me today. Happy Thanksgiving!
November 27, 2008 — 5:25 pm
Comments: 25
We Have Weasel…
Well, okay. My To Do list is…done.
Wow.
Huh.
I haven’t done much more than sleep since I got in, but I promise to do more. Like drink. And then sleep some more.
Charlotte’s fine. She’s slinking around like a bad smell, but that’s a big step up from sulking in a box somewhere. She’s even voluntarily stepped into a room with Uncle B in it, mostly because she’s flat fascinated by the fire. She’s never seen fire before and, on the whole, she’s inclined to think it’s a good thing.
Wait ’til she sees her first Christmas tree.
Anyhoo, the champagne ain’t going to drink itself! Thanks for the good vibes, dudes.
Another day of treating myself like fine china — cracked, beautiful — and I’ll be back to my old self.
Yeah. Sorry. Best we can hope for.
November 26, 2008 — 6:37 pm
Comments: 37
Fasten your seatbelts; here we go!
Right! It’s on. I’ve got a whole fuckwad* of things to do in the next eight weeks if I’m going to pull this off. I’ll be totally boring and self-absorbed — when I bother to show up at all. That’s my promise to you.
Still, the process by which an American woman and her cat legally emigrate to another country might prove instructive. Think of my journey as a public service. Like Katie Couric’s on-air colonoscopy.
And fifty-eight days from today, if all goes according to plan (ha, ha) we’ll all sit down together (metaphorically) for champers and spotted dick before a roaring coal fire.
Toodle pip, and other gay British stuff!
*Fuckwad: a unit of measurement equivalent to three or more shitloads.
September 29, 2008 — 11:15 am
Comments: 85
What else you going to plant in a weasel’s garden?
You must click this link for the big sloppy color version, with extra ninja toenail action. Yeah, up yours, Cute Overload!
There was a mound of clean, loose earth left over after the mighty Shit Processing Factory was installed, and Mummy Runnybabbit apparently snuggled right down into it and laid bunny eggs.
Because Uncle B is terribly old and terribly rich, he sometimes hires a couple of spry young lads to help him in the garding. They dug up these buns like ‘taters, they did. Shrieking and screaming (the buns, I mean). No sign of mama. Longtime readers may recall that rabbit’s milk is very nutritious and baby buns only need to nurse once a day. But I think these guys are old enough to be weaned.
I instructed Uncle B not to tell me what they did with them, because I assumed it was something horrible and manly. Took them by their back legs and cracked them like whips, perhaps. Bit they little heads off while singing Viking war ballads.
But no…Squishy McSlopbucket and his merry pirate crew took them into the next field over and left them in the embankment. Great. They’re going to be right back in our garding in no time. MAKING MORE BUNS.
Some day soon, Uncle B and I are going to have to have that little talk about the birds and the bees and the runnybabbits.
August 14, 2008 — 11:38 am
Comments: 49