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
I can too accessorize…!
Here’s something I discovered through my friends at the Steadfast Trust: this knife. It’s called a seax. It was common throughout Northwestern Europe. In Britain, a seax was carried by men and women alike, and was widely recognized as emblematic of their status as freeborn Englishfolk. (Not every Englishman was freeborn. At the time of the Domesday Book (1086), 10% of England’s population was slaves. There’s something I didn’t know until recently).
The seax is a single-edged blade with a thick, sometimes bent, spine, a narrow tang (the metal bit that extends into the handle) and a natural wood, bone or leather handle. The blade ranged from a few inches, used for eating and kitchen tasks, to a proper short sword almost two feet long. The seax was usually worn in a scabbard hanging from the belt, sharp side up, in front of the body.
Also, covered in runes. Check out the Seax of Beagnoth, fished out of the Thames in 1857 and now in the British Museum. “Beagnoth” was inscribed on it (probably either the smith or the owner) along with the only known complete inscription of the twenty-eight letter Anglo-Saxon runic alphabet. Because writing is magic.
Seax is the origin of the word Saxon. Also Middlesex, Wessex, Essex and Sussex. From the online OED:
Saxon (n.) c.1200, from Late Latin Saxonem (nominative Saxo; also source of French Saxon, Spanish Sajon, Italian Sassone), usually found in plural Saxones, from a Germanic source (cf. Old English Seaxe, Old High German Sahsun, German Sachse “Saxon”), with a possible literal sense of “swordsmen” (cf. Old English seax, Old Frisian, Old Norse sax “knife, short sword, dagger,” Old High German Saxnot, name of a war-god), from Proto-Germanic *sahsam “knife,” from PIE *sek- “to cut” (see section (n.)).
Also from the same entry:
Accordingly they all met at the time and place appointed, and began to treat of peace; and when a fit opportunity offered for executing his villany, Hengist cried out, “Nemet oure Saxas,” and the same instant seized Vortigern, and held him by his cloak. The Saxons, upon the signal given, drew their daggers, and falling upon the princes, who little suspected any such design, assassinated them to the number of four hundred and sixty barons and consuls ….
Um. We’re sorry? Say, that woke up some old braincells. I bet they don’t teach Hengist and Horsa in Middle School history any more.
Google Images is chock full of seax porn. There are tons of independent makers. Ooo, this is a nice one.
This is a lovely example, too. When Chrome translated that page from Polish to English, it informed me that “the vagina is no longer an accurate reconstruction.” So, ummm…I guess we know something about the Polish word for “sheath” now.
Anyway, I have to have one. No, a seax, you fool!
Remember: here. Tomorrow. Six sharp. Dead Pool Round 53!
August 22, 2013 — 10:51 pm
Comments: 23
No, YOU wear it to town
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “you couldn’t wear that here.” I know that’s what you’re thinking, because we’re all thinking it, because you couldn’t safely wear this anywhere, not even here in the heart of all things historically Anglo Saxon. Especially not here.
I bought this at Sissinghurst on Sunday, at a booth for an organization called the Steadfast Trust, a group with the perfectly uncontroversial aim of preserving English history and passing it on to English children.
Ha ha! Just kidding! It’s incredibly controversial!
Last year when we walked up to this booth, someone was chewing out the nice blonde lady behind the counter. Because I think how it works is, one minute you teach childrens how to thatch a roof and the next thing you know, coloreds have separate drinking fountains. Word.
I’m surprised the show organizers have allowed these people in for a second year (whether they were here before that, I don’t recall). The Smallholder’s Fair is very aspirational, not to say a bit twee, and this sort of thing…isn’t a good fit.
Oh, here’s the thing…the folks we chatted with at the booth were very nice, very earnest people. But the Left has made the very idea of an identity group based on Englishness (for which read: whiteness) so off limits that most decent people are afraid to come within miles. So, over time, organizations like this one will genuinely skew to the weird.
It’s a damn shame, but you know what? I don’t have the courage to push back, beyond buying a lapel pin I don’t have the balls to wear.
August 21, 2013 — 9:49 pm
Comments: 32
Good times, bad business models
Hey, I have some language trivia for you. In olden days, when a British family kept a pig, he’d be put in a pen down at the bottom of the garden and fattened all year. Then in the Fall, when the old boy was ready to go, a specialist hog butcher would go from house to house taking care of business. He’d set up out front, and the pig would be “led up the garden path” to his doooooom.
Zo! This weekend was the annual Smallholding Fair at Sissinghurst Castle. They’ve held it for four years now and, though it’s a trek for us, it’s a highlight of our late Summer. I don’t think we’ve missed one.
Technically, a smallholding is an agricultural concern that is bigger than an allotment and smaller than a farm. But really we’re talking middle class people with a vegetable patch and six chickens who love artisanal beers, free chutneys on stinky cheeses and rustic garden furniture made from railroad ties and ploughshares. In other words, us.
This is something we see an awful lot of down here. People whose first career was marketing or engineering or nursing — people who did pretty well for themselves, in other words — who retire to the country at just past their peak and decide to open a little shop. Or weave blankets. Or throw pots. Or raise rare breed hogs. Or brew beer or bake cakes or make soap or forge knives or cane chairs.
And they make absolutely gorgeous stuff…for as long as they can make a go of it. Most of them crash and burn after a year or two. Problem is, they expect to make middle-class money out of old-fashioned working class trades. They charge eye-watering money and still barely manage to cover expenses, let alone what they believe their time is worth. The ones that survive end up modulating their expectations — and working harder than they ever thought possible, back in the days they sat in cubicles.
Anyway, these are our people — in many cases, literally our friends and neighbors — and we love to turn out and pay stupid money for their high class gee-gaws and listen to lectures on the difference between cyder and cider.
There was a fancy beer tent. ‘Nuff said.
August 19, 2013 — 10:30 pm
Comments: 26
Math is hard, let’s go to the mall!
I suck at math. I’m not proud of this. I have a feeling some of the most interesting stuff of all requires math and I resent that I can’t share. (My grandmother was an algebra teacher, can you believe? Which goes to show there’s a lot we don’t understand about heredity).
So the Obama years (including, to be fair, a big chunk of the Bush years) have been tough for me. All them big numbers. I could swear there was a time when a billion dollars was a lot of money. Why, we even got exercised over hundreds of millions. A few nervous nellies thought we shouldn’t waste money by hundreds of thousands, but who’re they kidding?
So with the US debt inching up to $17 trillion, I’m completely at a loss. I need a nice simple visual aid to help me wrap my brain around that number. Luckily, I found one.
Ready? The value of the United Kingdom — the whole thing — the land, buildings, cars, currency, oil, patents, livestock, bank accounts, even little chikkens is £7.3 trillion. That’s about $11 trillion in dollars (by today’s exchange rate. Have to watch that. If my calculations are correct — and they’re probably not — a penny difference in the rate amounts to $73,000,000,000).
The good news is, the chunk of US national debt that is held by the public is around $12 trillion. That means if you paid off your credit cards, you guys could pool your money and buy Great Britain. With a trillion in walking around money left over. And the good news is, it comes with its own fully socialized medical system, already in place!
You have all weekend to make this happen.
August 16, 2013 — 10:35 pm
Comments: 29
Dagnabbit, we missed Bloodstock again :(
Bloodstock is an annual four day festival of heavy metal music set in the picturesque village of Walton on Trent, Derbyshire. Because England.
About a hundred bands and fifteen thousand fans turn up for it. But we didn’t. Because it was last weekend. And we are not really fans. (Well, Uncle B had his moments. He’s more into early liturgical music now).
BBC took a few snaps here.
That guy on the right? His cleavage tattoo says “1921__2009.” I’m pretty sure dude got ink for his gran. Awwww.
August 13, 2013 — 10:56 pm
Comments: 24
This lady
Dora Saint wrote novels about English life under the pen name Miss Read. Most of her books are about one of two fictional villages, Fairacre or Thrush Green. There are a bunch of them, too — twenty about Fairacre, fourteen about Thrush Green and a smattering on other subjects. None was a bestseller, but she had a loyal readership and put out about a book a year well into her eighties. She died in April last year, ten days short of her 99th birthday.
I read her first book, Village School, over the weekend. It’s one of the Fairacre ones. It was slow, gentle, subtly funny and only a very tiny bit sharp. I liked it. I’m not sure whether to tackle the whole series — I’m at the point in life where I’m painfully aware I won’t live long enough to read all the good books, and twenty is a big ask — but then I catch myself wondering what happened next.
It was her publisher’s idea to release the books under the name of her main character and narrator, the head teacher Miss Read. The village school is what we would call a one-room schoolhouse, with all the local children between the ages of five and ten, taught in two groups by two teachers. Thirty or so at a time. The school has no running water and buckets for latrines. Coke stoves for heat.
Thing is, it was set in 1955. And I gather, little village schools like this persisted into…well, I guess in more remote places, into today. I would like to think they all have toilets now.
Oh, what the heck. I’ve just bought the second one. I would like her publisher to note (I’m looking at you, Orion Book Group) that if they’d offered the Kindle edition for a sensible price (say 99p) they’d have gotten my money like a shot. I prefer reading off my Kindle. As it is, the used trade got my pittance and the publisher can go jump. I’m not paying £5 for a download when I can get something nice in the mail for under £2.
August 12, 2013 — 10:12 pm
Comments: 17
Ewwww
That there is a solid lump of lard and wet wipes the size of a city bus. It has been hindering the proper operation of the sewers of Kingston, Surrey. The things they fish out of London’s drains.
That’s a frame from the sewer cam. Now stop and realize there’s some poor bastard whose job is to sit and watch Sewer TV all day long.
August 6, 2013 — 10:29 pm
Comments: 27
Return of the Swan fambly
We’ve seen a lone swan in the field several times this year, so we assumed there wasn’t a swan family. But lookee here what I spotted in the back field this afternoon.
Those aren’t six headless swans, they’re six enthusiastically grooming swans. Though the bird at the far left is a little too enthusiastic, judging from the cloud of white feathers on the ground.
Short post, but Monday night is Garbage Night and Bath Night, so we’re pretty excited around here.
August 5, 2013 — 10:23 pm
Comments: 27