Comes the harvest…
And today we harvested the currants. Red currants, black currants, white currants and green currants (the latter are any currants which are not fully ripe). Y’all will have to forgive me this evening; I’ve got about six pounds of the suckers to clean and sort. And find room for in the freezer. Before I can drink.
Have a good weekend, everyone!
August 2, 2013 — 9:55 pm
Comments: 22
Lookit that face…
Just lookit those faces. The seated man with the umbrella and goggles (lookit his face!) is an anti-fracking protester, who has chained himself to…something. The standing man (just lookit his face!) is waiting for a saw (being handed to him, bottom right) to cut the silly young man loose.
This is the sleepy village of Balcombe in West Sussex. They aren’t even trying to frack there. Not yet, anyway. The oil company wants to dig an exploratory hole six inches wide to see what the situation is.
That was enough to bring the hippie circus to town. Protestors have also glued themselves together on site, and blocked access with an antique fire engine. Because, England.
It’s almost as if lefties hate cheap energy…
August 1, 2013 — 10:38 pm
Comments: 22
Slappy Bumday, Spilliam Wooner!
What’s that you say? Royal behbeh? No, no, no…much more important: today is the 169th birthday of the man who gave a name to getting your murds wixed.
Reverend William Archibald Spooner was born in London in 1844. He was an albino. That doesn’t have anything to do with anything, but I bet you’re thinking, “holy shit — Reverend Spooner was an albino!” So I led with that. I aim to please.
Spooner was an Anglican priest and a lecturer at Oxford for 60 years. So, a clever man. Which is probably why when he misspoke he didn’t speak gibberish, like you and me. He made a horrible, twisted kind of sense. Like, “it is kisstomary to cuss the bride”. Although the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations contends there is only one confirmed Spoonerism and the rest were made up by his students.
Stupid Oxford Dictionaries. Forever shitting in my oatmeal. Screw ’em, here’s some of my favorites (whoever really said them):
■ A toast to “our queer old dean” instead of “our dear old Queen”
■ He also supposedly informed her majesty that he had in his bosom a “half-warmed fish” for which he meant “half-formed wish”
■ Calling farmers “ye noble tons of soil”
■ “A well-boiled icicle” for “well-oiled bicycle”
■ “Blushing crow” for “crushing blow”
■ And then there’s this: “Mardon me padom, you are occupewing my pie. May I sew you to another sheet?”
Oh, and the title graphic? Our Lord is a loving shepherd.
Also, you can talk about that other obscure British birthday if you want.
July 22, 2013 — 9:50 pm
Comments: 34
We’re having a heat wave
I suppose you’ve all read about Britain’s killer heat wave, the one with a body count of over 700? Look up. That’s it. That’s the real thing. That’s our actual weather forecast for the week.
Last week, it was in the mid-70s and sunny every day, clear and in the mid-50s at night. Or, as we used to call that in Tennessee, “April.”
To be fair, it’s been hotter in other parts of the country that are even less used to it than we are (it is *always* snowing somewhere in Scotland), but I don’t think it’s broken 90 anywhere. Most of the fatalities are swimming related.
So, as we slide into the weekend, what’s the hottest you’ve endured? We used to visit my grandmother every August. She lived in the bayou, on the banks of the Amite River in Baton Rouge. Stepping out of the air conditioning was like being sucked violently into Satan’s armpit.
p.s. What, you thought I was going to go with Barack Obama in a hoodie? Noo thenk yew. I’ve already disrespected an iconic African saint this week.
July 19, 2013 — 10:44 pm
Comments: 48
back yard artichoke
Well. Not to go all Pollyanna on your asses, but it would seem every variation in weather is ideal condition for something and our shit Winter has had some interesting side effects. Everyone’s roses are spectacular this year (we have…eight, I think). A whole patch of opium poppies have sprung up were they were not deliberately planted (it is legal to grow somniferum in the garden here, but not to harvest). The elder flower was especially impressive all over the county (meaning mucho elderberries in the Fall).
And this guy, my back yard artichoke. Made it through the Winter and is busy growing three heads (as you do). This sucker was at the optimum harvesting age, before the thistle begins to open. Not the biggest ‘choke ever, but sweet and tender.
The perks of marrying a gardener who likes a challenge.
July 9, 2013 — 9:51 pm
Comments: 21
Cupcakes for Jesus
So endeth a week of short posts. The church fête is this weekend, so we’re baking Cupcakes for Jesus tonight.
We bring cupcakes by tradition (Uncle B does the actual baking, and I assist by washing things and fetching things and reading him the recipe wrong). By tradition, we finish them at two in the morning, rather the worse for strong drink. And, also by tradition, I chuck way too much red food coloring into the frosting, turning the end result a toxic pink that adults won’t touch.
This year, it looks like we’ll be finishing fairly sober and not long after midnight — so yay! I still spilled too much coloring in the frosting, though. Tradition!
Good weekend, all.
July 5, 2013 — 10:41 pm
Comments: 16
And this fabulous can of soup
We went to a church flower festival this weekend, one of England’s zanier natural disasters. How it works is, they pick a theme for the festival, and a dozen or so people make flower arrangements and little tableaux on the subject and scatter them around the church. There’s usually a helpful program.
That doesn’t sound weird? Well, this is how it usually ends up: say the theme is “summer activities”, you’re going to find a vase of zinnias and a grubby sneaker in the pulpit. And a bowl of badminton shuttlecocks with petunia in the baptismal font. (Hello? Salvador Dali called: he’s a lit-tle creeped out and he’d like a ride home now, please).
There’s usually refreshments and some stalls and other fundraising things outside, in aid of the church building. Bits of this church are 900 years old. It has clearly been extensively renovated many times over the centuries. There’s a sign on the tipjar by the door that says it costs £100 a day to keep the building together.
And that’s the thing. This is a little community to pony up a hundred smackers a day. And, without breaking a sweat, I can think of a dozen villages around me with small populations and beautiful ancient churches to keep afloat.
The big ‘C’ Church helps with the costs, of course, and there are various architectural grants and things. But these great old buildings are mostly kept alive by locals. I don’t know if it’s a Christian thing, this bedrock devotion to the church building. I suspect not. It’s very powerful, though.
Oh, I won that can of soup in the raffle. Only cost me a pound in tickets. I like to imagine some nice old English lady shrieking, “oh my lord — the flower festival is today! Quick, go into the kitchen and grab something. Anything!”
June 25, 2013 — 10:54 pm
Comments: 22
Happy Solstice!
‘Tis the Solstice! And you know what that means — Cosplay for Seniors at Stonehenge. Please enjoy the Daily Mail‘s photo essay on same. Now don’t you feel more dignified?
Also in the Mail, Are Chickens Smarter than Toddlers? I take their point that chickens are not stupid, I surely do, but I think describing them as having an innate grasp of structural engineering is a bit rich (this because chickens prefer diagrams of workable machines over ones that violate the laws of physics, would you believe). I’ll leave you to decide if you’d cross a bridge design as approved by Mapp.
First day of Summer was damp and cold here, but next week it’s going to be…damper and colder. Stupid global warming.
Enjoy the weekend, folks!
June 21, 2013 — 8:54 pm
Comments: 25
So, we got buzzed by this thing on Saturday
Last airworthy Vulcan bomber. After the Trooping of the Colour, where members of the armed forces drop by to wish Her Maj a happy birthday, this little number (XH558 to his friends) zoomed down to Hastings and then up the coast and right over our heads.
It was billed as the last flight of the Vulcan, but engineers have since found a way to strengthen the part of the structure they were worried about. So, not the last, but it doesn’t have a whole lot of juice left.
Not RAF. It’s in private hands. It was built in 1960 (like me!), decommissioned in the Nineties and bought by a private family, in unflyable condition. Since restored entirely by private donations. First flight after restoration: 2007. It takes eye-watering money and volunteer work to keep this thing going, so it stands a real tribute to the love Brits have for their feats of engineering.
It was a beautiful thing. It circled over our heads for a while and then took off up the coast with a roar like the last judgment, the kind of sound you feel in your breastbone.
Oh, the poor sheep.
June 17, 2013 — 10:30 pm
Comments: 35
I will put you some forbidden knowledge
The Appleby Horse Fair was held today, as it has been for three hundred something years. King James II granted a Royal Charter in 1685 allowing the fair to be held ‘near the River Eden’. So they do. They wash the horses in the river, gallop them down the ‘mad mile’ and then have a big horse sale.
It’s pretty much just a Gypsy affair now. Um, and that’s where it gets complicated.
There are the Gypsies of Romany descent, who have lived in England for many hundreds of years. There are Gypsies from Romania, the kind Adolph had a thing for. There is a traditionally nomadic people of Irish ethnicity who are also called Gypsies. And there are a number of crusties, essentially rag-tag old hippies and acid casualties who have dropped off the grid and live out of vans. And they are all, confusingly for a foreigner, called “Travellers” now. And protected by the government so hard, bald eagles think to themselves “geez, that’s a little over the top, isn’t it?”
I asked Uncle B a question about this a second ago, and he was like, “oh, god, you’re not going there, are you?” No. I’m not. This is one of those giant sore nerve-ending societal issues that the wise foreigner keeps her nose out of. I just had to explain it enough to talk about the article.
The Appleby Horse Fair is Romany Gypsies, of the kind that have been here since forever. The old farmers around here traditionally rubbed along with them pretty well. They’d let them park their wagons in the fields and hire them as seasonal labor.
So anyway, go to the article at the link and look at the horses. Notice anything?
The horses are almost all paints — that is, black with white splotches. Or white with black splotches, if you prefer. We recently watched an ancient program about the country — a relic from those long, long ago days before political correctness — that explained that Gypsies and American Indians love paints above all other horses. Because they’re both horse-stealing cultures and paints are each so individually unique and easily identifiable, it’s as good as a serial number.
So now you know.
Remember, Dead Pool tomorrow. Six sharp!
June 6, 2013 — 11:10 pm
Comments: 30