Winchelsea Mark II
Saturday’s bonfire was in beautiful, haunted Winchelsea.
The original Winchelsea was an important shipping port next to Rye, on the edge of Rye Bay. Probably. Nobody’s entirely sure, as the sea came in and ate it up one day in the 13th Century.
They saw it coming, though, and had time to build another one. Edward I ordered the new Winchelsea built in a grid pattern, high on a hill nearby.
It was quite a large town by Medieval standards, but it was sacked by the French a couple of times. And then, you know, there was the Plague. That sure wasn’t good for tourism.
Winchelsea today is a tiny place, a fraction of what it was. Walk half a mile over empty, rolling, sheep-covered grass and you’ll find what used to be the farthest town gate.
It’s tempting to call Winchelsea luckless, except what’s left of it is absoLUTEly lovely. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that every building in the town is listed. And everywhere, the sweet, pervasive, inescapable, permeating smell of contemporary money. Gobs and gobs of it.
Winchelsea being Winchelsea, their Guy was a guy. In a Guy Fawkes costume. The good citizens gathered around the town well and put on a little pageant, with the Himself, two guards in 16th Century armor and a narrator. Then they trussed Guy up in a cart with a rope around his neck, and we all marched him around the town to the commons behind a small pipe and drum troupe from the local prep school and had a jolly good bonfire and fireworks display.
They replaced dude with an effigy for the bonfire, of course, but Winchelsea being Winchelsea, it was a really good effigy. Highly realistic. There was more than one gasp and nervous laugh when the Guy caught fire and burned up all convincing-like.
November 8, 2010 — 11:31 pm
Comments: 19
Remember, remember
England isn’t lost yet; these people love them some fire and explosions.
Happy Bonfire Night! Remember, remember the fifth of November — 1605, when Guy Fawkes attempted to blow up the houses of Parliament. Parliament, king and all. He and his buds hoped to make England a Catholic nation again.
Problem is, the last time England was a Catholic nation — 40-some years earlier, when Bloody Mary was on the throne — a good 300 Brits were burned alive for the heresy of Protestantism.
They’re still grouchy about it.
Still, any excuse to dress up, parade around with torches, drink beer, set off fireworks and have a hellaciously huge bonfire with an effigy on top. I think only Lewes still burns an effigy of the Pope every year — 17 Lewesians were burned at the stake during the Marian persecutions — but everybody burns somebody.
In Sussex, they don’t have Bonfire Night, they have Bonfire season. From September almost through to Christmas, local village bonfire societies take turns having bonfire celebrations, so we can all turn up to all of them. Or lots of us turn up to lots of them, anyway.
On the fifth itself is our favorite: Icklesham. It’s a tiny town near Hastings, but they have a robust bonfire society, the Robin Hood Bonfire Society (out of the Robin Hood pub). And they charge £3 admission, which goes towards next year’s festivities. They always put on an excellent show.
They did it again tonight — though it was a bit a mizzly out and attendance was down, which may affect next year’s celebration. Still, the beer was my favorite!
Pull up a toasted Catholic and join us!
November 5, 2010 — 11:25 pm
Comments: 41
Nice puss
This handsome feller is from the inside of the church of St Peter and St Paul, the Norman church next to Peasmarsh Place.
The village of Peasmarsh is a mile from the church. Legend blames the Black Death. Originally, homes were built all around the church, as usual. But when the Plague came, they burned the houses to the ground and rebuilt a mile off. The rector had three symbols carved into the church to keep death away: a stag to ward off rats from the drains, a unicorn to keep plague from the door, and a bird to keep plague from coming in the roof.
Or so they say.
This guy, however, is a leopard — one of two on either side of the arch leading to the altar. It was his job to protect from leprosy. There was a lot of it about.
Charming place.
I love exploring village churches. They are traditionally kept unlocked, and they’re chock full of Norman bits and weird pagan-y iconography.
Christianity came to Britain bass-ackwards — the early evangelists were told not to disparage pagan tradition, but to quietly absorb it. By, for example, building churches near sacred trees and groves.
The result is kind of Jesus meets Harry Potter. I honestly don’t know how else to describe it.
We recently watched a very interesting BBC program called Churches: How To Read Them on the history of British church imagery. Presented by a man with a seriously annoying lisp.
BBC loves doing that.
October 28, 2010 — 11:11 pm
Comments: 8
Can Alice come out and play?
Peasmarsh Place is a dreary-looking old folks’ home in the village of Peasmarsh. Natch. At least, it looks dreary from the outside; it ain’t cheap, so it’s probably pretty nice inside. It does have ten acres of very impressive gardens — trees, mostly — that are open to the public two days a year, Spring and Fall.
We went yesterday. I’ve wanted to go since forever. Gardens, schmardens — the occupant in the 1860s was Charles Liddell, Alice‘s uncle. In these grounds, Alice was told some interesting stories by the Rev’d Dodgson.
At least, that’s what their marketing blah says.
Most of the trees were blown over in a hellacious storm that flattened Southern England in 1987, but there are plenty of gigantic specimens left. And interesting young trees. And spooky abandoned greenhouses with invasive whatnots pressing their leaves against dirty cracked glass. And a gorgeous Norman church next door.
And wild pigs. Apparently. After dark, they come out of the forest and roam the grounds and make themselves dangerous, so the signs said.
And, yes, I turned my ankle in a rabbit hole.
Amusing exercise: know who else lives in little Peasmarsh? Paul McCartney. Not sure where. All we know is, his house is up a drab lane of carefully deceptive boringness. Peasmarsh Place is here. Have a Google around, if you’ve a mind to.
One more thing: a link to Ace’s latest Be The Wave post. Expectations for this election have gotten so crazy out of hand, if the Republican wave isn’t HUGE a week from tomorrow, the Dems will call it a win for their side. And a mandate. With all that entails.
Please please pleeeeeeeeeease</whiny kid voice> do what you can to turn out your fambly, friends and cubiclemates on November 2.
October 25, 2010 — 9:54 pm
Comments: 34
Ye olde Franke and Beans
Uncle B has been working hard lately and I’ve been watching him do it, so today we took a break, broke out the Weaselmobile and drove to Bodiam Castle, which is this stunning 14th Century semi-ruin along the River Rother.
It’s got everything you want in a Medieval castle: a big square sandstone thing with round towers on the corners and square towers in the walls, with gatehouses, crenellations, portculliseses, murder holes, machicolations and a big giant moat full of carp and fornicating ducks (well, they were certainly fornicating today).
It had a cameo role in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (as the establishing shot of “Swamp Castle“) and I caught Uncle B humming “Brave Sir Robin” under his breath in tune with the crumhorn music once or twice.
The castle wasn’t lived in for long and was deliberately ruined (or “slighted“) after the Civil War (theirs, not ours, duh) to keep it from being used as a fort again. Then good old Mad Jack Fuller bought it in 1829 and started excavating and shoring it up. Which they’re still doing.
The lady in the long linen cape and jingle bells (god, I hope she works there) told us that workmen on the sewer lines found a complete medieval pot and a piece of wood with a nail in it, just this morning.
The whole thing is covered in incised graffiti — mostly from the 19th Century, when it was an early tourist attraction. But I’m guessing this handsome meat and two veg, carved on the wall outside the guardtower loo, is a bit older.
What? Yes, I went to a beautiful 13th Century castle on a lovely Fall day, and all’s I brought you was some crude penis graffiti. Geez, learn to use Google, why don’t you?
October 20, 2010 — 10:17 pm
Comments: 17
I get a lot of these
Uncle B keeps asking me what I’m going to post tonight, and I keep telling him and telling him.
Stoopid badger.
Good weekend, everyone!
October 8, 2010 — 9:40 pm
Comments: 30
Long walk, meet short pier
Somebody torched Hastings Pier last night.
Bastards.
It was a great spindly thing with a ballroom at the end, like a Victorian lady hiking her skirts and wading out to sea. Designed by Eugenius Birch (who also designed Eastbourne Pier and West Pier in Brighton — which was itself torched a few years ago), it opened in 1872 on Britain’s first bank holiday.
Its fortunes — like those of all Britain’s pleasure piers — were up and down through the 20th C and into the 21st. In the Sixties and Seventies, Hastings Pier was a rock and roll venue, hosting concerts by The Rolling Stones, The Who, Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd.
They’ve already made arrests. I’m guessing it’s insurance money or something, but we may never get to the bottom of it.
There is no part of England that is farther than a hundred miles from the sea. When I was told this, I sat down with a map and a piece of string and worked it out. It’s true. The seaside holiday is deep down in the marrowbone of the Briton.
From the very beginning of the Nineteenth C — and really hotting up once railroads made travel easy — Brits built pleasure piers like this. Dozens of them. So they could visit the ocean even when the tide was out, without getting their pink satin slippers wet.
They’re like…long, thin state fairs stuck into the sea (the one at Southend-on-sea is almost a mile and a half long!). They had concerts and shows and shops and food running down the middle, railings on either side to look out over the water and at night they’re lit up like Rock City.
I love these things. I’m sure they make perfect sense to Brits.
October 5, 2010 — 7:03 pm
Comments: 17
A faceful of hot, wet ugly
I know, I know — all the cool kids have blogged this PSA already.
It’s an eco fantasy snuff film, where true believers calmly murder those not willing to cut energy consumption by ten percent. And it’s an extraordinarily ugly piece of work. That’s my favorite bit up there — right at the end, when they blow up Gillian Anderson and her eyeballs slowly squee down the glass.
The blowback was instant and HUGE and not all from the right. They’ve pulled it down already. Repeatedly. As of now this copy is still working and, if all else fails, I’ve downloaded the .flv (drop me a line if you want it — my blog uploader choked on it).
I think I can explain where this thing comes from, though. I mean, besides scary evil eco-psychosis. Raw, ugly and in your face is a very common style of charity and public service advertising in the UK.
There was that anti-smoking TV ad I found so hard to watch; dragging a guy down the steps and out the building by a giant fish-hook stuck in his face (“hooked” on cigarettes, uh-huh uh-huh). Or the man slumped bleeding in the driver’s seat while his wife screams his name down the phone (cell phones distract drivers, see?).
Because of my IP, I even get British adverts while surfing my good old true-blue American web sites. Most common are the tragic children; the perennial starving African babies, the tight close-up of an Asian child with cleft palate, the little girl with the stumps for legs. Picture of sad-eyed child with horrible parental insults superimposed in text. Scared teenager on the streets with shadowy figures closing in. Oh, and the animal charities — ye gods! All those filthy one-eyed puppies and mangy bears.
I’m sure the advertising agencies would say that shocking imagery is real and we should be forced to confront it — and that awful images get the desired response. But there are two huge disadvantages to this approach.
The first is for me, a consumer of media. It makes my world a relentlessly horrible place; a place of perpetual emergencies and nagging ugliness. It is, in a word, a downer.
And the second flows from the first: I get jaded. To shock me, agencies have to up the ante continually. Dream up more and more horrible imagery. This isn’t the first time green campaigns have evoked jihadi/September 11 imagery to sell the urgency of their cause. To the people who made the “No Pressure” video, this seemed like a perfectly natural next-step progression in the ratcheting up of edginess.
But to all of you who aren’t exposed to this ugly shit all day, it was like, WHAT THE FUCK IS THE MATTER WITH THOSE PEOPLE?!
October 1, 2010 — 8:35 pm
Comments: 52
My hops. Let me show you them.
September is the time to harvest the hops. Next door in Kent is big hop-growing country, and has been since the 16th Century. Before then, lots of different herbs had been added to beer to make it bitter (to counteract the sweetness of the malt), but hops have a preservative, plus a slight antibiotic effect which makes conditions more favorable for brewer’s yeast.
Of course, they didn’t know shit about antibiotic effects in fifteen-hunnert-something. They just knew beer made with hops turned out better and lasted longer.
It took a quarter of a million workers to bring in the crop, about a third of whom were vacationing London families from the East End. A hell of a vacation that must have been, sleeping in crappy little hopper huts and working in the fields all day. But the money was good, it was out in the country, and it seems to have been pretty sociable work.
Fresh hops were then taken to oast houses, which are giant drying kilns. In the 19th C, oast houses took on a distinctive shape: round towers with conical roofs — usually in two or three in a cluster. The roofs have a little flange that catches the breeze and moves a vent to face the wind.
Or did. All the harvesting and drying is done industrially now, of course, and the oasts have been converted to housing. Tons of them around here.
I’ve been trying to get my hands on some hops for several years. In old houses and pubs with low beams, it’s traditional to hang strings (or “bines”) of hops along the beams like curb feelers, to warn people off smacking their noggins. They look and smell great. But you have to get them fresh, before they go brittle and dry, and they disappear into the beer trade very fast.
We stopped at a fruit stand for some plums and another customer pulled in, the back of his car full of freshly-picked hops. I mugged him. He’d picked them for some other middle-class pretend-farmer’s-wife country wannabe, but weasel got there first.
Somewhere in England tonight, a woman named Tallulah or Cassandra or Jemima is thinking of lost hops and crying bitter tears.
September 23, 2010 — 11:02 pm
Comments: 34
It’s better than bad, it’s good!
Bought this at a smallholding fair. It’s a grow-your-own ‘shroom kit.
Dude sells wooden furniture pegs — you know, like the ones you bang together Ikea furniture with — covered in different varieties of mushroom spores. Sells ’em in little burlap bags, along with instructions and a correctly-sized drill bit.
What you do is, you take a freshly-cut hardwood log (needs to be fresh because the mushrooms live on the moisture and sugars), about four inches by two and a half feet, and drill a series of holes in a diamond pattern. The holes are a little deeper than the pegs. Bang the pegs in, plant the log in a cool, damp spot and…wait a year, eighteen months.
I bought hericium Erinaceus, which is supposed to taste like delicious lobsters.
But where in the Sam Hill do you get freshly cut hardwood logs? Anyone who sells wood will swear on his granny’s silver noggin that everything he’s got is two years old or more and seasoned all to hell.
We had begun eyeballing out neighbor’s orchard and planning a midnight raid when we remembered a local smallholder who sells apples. He had a perfect pile of wood…only it was six months old. Two months or less is optimum.
Oh, well. It’ll have to do.
Then the drill bit snapped off in the log before I got all the holes drilled.
Well, hell. This shit grows wild. In the woods. How hard can it be?
September 22, 2010 — 10:34 pm
Comments: 31