Today we made a mayor! Want the recipe?
The Antient town of Rye (totally their spelling) was once a busy seaport. Then the sea hiked her skirts and tripped away, leaving the town, more or less, high and dry. Now it rises up improbably on Rye Hill surrounded by green flat farms that were once beaches.
I love Rye. Touristy on the surface, rough and crusty underneath. It’s an earthy, bawdy place. If we were going to live in a town, Rye would be high on my list.
Once a year, on the first Monday in May, the mayor of Rye takes the oath of office in a ceremony known as the Mayor Making. The office of mayor goes back to 1289, but nobody knows how far back, or whence came, this particular tradition.
First the town crier comes out of the town hall and hams it up for a while. That’s the prat in the hat here. (I think “crier” might be this dude’s full-time job description; he’s available for weddings and Bar Mitzvahs).
Then, about noon-thirty, the new mayor appears in the window above and — in a ritual described as part sadism, part charity — throws scuttles full of hot pennies to the children below.
Pennies. Heated in the fire.
One assumes the custom dates from a time when a penny was a lot of money. One further assumes that the pennies were originally heated painfully — if not dangerously — hot. One assumes the children wanted them very badly. One is cynical about these things.
Today we could see the rest of the town council in the background, milling about in their civvies (they all wear robes on some occasions), drinking alcoholic beverages. After the Right Worshipful the Mayor of Rye’s pitching arm got tired, the rest of this worshipful assembly moved forward and began tossing their small change out the windows.
Something about standing in the street while elderly drunken plutocrats pitch small boobytrapped coins at me from on high seems a refreshingly honest demonstration of the role of government.
May 4, 2009 — 5:51 pm
Comments: 10
A tale of two foodstuffs
How is everyone today? Feeling well? No high fevers or unexplained night sweats? Good, good.
I’ve mentioned this about British poultry before: the standard whole bird you get in the supermarket, they snap the poor bastard’s legs off right above the feet and jam the stumps up his ass. It’s so undignified; the Christmas turkey ’bout moves me to tears every year.
Well, Sunday’s bird got hisself half untrussed and waved a jaunty stump at us on his way to the death chamber. I thought it was poignant. I share.
As for see below — some sonofarodent got into the cupboard and ate up my bran flakes. Ate ’em all up! I hope he shits himself to death.
April 27, 2009 — 7:35 pm
Comments: 24
Labour cowards
Y’all have probably heard of the Gurkhas (probably best remembered for their wicked effective kukri knives). The Gorkha people of Nepal had been hiring themselves out for soldiers since the way back. The Brits discovered them when they fought them during the Nepalese War of 1814-16 and somehow managed to call them Gurkhas. They kick all kinds of butt.
Four original battalions of Gurkhas were formed into the East India Company, and they stayed loyal to the Crown through the Indian Mutiny…and every armed conflict Britain’s been part of ever since. Two hundred thousand of them joined up for Dubya-Dubya Eye-Eye and distinguished the hell out of themselves.
And now thousands of them are set to be deported from Britain. Gurkha veterans have been fighting for the right to live in Britain for a long time — and I don’t pretend to know the whole backstory — but the latest immigration rules released today are fucking evil: a soldier can stay if he’s served 20 years. The rank and file are only allowed to serve 15. Nice.
Oh, an enlisted man can stay if he got crippled in battle, or won a conspicuous decoration. You know, Audi Fucking Murphy is welcome, the rest of you can piss off.
I won’t get into a British immigration rant tonight (don’t-do-it-don’t-do-it-Weasel-don’t-do-it). But a country has to be completely retarded to turn away applicants who have put their lives on the line and, you know, spilled blood in defense of the realm and shit. One of these guys is worth a hundred wastrel immigrants like me.
And don’t get me started on the Pakistani splodey-dopes, Kenyan moochers and Albanian pimps…
April 24, 2009 — 8:02 pm
Comments: 28
Goose!
These guys were behind a farm shop we visited today. There’s something…I dunno. Surreal about this picture. Maybe because they’re all looking in different directions. I can imagine some kind of dialogue of the absurd going on here. With geese!
The weather in our little corner of the realm has been gorgeous. Relentlessly, mercilessly, unflinchingly gorgeous. Since about the second week in February, it’s been sunny and in the fifties every damn day. It’s rained maybe twice. Uncle B is going nuts watering stuff in the garden.
Everybody says they don’t remember a Spring like it, ever.
This is not the English weather I signed on for.
I’m telling you, folks, all this frolicking in the sunshine is wearing me the hell out.
April 23, 2009 — 7:45 pm
Comments: 15
Hopi farging carp on a popsicle!
Today we had a surveyor in to look at our deathwatch beetles. We got his name from a local real estate agent who deals in ancient buildings. It’s no good sending out a green surveyor; he would take one look at an old pile like Badger House and pee his pantses.
Our guy tapped and frowned and frowned and tapped and took a little dust sample in a 35mm film can (luckily we had one to spare). And then declared the house whole and sound and (almost certainly) in no danger at all, tappingdancing beetles or not. He offered us the use of a stethoscope for the Summer: if you can identify exactly where the little bastards are hanging out, he told us, it might be worth opening the wall to kill them. But otherwise, the damage you’d do tearing the place apart to find the infestation would be far more than the insects will do.
They don’t do much harm. They don’t do any harm fast. Their life cycle is (up to) twenty years. And they won’t spread in the absence of damp.
“After all, they came in with the wood and they haven’t knocked the place down yet,” he said, klonking his fist against a great oak beam.
And I said (proudly), “haha…oh, yes. We have documentation on the house going back four hundred years.”
And he said, “oh, no! These beams are MUCH older than that. Some are probably a thousand years old.”
And Uncle Badger said, “!” And I said, “!!!!!!!eleventythousandholyshit!!!!”
He explained. Nearly all the wood in the house would have been reclaimed from some earlier use: another house, a barn, a horse-cart. Wood was scarce around here and hard to come by and EVER-so-hard to work with. We’re talking hand tools and OAK. When we were looking to buy, we seriously considered one house built in the 15th or 16th C from beach flotsam (very common) and they even knew the name of the French shipwreck it came from.
It’s clear that some beams (top picture) weathered outside for…oh, hundreds of years, maybe. And I spent months poring over mysterious pegs and slots and cut marks, trying to figure out the original shape and purpose, when these artifacts probably had nothing whatever to do with Badger House.
Whoa.
No, seriously. Whoa.
It’s probably just as well I’m psychic as a potato.
April 21, 2009 — 8:24 pm
Comments: 21
It’s a bee! It’s a fly! It’s a bee fly!
Sorry about the crap picture, but I’ve been trying to get a shot of this screwy little bugger for two weeks. Uncle B and I have both seen him bumbling around the garden. I got one quick snap of him today and then there he was, gone.
He’s a funny little customer with a long, thin proboscis. Weird; like a tiny, hairy hummingbird (but no hummingbirds in England, alas). He hovers, he drinks nectar and he’s shy as a bastard if you try to get near him.
Turns out (thank you Google), he’s not a bee at all. He’s a fly that looks like a bee (probably to keep predators off). A bee fly, or bombyliid (thank you Wikipedia). Kind of an unpleasant piece of work, this — it’s a parasitoid, which means a parasite that always kills its host.
Bee flies lay their eggs in the nests or burrows of other insects, and the larvae eat the tenants. Yum!
I gather these things are kind of rare, so I should utup-shay about the ug-bay or we’ll probably have the conservation people on us.
April 20, 2009 — 7:49 pm
Comments: 16
Ze Pelophylax ridibundus…eet laffs at me
In 1935, Mrs E.P. Smith, wife of the Member of Parliament for Ashford in Kent, decided to surprise her husband. And not in the usual way. She wished to buy him some edible French frogs for their garden in Stone-in-Oxney. Unable to find edible French frogs, she settled for a dozen Hungarian Laughing Frogs instead. No, I’m unclear on this thought process, too.
The buggers promptly escaped. By the 1960s, they had colonized the whole of Romney Marsh and by the…umm…right now, most of the Southeast Coast of England (and even beyond). As they don’t seem to be doing any harm, nobody cares.
Pelophylax ridibundus (the Marsh Frog or Laughing Frog) is a big blue-green warty fucker, up to six inches long. The little ones eat bugs and slugs, but the big ones can eat mice and voles(!).
As you probably guessed, what they’re really known for is this:
[audio:marshfrog.mp3]
In marshy places, where there are many drainage canals, the chorus in high Summer is madhousish. Bedlamanian. I haven’t heard this in person yet, but Uncle B would pull the car over and hold the cellphone up for me to enjoy from my desk 3,500 miles away.
Badger House has its own contingent. A trio, to be exact, in the long canal at the back of the garden. Tonight, they tuned up for the first time this year.
Sheesh. And he complains about my banjo playing.
April 15, 2009 — 6:21 pm
Comments: 16
Pollarded? We were damn near coppiced!
We had a couple of trees pollarded this week. That one on the left? The thing that looks like a stump? That’s one. The tree on the right was pollarded some years ago.
Pollarding is a form of arboriculture practiced around these parts since the far off misty mists of time. You take a tree and lop it straight off about ten feet up from the ground. After which the cutoff bit explodes in new growth: long, straight new branchlets. After five or seven or fourteen years, you lop these off for firewood, or nice straight structural members, or weaving baskets.
Only some kinds of tree will put up with this abuse (ours are willows, I think) but, believe it or not, pollarded trees are healthier and live far longer than maiden (unpollarded) trees. They aren’t top-heavy, they don’t have gnarly branches to split off and they are apparently metabolically in a state of perpetual adolescence. It’s good for the ecowotsit of the forest, too: it lets light in for richer undergrowth and little animules. Hippies love it, though, so…grain of salt.
Coppicing is similar, but they slice off the trees only a couple of feet from the ground. This won’t do if you have livestock or wild deer that would nibble at any new growth.
Once trees have been pollarded, you can let them go wild again. This ultimately results in extraordinarily top-heavy trees and very, very little light penetration. Dark, creepy woods, in other words. Epping Forest is apparently like this. Some of the twisty, spooky trees you see in churchyards — where the upper branches writhe out of gnarly fists — were formerly pollarded.
We only have a small cluster of pollarded trees at the end of the drive, and we contemplated letting them go. But the lads talked us into having them done.
The lads. Yes. We has gardeners!
April 8, 2009 — 8:06 pm
Comments: 12
Note to self: don’t piss off Farmer Brown
Okay, I’m no Marlin Perkins, but I’m pretty sure that there’s a fox. And I’m damn sure it’s dead. And I do not believe foxes habitually climb trees to die, ergo…the French must have perfected the foxapult at last.
Kidding!
We drove over to see Farmer Brown (not his real name) this afternoon. Mrs Farmer Brown, actually. Very important people ’round these parts (we invited them to our wedding on the general principle of suckuppery). As we turned into the lane, we saw this jaunty fellow smiling at us from the hedge. I didn’t ask, but I would guess the country folk regard corpse-festooning as a deterrent to others.
Between you and me, I doubt it has the slightest effect on fox behavior. Makes the farmer feel better, at most. If the gibbet didn’t work on people, with our honking huge fearful brains, what is this supposed to do for Mister Sneakyboots McCleverpants?
Our local town still has a cage gibbet, by the way. And a pillory. Neither has been used in a couple of centuries, but there’s a piece of the last guy still stuck in the gibbet. I think you have to make an appointment to see it. I don’t know. It’s busy, I guess.
March 31, 2009 — 7:46 pm
Comments: 24
Cheap at twice the price
Shhhh…I’m trying not to annoy Uncle B tonight. He’s working. (Hey, one of us has to!)
Today I mailed off my FLR(M) application. It’s the second visa I need. The first one let me enter for the purpose of marriage, and it’s good for six months (I’m legal on that one until the end of May). The second one lets me work and be a sort of semi-person, and it’s good for two years.
It’s taking an average of 14 weeks to process those ones at the moment, so (assuming all is well) I expect to remain blissfully employment-free until July, mayhap.
Mayhap longer. The visa fees go up (again!) on Wednesday, April 1, so I imagine the Home Office will be buried in applications tomorrow. Heh heh heh.
The picture? That there’s a Thermionics Vacuum Products FLRM Series Push-Pull Linear-Rotary Feedthrough. It’s a linear-rotary feedthrough based on the FLM series push-pull linear feedthrough mounted on a standard 2.75″ O.D. flange. Strokes of up to 36″ are feasible, dependent upon payload, orientation and acceptable deflection. All metal construction for bakeability. It costs about three grand. It turned up on a Google Images search of “FLR(M)”.
I have no fucking idea what that sonofabitch does.
March 30, 2009 — 8:40 pm
Comments: 23