Wherein Stoaty flunks being an American
We’ve got turkey and roast potatoes and hot dinner rolls and candied sweet potatoes and…shit. I was SO SURE Thanksgiving was the THIRD Thursday in November.
Wow.
Huh.
Comes to something when my mother-in-law rings us up to say she’s been watching the telly and she’s pretty sure we’ve got the date wrong. Well, dammit, no limey bluehair’s gonna to tell ME when Thanksgiving is. It’s my favorite holiday, and I’ll celebrate it any day I like.
Anyway, the turkey won’t keep for a week.
What’s that? OF COURSE I passed my written driver’s test! I got 100% of the multiple choice questions and 58 out of a possible 75 points for that supremely pointless ‘hazard perception’ section (44 is passing). Now I have to start prepping for the real test — the one where I actually drive a car. Um…yay?
Afterward, Uncle B took me out for a Big Mac as a special Thanksgiving Day treat. I still lumme some special sauce, so maybe I’m an American after all.
November 19, 2009 — 4:32 pm
Comments: 45
Happy Guy Fawkes Night! Don’t burn anybody I wouldn’t burn…
I mentioned a while back that Sussex makes a Very Big Deal out of Bonfire Night, holding parades and fireworks and bonfires in one village or another most weekends between late September and late November.
Well, tonight — November 5 — is the real Guy Fawkes Night. By Sussex tradition, Lewes holds this one, the biggest one. That’s because Mary Tudor burned 17 Protestants in Lewes High Street while she was on the throne, so they kind of earned the right to a party. Yeah. It’s a whole sectarian thing.
Lewes has been trying to put people off recently. It’s getting big and out of hand, with Londoners coming down and all. So instead we went to one in the ancient tiny village of Icklesham tonight.
And a damn fine firework display they put on, too. They charge £3 a head and put it all toward next year’s fireworks. And they roast a pig (a heartbroken Uncle B was put off by the queue) and serve booze and dance about in ancient costumes and bang drums and burn a honking great huge pile of wood pallets with a Guy on.
You know, the nannies have been trying to shut this thing down for years. The fires and the crowds are both very big and very dangerous. Some bonfire societies drag their explosives through town carrying torches(!). Some Guys are rigged with dynamite(!). Some of the fireworks are homemade(!).
There was a sign saying “no sparklers — they will be confiscated!” under which a group of drunk people were happily waving sparklers. There’s lots of booze involved. This afternoon, we bought a whole big box of fireworks (for our own personal bonfire night) in the grocery store.
I wouldn’t count these people out just yet.
November 5, 2009 — 7:32 pm
Comments: 11
‘Tis the season…
I’m sure you’ve heard of Guy Fawkes Night in the UK, which is celebrated on November 5 with fireworks and the burning of Fawkes in effigy (or, more traditionally, the Pope in effigy, since the conspirators were Catholic). It commemorates the foiling of a plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
Which doesn’t look like such a very bad idea these days.
But I digress.
The holiday is a bit different in Sussex. There is a GIGANTIC November 5 celebration in Lewes, a kind of Mardi Gras with more fire, less nudity. Most of the major towns in the county (and parts of Kent) have bonfire societies which come to march through the town for the big one.
In return, each of the towns and villages has its own Bonfire Night and everyone comes to march in their celebrations, too. So they have to stagger them. Between late September and November 5, there’s a bonfire somewhere in the county pretty much every weekend.
And very pagan-y affairs they are, too. There are elaborate and spooky costumes, and torches and fireworks, and they pull the guy (the various guys, which are effigies of people in the news. I believe Dubya got immolated a time or two) through the town. At the end, there’s a HUGE bonfire (usually made of hundreds of wood pallets) and they blow up the Guy and several kzillions of pounds (in weight and/or money) of fireworks.
The first big one is tomorrow night, in Hastings. I don’t think we’ll go this year, but we’ve gone before. It’s most impressive. Last year, they saw it in France and sent out the lifeboats.
Oh, and the tiny village of Icklesham insists on defying local custom and having theirs on November 5 each year, so none of the other villages will show up or advertise for them. Go Icklesham!
October 16, 2009 — 8:31 pm
Comments: 18
Thank christ it’s the solstice
Yesterday was the summer solstice, the longest day of the year in our hemisphere. Thirty thousand hippies turned up at Stonehenge, but it was cloudy and they couldn’t see the sun rise, so all they dressed up like assholes and got stoned. Oh, wait — that’s what they were going to do anyway.
This is the first I’ve spent time in England in Summer — it costs a fortune to fly overseas during the tourist season, so all my trips were off-peak — and I am so damned happy to see the solstice come and go.
See this map? I threw a lassoo around Britain and pulled it directly West. You’ll note that London is more or less in a line with Hudson Bay. Here’s what the forecast said for the day of the solstice:
sunrise sunset
London 4:47 9:21
Providence 5:13 8:24
Nashville 5:31 8:08
Given that it’s light long before sunrise and stays that way long after sunset, you can easily see that it never gets dark in England. Land of the Frakkin’ Midnight Sun, that’s what it is. Also, lucky me, it’s The Year It Never Rains Along the South Coast. The sun, it burnnnnssss ussssss.
Of course, I’ll catch up on my sleep in Winter, when it’s dark for six months. Natural born Mole Person, me.
June 22, 2009 — 7:53 pm
Comments: 15
Swan upping new year
I usually post a picture of the last light of the year on New Year’s Eve, but there wasn’t much of it today. Instead, I offer you these swans, which I photographed as I walked into town to buy a loaf of bread. (Get me! I’m olde worlde!).
The field across the road is sown in rape (it’s a cinch nobody consulted a PR before naming it “rape”, isn’t it?) and for several weeks, the new crop has been home to a flock of swans. Mute swans. Cygnus olor. Dozens and dozens of them. I don’t know why the farmer doesn’t shoo them off; perhaps foraging swans are protected.
Wild, unmarked mute swans have been the property of the crown since the 12th Century, but Her Maj only claims the ones on the Thames these days. She graciously shares ownership with the Companies of Vintners and Dyers. Once a year, the Queen’s Swan Marker and the Swan Uppers of the Vintners and Dyers dress up in little red suits, climb into six little red skiffs and spend five days rowing the Thames upping swans.
How dost up a swan? Carefully, I prithee! Ho ho ho!
Swan upping: the Worshipful Company of etcetera paddle about on the river, shout “all up!” when they spot a brood of baby swans, circle the boats, lift the cygnets out of the water, weigh them, check them, tag them, count them and let them go again. When this gay party passes Windsor Castle, they stand up in the boats, raise oars, and salute Her Majesty, Queen of the Swans.
Weasel doesn’t make this shit up, you know.
As luck would have it, the bottle of shampoo next up in the booze rotation was my favorite. And it’s kosher! Soon, my beauty. Happy New Year, y’all!
December 31, 2008 — 6:21 pm
Comments: 19
Tolja
We got invited ’round to the neighbors for Boxing Day afternoon. We got the time wrong and landed in the middle of family celebrations. Awk-warrrrrd.
Still…on the way home, I got Uncle B to take a picture of me next to The Sign.
December 26, 2008 — 8:47 pm
Comments: 45
It’s that time of year again!
The time when Stoaty risks detention by serruptitiously taking picture of the most expensive unbought turkey on the shelf. This fat boy weighs in at £96.58, in money. That’s $142.31 by today’s exchange rate, making it a few dollars cheaper than last year’s winner. If we were still working on last year’s exchange rate, though, it would win easily at $191.65. Currency is magic!
Of course, last year’s bird had the charm of looking like proctology waiting to happen.
Appledore is a town in East Sussex. Bronze is a variety. We had a bronze breast (or ‘crown’) last year, and I thought it was vile. Gamey, like it was all dark meat.
But hark! What is that I hear? The tinkling of…booze glasses? Quick, minions — time to get falling-down drunk or Sandy Claws won’t come!
December 24, 2008 — 6:40 pm
Comments: 22
Christmas weaselpr0n!
Stoatpr0n, actually. Badger gave me this present early, presumably to keep me quiet while he did his end-of-year accounts.
It’s the September, 2008 issue of the BBC’s nature magazine, Wildlife, which features the best goshdarned weasel photography I’ve ever seen.
The photographer is Spaniard Oriol Alamany who chased a family of stoats in the Pyranees to get these shots (the little one looking into the camera is Mama Stoat, with her three fine sons. They grow to weaselhood so quickly!).
The whole magazine is slick and impressive. I’d ask Uncle B for a subscription, but magazines always pile up on me and become a throbbing locus of angst and guilt.
Not really something you want for Christmas.
December 23, 2008 — 8:57 pm
Comments: 19
Smoochies!
Britain has been inching toward a semi-official two weeks off at Christmas and New Year’s in recent years — and, okay, nothing gets done Christmas week and New Year’s week; it does make a sort of sense — but, actually, everybody buggered off TODAY. I think taking the Friday before is pushing it, don’t you?
Poor old Uncle B was trying to get a little last-minute work done, and nobody was answering phone. So we said a merry “screw it!” and began our holidays, too.
That’s Old Skullcrusher draped in misteltoe, in case it isn’t immediately obvious. He’s the main housebeam, and that’s the front hall now — but we’re pretty sure he was once outside the house and that was an animal run, ending in what was an open-air stable and is now the kitchen. It may have been enclosed as recently as the 1970s, which is when the front door was built in its present location. It’s a whole forensic dealie, trying to work out the many phases of Badger House.
Anyhow, here come the holidays — Merry Preemptive Christmas, minions!
December 19, 2008 — 6:51 pm
Comments: 21
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