Tag: England

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My 21 curios from my England trip should have been more like 24.  There are a few more details you should be aware of before traveling to the UK.  22. Toilets: I’ve never seen such inefficient flushers in my life. At the comfortable house rental in the Cotswolds, with a bathroom on each floor, we […]

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Castle Combe Village: The Manor and the Garden

 

Continuing with England photos I coaxed from my Android phone, I go from a hike in the English countryside to features of old Castle Combe village itself, where treasures from the past and a primitive settlement that seems the very essence of picturesque is deemed tourist-worthy, but nothing to get worked up about.

Once she’d pried me from our comfortable lodgings along the By Brook, my sister walked me through the graveyard and the church, where a knight was buried. But, my little brother wanted to know, had I seen the manor?  To my surprise, when we proceeded around a corner and past the church, we came upon a driveway, and then vast lawns with a manor house dominating the grounds. A tour of some ancient aristocratic residence had been on my wish list for England, and although we got only a glimpse of the interior, I felt satisfied. However, I was especially content after I treated myself to a private viewing of the old garden.

Quote of the Day: Francis Parkman

 

“If any pale student, glued to his desk, here seeks an apology for a way of life whose natural fruits is that pallid and emasculate scholarship of which New England has had too many examples, it will be far better that this sketch had not been written. For the student there is, in its season, no better place than the saddle, and no better companion than the rifle or the oar.”
American historian Francis Parkman (1823-1893)

My favorite era of American history is the first. Europeans arriving on the shores of a primeval wilderness, wondering if it’s a second Eden or a green hell. Native Americans stumbling upon pale creatures in bizarre clothes rowing to shore from floating wooden islands.

The earliest historian to fully document these encounters is Francis Parkman, a Harvard-educated Boston scion who set aside Yankee comforts to tramp over snowcapped mountains and muddy battlefields.

21 Curious Details I Brought Back from England

 

We speak the same language, but it’s like we’re separated by geography, history, and even culture. I told the border officer in the US that I had nothing to declare except a few souvenirs, but maybe that wasn’t true. Here’s what I brought back with me:

  1. The English are open to keeping their mayo on diners’ tables, next to the ketchup. No freakout about mayonnaise refrigeration. I had a squeeze or two, and I was fine.
  2. Eggs are sold on the regular store shelves, not refrigerated.
  3. Packaged meats of all varieties, bread, and dairy products were satisfying and delicious.
  4. Most pub food was tasty, hearty, and handsomely plated. The only English food I tried that deserved its reputation for blandness was steak and ale pie. Meat pies were just okay.
  5. Food everywhere is fresh and relatively inexpensive.
  6. Old pubs–hundreds of years old–were everywhere and could come with history, such as being host to some famous writers. I found them to have a bit of an odor, too. I suppose cooking up fish and chips for so many years will do that to an establishment.
  7. Pedestrians and Underground riders aren’t always friendly and don’t seem eager to interact with strangers with even a smile. I was accosted by a woman in Oxford who didn’t appreciate that I smiled at her. And when I struggled for several minutes to get my too-wide suitcase down the long aisle of a train, male riders just watched impassively instead of offering to help like they would in the US (until I got to my seat at the end of the car, where a British man kindly stood up and lifted my suitcase onto the rack).
  8. The population is very diverse, such that most souvenir shops seemed to be run by Middle Easterners. Other populations, including Eastern Europeans who in my limited experience did not speak English, represented a slice of the citizenry. The diversity meant there were interesting restaurants everywhere–Turkish, Greek, Thai, Indian, and a Brazilian/Portuguese/Greek fusion place whose food met with our approval. Everyone seemed to get along and everything ran smoothly. It was a civilized, sophisticated, humane country.
  9. Many processes are automated, so that when you’re about to get on public transportation, or come into the country, or even go into the bathroom at the train station, automation smooths the way. No long lines in customs, unlike in San Diego–just place your passport on the sensor and the gates open for you to walk into the English side. You might be greeted in the bathroom with a readout that says “These stalls are: 20% full.”
  10. Enterprise seems to be thriving, especially the restaurant business. But large chains, small groceries, food trucks, tidy flea markets, tour companies, malls–all are booming.
  11. Restaurant servers aren’t allowed to take your payment card out of your sight. It’s some kind of law. So they bring a little card processing machine to the table, which is convenient and helps with splitting the check.
  12. It took us some time to realize that “Are you okay?” is said everywhere, and means something like, “Can I help you?” when spoken in a store and “You’re distracting me” when uttered by a tour guide to my sister, who was quietly offering me gloves because we were getting chilly standing in old, dark alleyways.
  13. Public transportation–buses and the London underground trains–are prompt and frequent, reasonably clean, and inexpensive. The underground, which we took to Westminster Abbey and the British Museum, was fast and fun to ride. The downside was feeling so rushed to get on and off, since our family liked to walk rapidly to and through the station and those automated train doors were indifferent to riders with slower reflexes like my mom and I. Oxford was full of buses trundling up and down the main roads, and they seemed to represent various companies. We realized toward the end of our stay that riding up front on the upper level afforded a great view. We dominated the solemn architecture and crowded sidewalks and were in no danger of getting lost. Yet from up high, it always looked as if the bus was going to clip pedestrians or run them over. With their ease of use, ubiquity, and affordability, buses ended up being my favorite form of transportation, whether for long or short distances.
  14. London was big, but felt dense. That is, everything seemed crowded together, a contracted version of a US city. Old row houses were everywhere, and there were freeway entrances that looked, not exactly miniature, but scaled-down compared to what I’m used to.
  15. The city’s economizing on space confirmed my idea of England feeling small, even though there was so much city. But then I was surprised by vast swaths of countryside. You see miles of it from the windows of buses or trains. Then you get on freeways where verdant views continue to separate you from your destination. I started to suspect that England wasn’t that small. The Internet says that its size and population density are comparable to that of New York state.
  16. The size of the cities border on intimidating. My first impression of Bath was around the train station where we were picked up–there were some charming old buildings and inviting new restaurants. When we visited a few days later, we drove over an Old-Europe-style bridge, with looming antique buildings crowded on a hill across the water. Oxford was not just a compound of old brick institutions for students and a few gawking tourists, as I had imagined. It was huge, dense, mostly very old, and jammed with visitors. We did find a large, bright shopping mall and a decent Thai “street food” restaurant.
  17. Paper goods were in short supply. Maybe the English don’t believe in generating all this extra waste, or maybe with their population, they just can’t afford to. Or possibly it’s against the law for bathrooms to provide anything other than hand dryers or for restaurant servers to be liberal with their napkins. Whatever it was, I was often in search of something with which to wipe my fingertips. Homes and apartments we rented didn’t offer tissues, and we even had to stock paper towels ourselves in one instance. It made me think about how attached I was to paper plates and other disposable products back home and feel slightly ashamed, even though I tend toward frugality with them.
  18. There were trash bags along the roads in London, and the refuse made a poor impression, especially when bags were broken open and spilled on the sidewalk. I finally realized that the trash was put out on the walkways for pickup, and refuse collection seemed to present opportunity for even more private enterprise. At one bus stop in the countryside, I saw garbage concentrated all around the bus stop. It looked bad. My guess was that this was another instance of trash bags breaking open, except breakage had happened several times in the area and hadn’t been picked up.
  19. Ancient artifacts and old architecture abound in England. I was ready to see a few pieces from the 16th and 17th centuries, maybe. But not relics from the 1300s and even before. At Westminster Abbey our first full day in London, I gaped and was overawed. But I didn’t realize my enthusiasm was like that of a visitor who came for Old Faithful in a park pulsing with other natural wonders.  n England, evidences of Roman civilization are still around. Medieval-era churches abounded, each with their stained glass windows and respected dead memorialized and buried indoors. Doors everywhere were unique, nothing one could buy at the local building supply store. Doorknobs might be in the middle of the door, and those were newer models.
  20. I noticed a few homeless people sleeping on the street, but not very many. The parks didn’t seem to draw any homeless. I do seem to remember a panhandler asking me if I could spare change in a very British way.
  21. There are so many things to see and do, that even with our busy schedule, we only experienced a small fraction of what was out there. We visited Westminster Abbey, went on two London walking tours (Jack the Ripper–I sat that one out–and Dickens/Shakespeare), saw the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum, strolled in the parks near Buckingham Palace, walked around Bath, stayed in an old village in the countryside, toured C.S. Lewis’s home, dined in a dozen pubs, and walked frenetically around Oxford. I appreciated the grassy parks full of trees and bursting with daffodils in every city we visited, and refreshed myself walking in them.

England felt like a rich, deep, old place. If I had to do it again, honestly I would skip the London tour and walk the city looking for plaques. I hope there are plenty commemorating, for instance, the tree that our tour guide said such distinguished fellows as Wordsworth knew and referenced. There certainly was one at the square where William Wallace met his end, and surely the house from the Tudor period indicated by the tour guide had its marker. At the end of our visit, I felt deeper and older, but not so much richer. I was definitely tired, and upon arrival in San Diego, felt like kissing the soil. England had been an adventure, but it was sweet to be back in my home country.

What I Captured in England on My Cheap Android Phone

 

When your sister invites you on a family trip to England, you consider it. When she offers to pay for your plane ticket, you think about it some more. Then when you’re going to be in her town when the flight leaves, you say yes.

On my first trip to Europe, six of us stayed three nights in London, three in Castle Combe village near Bath, and three in Oxford. The stunner for me was how much old stuff–no, I mean really old stuff, like 1300s old–there is scattered all over England. I’ve always heard only the highlights of what visitors can see in the UK, and I imagined you’d have to plan visits to specific sites to behold these things. Turns out unique architecture and one-of-a-kind artifacts are as ubiquitous over there as deer in northwest Montana.

Join Jim and Greg as they offer the second installment of their highly coveted year-end awards. Today they remark on the people connected to politics that they’re most sorry to see pass away in 2022. They also share their choices for rising political stars and the political figures who appear to be fading into oblivion – rarely to be heard from again.

A Beautiful and Important Christmas Message from France

 

Eric Zammour/Getty Images

You’re forgiven if you’ve not heard of Eric Zammour. Head of the new “Reconquest” party, he’s polling around 14% currently in France’s 2022 presidential election. He’s often compared to Donald Trump (not kindly and not very accurately) since they seem to share the same general views on immigration – arguably an even bigger issue in France than in the United States. The proportion of America’s population (328 million) that is foreign-born (about 45 million, or 13.7 percent) is larger than France’s (a population of about 60 million with about 5.9 percent that is foreign-born).

Zammour is a proud French nationalist and ardent defender of Western Civilization. The left-wing media tags him as “far-right.” Funny, they never tag anyone as “far-left.” His Christmas message indicates suggests that he subscribes to French Exceptionalism, but it should inspire the citizens of any country that embraces our divine rights of life and liberty (see: Declaration of Independence). Americans, as Barack Obama suggested, are not the world’s only exceptional nation, even if he utterly and embarrassingly failed to grasp what made America truly exceptional.

19th Nervous Breakdown (This Week): An Isolation Photo Journal, Round 2

 

Guess who ended up in English quarantine again? (For anyone that wasn’t around for the last time this happened, you can read/see the beginning of the saga right here).

Because I chose to visit my parents in Massachusetts for three weeks, I got to have a lovely, ten-day mandatory quarantine alone, in my dorm room/flat. In between all of the fun of completing graduate school applications and getting ready for the start of school on Monday (as well as painting, reading, contemplating escape, practicing harp, working on Hebrew, contemplating escape, workshopping recital routines, boxing practice, and contemplating escape), I took a few minutes each day to make a meme about my experiences in isolation for the PiT, through the medium of Keith Richards. So without further a-due, for your amusement ‘The 14 days of Quarantine: Keef Style, Part 2’:

It’s Only Quarantine, But I (Don’t) Like It: An Isolation Photo Journal

 

For anyone that’s unaware (and there’s no reason you should be, I’ve spent most of my Ricochet time in the PiT lately), I’ve been in quarantine in England for the last 14 days. It’s been an opportunity to work on Russian revision, GRE prep, painting, reading, and also to be incredibly bored (along with various other disasters). Mostly in a bid to quell that boredom, because even I can’t read for 18 hours a day for 2 straight weeks, I spent a little bit of each day I was confined to my dorm room making a meme. So without further a-due, for your amusement ‘The 14 days of Quarantine: Keef Style’:

COVID-19 Symposium: An (Im)movable Feast

 

I won’t pretend that I have a singularly unique quarantine story, or even one anywhere near the hardest. Life could be much, much worse and I am supremely grateful, above all else, that I got a choice in how this happened. When my university decided to move online, a few days after Yale and Columbia began demanding that their exchange students return and we had the first two confirmed coronavirus cases on our campus, my parents began making plans for me to come home before it became impossible. I said no. There were still exams I had to sit in May, I said, and there was no way I was going to be able to study with everyone home, or take my last three weeks of classes over Zoom with our unstable internet connection. One of my classes had yet to go online, and I didn’t want to leave and miss a tutorial. Flight prices were going to skyrocket. And these were all true enough, especially the excuse about exams, but I stayed mostly to keep my family safe. 

This was the first winter and spring in all I could remember that my dad hadn’t caught pneumonia, hadn’t ended up with an inhaler or at the ER, struggling to breathe. So I, who had almost definitely been exposed to the virus on campus, and if not there in our university’s city at large, was going to make a long train trip and go through two airports, one that had been host to thousands of Americans on the continent from heavily infected countries escaping while they still had time, to come home? To potentially kill or do irreparable harm someone I loved? Hell. No. 

Quote of the Day: Thoughts of Abroad, From Home

 

Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England – now!!

Perhaps it’s the fact that I can’t go to England at the moment, that makes me want to, almost more than anything. At the same time as the fact that I can’t go out and watch a movie by myself (something I do, at most, maybe two or three times a year) has suddenly become one of my greatest yearnings, even though I can’t think of one I really want to see. What is it about the human condition that makes us so extremely contrary, I wonder. “That which we are, we are,” as another Victorian poet observed. Sometimes, for the sake of my own peace of mind, I wish I weren’t, at least quite so much.

And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops – at the bent spray’s edge –
That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children’s dower
– Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!–Robert Browning, “Home Thoughts From Abroad”)

Ash Wednesday, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Paddy

 

You were made from dust…

Had I walked about, and run, this morning topless and with neon purple hair, I think I would have attracted fewer stares than I did today. Growing up in very Catholic Massachusetts, I’m not sure it had ever occurred to me on more than a purely intellectual level what it means to be a religious minority, especially one that (even for a day) was marked out in its physical difference. Which is not to say that I feel the victim; I am perfectly free, as so many martyrs and fathers in ‘priest holes’ were not, to practice my faith, and to giggle at the man who stopped walking his dog and turned around to watch me go by like a latter-day circus attraction. In fact, I left Mass this morning more uplifted than I had been in weeks, embracing something of the Chestertonian paradox that finds the deepest hope in the most profound sadness. On a day of penitence, prayer, and fasting, I found joy.

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I’ve walked in the fields, and I’ve trod light for daysSeems I’ll do that old rag, takes me all kinds of waysExcept the way I’d be headed if I knew where I was goingBut I’m from the country, and it’s better not knowing.  I do not pretend to know much about life. I have read […]

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We have experienced the truth of this prophecy, for England has become the habitation of outsiders and the dominion of foreigners. Today, no Englishman is earl, bishop, or abbot, and newcomers gnaw away at the riches and very innards of England; nor is there any hope for an end of this misery.—William of Malmesbury (c. […]

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On this day (variously given as March 20 and March 21, and making the usual allowances for the Julian Calendar discrepancy), 605 years ago, Henry of Monmouth, Prince of Wales, became King Henry V of England. And it’s a jolly good thing, too. Not only did he rule well in both domestic and foreign affairs, […]

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This time of year seems to inspire a closer look at our human condition. As I clean up and organize in preparation for the holidays, tax season, acknowledging another year coming to a close, I seem to reflect on my spiritual condition more closely. Inspired by recent posts by @paddysiochain, @susanquinn, @skipsul, @curtnorth, @gilreich, @midge […]

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The town of Edenbridge, England holds an annual bonfire to commemorate the failure of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament. Traditionally they burn Guy Fawkes in effigy plus that of another, more contemporary figure. For 2017 the, uh, winner is Harvey Weinstein. Here is the upper half of the 36-foot painting to get […]

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David French of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America point out former FBI director James Comey’s evaluation of how untrustworthy much of the media was when reporting on Russia and the 2016 elections. They also discuss the major political disaster that befell British conservatives in the snap election Thursday, badly weakening the party and strengthening the position of the Labour Party’s far-left leader. And they decry Bernie Sanders’ blatant disregard for Article VI of the Constitution (“no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States”) when questioning President Trump’s nominee for deputy budget director about his Christian beliefs.

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Somewhere around the time of my eleventh birthday, and just when I would have been entering the sixth grade, had I been living in the USA, my parents unceremoniously dumped me at The Abbey School, Malvern Wells, and my English boarding school experience began. I’m sure they meant well. I’d had a rocky and circuitous […]

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