Category: Uncategorized

What I won’t do in the interests of researching British culture.

Wild Thing and I just got back from the Gloucester Cheese Rolling and I hardly know what to say, except that humans are a very strange species. The Cheese Rolling works like this: The contestants line up at the top of an insanely steep hill. Someone starts a wheel of Gloucester cheese rolling down the hill. Then the contestants run after it. The first one to the finish line wins the cheese.

Runners sliding down the hill. The camera’s at an angle and doesn’t do justice to how steep the hill is, but keep scrolling down.

Sounds simple. Did I mention that the hill is steep? Steep enough that before the race started I told Wild Thing I was going to see what was happening at the top. I got maybe ten yards uphill and thought, No I’m not. I was…

Antique Note Card
From vintageglorycards.com
(Originally posted here in May, 2014)
************************************

(I grew up knowing it as Decoration Day. Today it is called Memorial Day.)

(To America’s three million uniformed soldiers and sailors, flyers and marines, – dead, wounded and missing – the casualties of our seventy-five wars and armed clashes since the American Revolution)

gather my gratitude unto your graves
anoint your mean scars with my tears
feel my arms round your still homeless
ghosts I am here thanks to you with no
gifts but my words all my tribute exists
in compassion that weighs on my heart
you are sacrifice given to direst of duty
you answered the call with the courage
of flesh and blood placed in harm’s way
in defense of your flag faith and family
know I am your son holding dearly your
legacy filled with the freedom of grief

It’s late at the Super 8.

There’s dirt under my fingernails even though I wore gloves.

I have one pink geranium I couldn’t make fit.

The urn for their flowers that I bought new last year was damaged by the winter.

My husband left four stones on my parents’ graves to show that we had been there.

I wiped down their headstone and that of my grandparents, wiped the old mown grass away with a rag.

In the late afternoon sunlight, both of the rose-colored stones shone just a little bit.

I would have sat there all afternoon, on that little hill admiring the trees, except we were in a hurry to go somewhere else.

I planted geraniums and petunias and plants I don’t know the names of until the urn was full and worthy of its job of showing the world that my parents had people who will show…

APROMPTreply asked what A-Levels and Sixth Form are, and Diane Clement wanted me to “explain all the education jargon in the U.K., especially this new stuff that sounds like American charter schools.”

Let’s start with Sixth Form, because it’s damn near manageable. The phrase is left over from an earlier way of organizing education—or at least of talking about how it’s organized. What I (being American) call grades and are called years here but were once called forms. The First Form was the first year of secondary school.

Irrelevant photo: rhododendrons and azaleas in bloom at Lanhydrock House

Students who stayed in school to study for A-Levels (those are tests, and if I live through this part of the explanation I’ll get to them) went into the Sixth Form, which took two years and was divided into the Upper and Lower Sixths, because it would all be too simple otherwise. To ward off the…

I thought God had circled the Earth twenty times until He saw me wringing my hands after another failed home pregnancy test and decided to bring me babies from somewhere else. That’s how far gone I was. I absolutely believed that I was purposely plucked from the vast sea of infertility to mother these two specific boys. All of that business about how adopted kids aren’t born of your womb but are instead born of your heart, I bought all that. I reeked of Hallmark.

When they were babies, I laid them on my chest. Although they were born in another country and born of other mothers, nothing about them was foreign. I knew every inch of them. Their tiny hands, their beautiful backs, the smell of their hair. Though they were toddlers when adopted, their illnesses and delays made them like infants. They were weak and dependent and it was…

An extract from The Duke of Edinburgh’s biography of Twatersley Fromage OBE

Rice University, Houston. September 12, 1962: Raising the stakes in the competition between Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union and the United States for supremacy in spaceflight capability President John F Kennedy gives a speech, broadcast worldwide stating unequivocally that the US will get a manned flight to the moon before the Soviets do.  At the Foreign Office in London two senior members of staff and their ‘secretary come dogsbody’ are tuned into the Home Service on the radio listening intently to what the President has to say.

“I say Carruthers that’s a hell of a good wheeze Kennedy has got there”

“Has he by Jove…although I must confess Twattersley personally I didn’t think he sounded bronchial at all…indeed I thought his voice was crystal clear throughout the whole speech.”

“No you fool…a good wheeze as in…