Soaring Over Salisbury: Arts Festival Aerialists
Mary Poppins, you’ve got company: These Salisbury International Arts Fest performers suggest a new way to see southern England. Formerly Sarum, Salisbury is home to the famous 13th-century Gothic cathedral of the name. A nearby grassy knoll (no relation to JFK) marks the site of its Norman predecessor, built 200 years earlier and abandoned for geographic reasons, like bad weather and a lack of nearby water sources:
Cathedral ruins at "Old Sarum," Salisbury's Norman predecessor.
Salisbury’s charming town center still boasts streets named for medieval uses, like Butcher Row and Fisherton and Penny-Farthing Streets. (Not sure what was located on Blue Boar Row…)
Old Salisbury Center
Front-row seats, riverside.
It was from a riverside inn in Salisbury that my family munched on jam-slathered breakfast toast—served in a proper rack, of course—as we watched the hotel’s straightbacked septuagenarian waiter scatter leftover crusts for the resident swans, a mother and her adolescent cygnets.
Elegant they may be, but these birds were no patsies, he solemnly informed us. Shortly after they hatched, a fox had begun menacing the nest, eating a baby or two. Then, a week before our visit, he had watched as the mother swan grabbed and drowned the fox!
Note to fox: "Cave Swanem"
Bad Wedding Hat Can Finally Do Some Good
- Beatrice: Improper topper?
Surely, this is the haberdasher’s equivalent of “making a silk purse from a sow’s ear:” Royal granddaughter Beatrice of York is also making lemons from lemonade by auctioning for charity her much mocked “fascinator” from the Wills-and-Kate nuptials. Apparently, it was that or lend it as a life raft for Somali pirates.
- Mayan à la mode?
Her unfortunate headwear “instantly became the focus of several Facebook fan pages” on the wedding day, reported People, alluding demurely to thousands of comments that (reported more frankly elsewhere) compared it to antlers, broadcast antennae and “a uterus and fallopian tubes.” The hat’s designer calls it “21st-century,” but I detect rather a Mayan influence.
Let’s open the bidding at a thousand. Do I hear one thousand pounds?
Beatrice and her sister, Eugenie, also sporting a zoo of a hat, were escorted to the wedding by d0ting father Prince Andrew, the queen’s son and uncle to the groom. Their scandal-plagued mother, Sarah Ferguson, Andrew’s ex-wife, was not invited.
Fergie—known less for a grasp of royal protocol than for dieting, tacky affairs, financial missteps and flogging her royal connections like a carpet dealer in a bazaar—was the one who, in a rare moment of media savvy, reportedly suggested selling the hat to benefit UNICEF. In publicity terms, that surely is making a silk purse from a sow’s ear!
Beatrice photo credit: Mark Cuthbert/Abaca
Royal Kiss, Bin Laden Dead: Best Front Page Ever?
Smarty-pants that I am, I was sure when I saw this that it was Photoshopped — the events happened, after all, about 60 hours apart. Then I realized this is a weekly edition.
So, best ever? The Atlantic‘s James Fallows so dubs it. And those old-school masters of reticence over at HuffPo are running a poll on it. (Slogan: “Others report. Huffington posts. You decide.”)
This is hard for an AngloFile to admit, but swag notwithstanding, I cannot seem to get all goo-goo-eyed about Kate & Wills, Wills & Kate, hashtag-Royal-Wedding. Only a fool of a blogger would allow this entire month of pre-nuptial hoopla to pass without jumping on the meme, snagging a radio appearance or two, grandstanding online with intimate “knowledge” about the charming couple, or at a minimum (given what an egghead I can be), offering a historical retrospective on British royal knot-tying.
Hitched: George V and Mary.
Well, color me F.O.O.L.
Now, I’m not completely alone in “dreading the wedding.” But I’ll wager I have more company among jaded Brits than starry-eyed Yankees, like the abject American participants in this snarky BBC America reality series:
Royally Mad: Enough to drive you ... barmy?
Maybe I’m still irradiated by the Fukushima-like fallout of my own generation’s “fairy tale” couple, whose wedding-day photos just make me feel … sad.
I am actually far more optimistic for the union of their son and Ms. Middleton (“Waitie Katie,” a.k.a., Cat the Commoner). The couple are older, for one thing—well, she is—and better acquainted, after years of friendship. Also, both have college degrees, which statistically bodes better for their marriage. And the queen and her retinue, sensitized by years of social disaster, seem to be welcoming the new in-law into the fold, or as some would have it, The Firm.
Still, I just can’t buy into it, “buy” being an all too operative word here. (NBC is selling a royal monogram logo on, Lord help us, a 44-cent United States postage stamp!) While the couple’s affection may be real enough, the whole affair has been utterly staged, stylized and slickly packaged for international consumption. One socialite’s dig on smiley, cosmeticked, orthodontic Kate: She seems excessively “American.”
So, sue me if I don’t feel a need to be boost The Firm’s Neilsens. I can’t see the point in losing sleep to listen to breathless hired TV commentators (“As long as you have an English accent, you’ll work,” one producer tells the New York Times.) Even Wills, himself, I can’t help but feel, is taking a hit for his family. Wouldn’t he probably rather marry in the chapel at St. Andrews college and head off in obscurity to a nice warm island?
But he, and we, know the importance of stagecraft for reviving the fortunes of his beleaguered family in a nosy, shabby republican age. So the couple press together their pancaked cheeks for the cameras and flash the giant bling. She’ll wear a tiara on the Special Day, for which even faux-populist P.M. Cameron will don tails. It may rain, but (hundreds of?) thousands will watch from the streets and pricey rented flats, while millions look on (beginning 4 a.m. in my time zone) from dens and bedrooms.
Me? I’ll sleep in and catch it in reruns.
My Own Piece of the Kate & Wills Wedding
Merchandise me! My friend, Melinda, of Plum Party, specializes in predicting party trends. And nothing’s more happening right now than crack-of-dawn shindigs to watch Kate and William tie the knot via telly.
Royal Wedding goods are flying out her virtual door. For instance, these tea bags are hot (pun intended).
I love the way the artist even captured that adorable receding hairline.
To dab at (stiff) upper lips during breakfast (which should be beans on toast, fried egg and tomato and kippers, if you want to do it right−save those scones for high tea), use these elegant paper napkins. They’re the ones the royal family will be using. (Kidding!)
But a true AngloFile like me needs something more permanent to mark such a special day. How better than with crockery? It was good enough to commemorate the (ill-fated) coronation of Edward VIII, as with this shaving mug I picked up a few years back at a consignment shop up the road.
See where my son broke the handle, by throwing something across the room? He was most contrite. (Again: Kidding, about the contrite part.)
Ceramic plates were also favorites for the (likewise ill-fated) wedding of this royal icon:
But hope springs eternal, and Krazy Glue fixes all. So, I placed my order with a traveling relative for a royal wedding plate, giving her carte blanche as to choice of design. Here is what she brought me from London.
I’ll be using it for scones, though, since I don’t really like kippers.
Dishy Di courtesy of Misocrazy via Flickr.
Tate Modern: Museum as Megaphone
Museums love talking
about “political statements.” They rarely make them, though−certainly not as overtly as the Tate Modern, among others, did this week. Following the lead of New York’s Guggenheim Foundation, the Tate devoted prime roof-edge real estate to a banner on behalf of Ai WeiWei, whose ceramic Sunflower Seeds currently cover the floor of the museum’s Turbine Hall. The renowned “social sculptor,” also an outspoken critic of his government, was grabbed this week by Chinese authorities for vaguely enumerated “economic crimes.”
Release Ai WeiWei blared the sign dangling from the Tate roof, a former power plant — real estate more commonly reserved for names of currently running exhibits:
The Guggenheim expressed “disappointment in China’s reluctance to live up to its promise to nurture creativity and independent thought, the keys to ‘soft power’ and cultural influence.’’ The Tate set up a second field of “sunflower seeds” to call attention to political prisoners.
Koons "Bunny"
Ai made his name in the 1990s with iconoclastic gestures and works like painting Coca-Cola logos on ancient Chinese pots and flipping the bird in front of international icons like the White House, Eiffel Tower and Tiananmen Square, according to art critic Holland Cotter, before moving on to more significant works like “an outdoor structure from 1,001 doors salvaged from Ming and Qing houses that had been eliminated by rampant development in Chinese cities.” Ai’s sometimes called “China’s Andy Warhol” for his pop sensibility, though Jeff Koons’s monumental kitsch also comes to mind.
As the Nobel Committee learned when it awarded Liu Xiaobo’s Peace Prize to an empty chair, even international adulation offers but slim cover for Chinese citizens who dare criticize their government. Still, it may be what small insulation there is in a judicial system ruled more by caprice than consistency.
Ai WeiWei in his Beijing studio.
Wickle-Hole + Kit’s Coty: Best UK Place Names
When master blogger Jonathan Thomas, my friend over at Anglotopia.net, makes this delightful “map” of UK place names available as a poster, I will frame and hang it:
Or should I just wrap it in brown paper and keep it from the kids? Some of these town names are positively R-rated!
Not all, though: I just love Ramsbottom and Knockerdown, and I see “Lane” receives its due, but where is “Mews”?
Another place-name that sticks with me is Kit’s Coty. Despite more than one extensive muddy search, my family has yet to find that elusive Kentish stone pile. We’ve pursued it through drives, parkland hikes, numerous (conflicting) sets of directions from locals, and hot slogging along scruffy asphalt roadbeds with cars whizzing past. My kids were usually in flip-flops and other inappropriate footwear, naturally. All to see a bunch of big rocks erected for unknown motives by hairy ancestors.
Need I add that this is my husband’s obsession, friends, not mine? Give me a collection of 19th-century landscapes and tea in the Orangery Cafe, any day.
See you at Upperthong!
King’s Speech Sweeps Oscar Nominations
The King’s Speech today fulfilled the expectations of not just AngloFiles but those who actually Know Something about the Movies by garnering a slew of nominations for its directors, leads, its brilliant screenwriter, soundtrack and others:
Still, remember wincing in, oh, 7th grade when some Popular Girl announced a sleepover party and “ooh, am I invited?” immediately popped from the mouths of her hangers-on? When I opened the New York Times Carpetbagger blog to check on Oscar announcements today, first thing I saw was a video ad for the movie blaring from the right-hand column:
Is it just me, or does The Weinstein Company look like it’s trying too hard?
Good luck to them anyway, I say, in the final vote. Even if they are a little bit gauche about politicking for them, the makers of this movie deserve a raft of statuettes — for vision, talent and, given the Queen Mum’s informal embargo on the film (“wait ’til I’m dead”), patience.
Dulce et Decorum Est — of Poppies and Wreaths
On 11/11 each year, at 11:00 a.m., we commemorate the signing of the armistice that ended the first World War. Thursday marked the 92nd such anniversary, with Veterans’ Day in our country and Remembrance Day in Britain. It is the custom in British lands to also wear lapel poppies, a poignant crimson reminder of the wildflowers that grew atop the trenches’ carnage in France and Belgium, as memorialized in the poem by John McCrae that closes, If ye break faith with us who die/We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/In Flanders fields.
Today was Remembrance Sunday when, with appropriate gravitas and ceremony each year, the Queen lays a memorial wreath at the foot of the memorial cenotaph in Whitehall, London’s government district:
The cenotaph is the work of Edwin Lutyens, who also designed the imposing memorial at Thiepval, in France, to 72,189 missing. As I wrote on Remembrance Day 2009, “These deaths occurred in the Somme alone, just one sector of the European front, and only through March 20, 1918.” The memorial at Thiepval looms high on a hill:
The United Kingdom alone, excluding its colonies and the Commonwealth, lost more than 800,000 soldiers (nearly 700,000 killed plus 140,000 missing) in World War I; another 1.6 million were wounded in combat.
Many in the British elite considered the character of youth corroded in the new century and recommended the bracing experience of war to toughen and “cleanse” the upcoming generation. Responding to Lord Kitchener’s recruitment drive, tens of thousands of young men enlisted daily when war broke out. The military often grouped them geographically, meaning some towns lost almost all their young boys in a single day or battle.
One survivor, Arthur Savage, who enlisted when he was young and unemployed, reflected much later to historians, “Of course, what really died in that war was youth, a generation of young men. In my street where I grew up one family lost six sons, all killed in France. The population was out of balance. All through the twenties and thirties a massive surplus of women because so many men had been killed. There were simply thousands of lonely women who grew old alone and never married because they lost their men in the war and the children grew up fatherless. The effects were far reaching. So many people were broken and lost for the rest of their lives. Mind you, all the war leaders lived to a ripe old age.“
Perhaps Wilfred Owen best captured the futility in his poem, Dulce et Decorum Est. Does the title echo a schoolmaster sending his slender students off to war? Or perhaps some fat, fatuous codger ensconced in a leather club chair, waving a well-masticated cigar? Change the setting to a Washington steakhouse and the battle aims from Flanders to WMD, and it all sounds frighteningly fresh.
The Latin translates as: “[How] sweet and right it is, to die for one’s country.”
Dulce et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Thiepval photo by Amanda Slater on Flickr.
Duchess, Corpse and Cockroach: Seriously Gross Hotel Stories
Turn with me to the 18th century and a French inn worthy of Yelp.com. But first, a more contemporary story, called
Mr. AngloFiles’ Most Gallant Act
Our Hawaiian honeymoon included a one-night stay in “heavenly” Hana. Several hours and 617 hairpin turns from Maui’s bustling beaches, its famous, among other things, as Charles Lindbergh’s last retreat. The state park’s rainforest cabins were such a popular destination that my foresighted fiancé had booked ours almost a year earlier.
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Hana and its rainforest turned out to be (duh!) somewhat rainy, and restaurant prices proved heavenly, too, as in “on high,” so we retreated with relief to our one-room haven and cooked a simple meal (probably Rice-a-Roni, a staple for us then) before tucking ourselves under the thin sheet and blanket.
In the dark of the night, my husband woke to a strange tickle on his cheek. Pulling the cord on the overhead lightbulb, he saw a scene he’s never forgotten: He, we, and everything else in the cabin were absolutely blanketed in cockroaches. The big, ugly, rainforest kind. His wake-up itch was a critter skittering across his cheek.
So, what did he do for me? He swept them from ourselves and everything else he could reach, covered our faces with the sheet and pulled the light off. Then he lay there, sleepless, until dawn came without waking me up.
In the morning, he told me. I love that man.
Henry Cavendish could have used Mr. AngloFiles at his side when he signed a guest register in the 1750s. In the annals of horrible hotel stays, none may be funnier than Dave Barry’s account of a sojourn at the “Hotel Shpennsylvania” (you know the one—if you stand outside Madison Square Garden and Penn Station, it’s right there):
Pennsylvania, Shpennsylvania
But none may be weirder than the experience of Cavendish, a scientist—scion of the Dukes of Devonshire—known for his work on hydrogen and pendulums. It is told by the elegant, 90-year-old Deborah Devonshire (née Mitford, one of the infamous sisters and widow of the 11th Duke of D) in Counting My Chickens, a collection of her homey, often crabby commentaries on country life and the evils of practically everything else.
Traveling with his brother, Frederick, she writes, Cavendishes was headed for Paris:
When they arrived in Calais they stopped at an inn and had to sleep in a room where someone was already in bed. It was a corpse laid out for burial… Nothing was said by the laconic pair till they were well on the road next morning. Eventually, Frederick said, ‘Brother, did you see?’ ‘Yes, I did, Brother,’ Henry answered.
Just think what would happen now. First the hotel manager would be sent for and given a dressing-down, as he often is by spoilt travellers who don’t like finding a dead person in their room. Then the rich headlines would follow: ‘Duke’s nephews practice necrophilia in French hotel.’
But don’t stop there, Debo! Next, the hotel would be called out on TripAdvisor, Yelp and Yahoo.com. The brothers would Facebook their experience. To deal with the necro-negativity, the inn’s Social Media Team would bring in Consultants in Angular Eyewear to initiate a YouTube marketing campaign focused on innkeeping grossness intended to make a joke of the affair and thereby win back brand loyalty.
Yes, it’s all too, too whiny. But before you join her ladyship in clucking over those “spoilt” customers, remember that she needn’t deploy her own stiff upper very often at the Shpennsylvania or Motel 6. Here’s her account of a trip presumably not booked through Expedia or the AAA:
We have just come back from the Republic of Ireland, staying at Lismore Castle, a house we know well, this being the 47th year we have spent part of April there.
In 1753, Lismore Castle and its lands passed by marriage to the fourth Duke of Devonshire, a patron of Thackeray and Dickens.
Explains the castle’s website, “Lismore Castle has been the Irish home of the Dukes of Devonshire since 1753 and is possibly the most spectacular castle in Ireland.”
