A Bad Day at School

School has started. We have within walking distance of our flat two primary schools and an after-school play area. (This last is why the ice-cream truck comes by every day at 5 or so, even in the winter when it is dark and raining. I guess if British ice-cream trucks only circulated when it was nice out, they’d go out of business.) The children are of various sizes and wear brightly colored uniform sweaters.

When I walked past this morning at recess-time, one small boy was lying face-down on the asphalt with his face buried in his arms - the immediately recognizable pose of someone having a Very Bad Day. The other children pretty much ignored him until three little girls descended, patting him with apparent intention to comfort and then trying to roll him over by main force. This never helps.

It Does Not Smell

I have become saddened by the lack of some pithy, meaningful quote in the signature of my emails. Since most of my correspondence has to do with music, I went to Bartleby.com and did a search for "music." So far the resultant haul has been less than inspiring. Some of the better ones:

Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread
-Conrad Aiken

[Music] can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
-W. H. Auden

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.
-Frank Zappa (1940–1993)

Whitby Abbey

A talk with our B&B hostess gave me a picture of the economy of Whitby, which depends heavily on tourism. In addition to a wide variety of music events, regattas, livestock shows, and the like, Whitby is a favorite gathering-place for Goths. She describes them as quiet, cheery, well-behaved people, and says the hearse-led procession through the town is not to be missed.

As the setting of a good deal of Dracula, Whitby was a natural choice of venue for a Gothic Weekend which takes place over Halloween. The presence of the ruined Abbey can't have hurt either.

Set at the top of the hill and scoured constantly by the sea winds, the abbey boasts an impressive collection of all-but-illegible historic tombstones and sky-framing gothic arches. The surviving pillars rise surreally from a carpet of well-tended grass.

Whitby Folk Week

The Whitby Folk Week takes place around the little coastal town of Whitby in East Yorkshire. Whitby is all steep hills and picturesque - windy! - cliffs. Pictured here, an arch made from a whale's jawbone.

The best picture I missed taking: two morris dancers (probably members of the Shropshire Bedlams) in blackface and tattered coats, wearing top hats adorned with pheasant feathers and swooping down a steep incline on bicycles.

Flapjack

The greatest area of liguistic divergence seems to be food, followed closely by terms of abuse. Today’s word: flapjack.

In the US, flapjacks are pancakes. An accidental similarity to the word “lumberjack” has caused my mental image to include stacks of them, dripping with butter and maple syrup, being eaten in camps in the woods by large men in red suspenders.

In the UK, flapjack is a bar cookie with oats in it. They are cheap and easy to make, and occupy the same ecological niche as rice krispy treats.

Hedgehogs

B and I have been fond of hedgehogs for many years. At one point, the fondness extended to having a number of them living in our house, two with the run of our bedroom, and a large tub of giant meal-worms in the kitchen for the nourishment of same. The family started with just one African Pygmy hedgehog from a pet-store. Some weeks later, all of a sudden there were five. The babies were born under an old shirt of B’s (supplied to the mom as bedding so she could get used to his smell). Somewhere we have video footage of them nursing, the four hoglets resting on the mother’s tummy while she lies on her back with one back leg sticking up in the air.

The hedgehog story, like most pet stories, was very sad at the end, and we’ve never gotten any more. African pygmy hedgehogs are harder to find in pet stores these days.

Today we walked over to the Hulme garden center and got our first up-close look at a live English hedgehog. English hogs are brown and lack some of the beady-eyed charm of the Africans, but the one we met was quite sweet. It was sitting in a cardboard box eating earthworms.

I found some hedgehog photos from the webpage of the founder of St. Tiggywinkle's Hospital.

Please Do Not Assault the Staff

In any British post office, doctor's office, train station, or bank, you are likely to see a sign bearing some variant of the message "Do not assault our staff. It's not nice. We will call the police."

I'm not sure what (if anything) this indicates about the British character. That such assaults are so common that the signs are necessary? Or that the sign-posters have such faith in the human nature that they think the signs will do any good?