On Rainy Scafell, Hot Bacon Butties and Warm Socks

Last weekend, the skies over Liverpool cleared. The temperature soared to nearly 80, and people came out of their houses
blinking, looking up at the sky and saying, "Ah...Eets a scorcha!"

My keen and long-honed travel instinct loaded us briskly into the little C-class and took us to the only place in the country it was raining, the Lake District, to climb Scafell Pike.

(Truly, weather presenters said, "And hurrah! The North West, where it's been coming down buckets since April, will see gloriously clear skies this weekend. All exept the Lake District, which will experience an uncharacteristically bit of unsettled weather.")



Scaffel Pike is called a 'pike' because it is tall and pointy, the tallest mountain in England (978m-ish). It rained steadily all weekend on the massif's craggy fells and scree. They slide right down into, interestingly, the deepest lake in England, Wast Water, which is 287 feet deep and very clear and probably very cold. We were alarmed to see people clinging to hot pink sausage shaped floats -just their heads - bobbing in the lake as we wound along the shore road, which I found disturbing and said, "Gosh I think those are people out there. Look." But B said, "I can't look honey, or we'll be out there with them." The little road winding beneath the giant fells, is just a little narrower than two cars, especially if one of them is full of self-absorbed and single-minded English people muscling down the middle, gorse-covered ledge and lake-bottom plummet on one side, ancient stone wall chipped and battered along its mossy length just at rear view mirror and passenger-face height on the other.

Note: the English drive baby buggies and shopping carts like this too, often sweeping side-to-side in a 'clearing' motion or along the Dairy and Creams section, clacketing along the glinting refrigerator bumper like a locomotive barrelling toward your tender and vulnerable acetabulum pretending deep interest in the On-Offer yogurts and double creams daring you to hold your ground.

The valley that holds the lake is called Wasdale, from the Viking 'Vantsdair', of course, meaning, 'Valley of Water' which is not very helpful, I wouldn't say, if you're giving directions to another Viking in a region with seven huge lakes radiating out of the center of an area streaming with gorges and gullies and rivulets and streams (called 'gills', actually, here is Brian expertly fording a 'gill'. A fine forder he.)



Wast Water is long, about 5 miles, but not very wide, and the slate scree slopes falling straight into the black lake give everything a fjord feel. It would hardly be surprising to see a wooden ship with a dragon head bow creaking past
as it sailed out of the cloud.

Well, we trudged up Scafell Pike - there were a lot of people in twos and threes, some of them running wearing next to nothing but shoes and a hat. It was about 60 degrees or so, but it was hot going. The views were tremendous over the lake and out to the Irish Sea and just to the north, the nuclear power station at St. Bee's Head, where the River Irt which flows from the lake is pumped to the cooling towers.

We were socked in by cloud about 3/4 of the way up just at the base of a narrow valley that I think might be called a 'col' full of scree up which we needed to scramble.

But, to mychagrin, I ran out of steam and we came bac k down.

Back in camp: Hot roasted sausage sandwiches in the rain when you've changed into your comfortable shoes and your socks are dry are delicious.

We are setting off this afternoon for Attempt 2, well provisioned with Bacon Butty ingredients (bacon and butty, I guess), dried blueberries, and a bottle of Reisling. Its name, wonderfully redolent of something you'd drink behind the 7-11, is Black Tower, and is in a bottle textured like a Germanic motte. Very velvet paintings and red upholstery in the basement. It's good though. Fruity. Like us all.

In Wales: The Off-The-Beaten-Track Beaten Track

Wales is criss-crossed by ancient Druid tracks, drover's roads, and Roman ways. They run from sacred spring to chapel, from village to market, from garrison to copper mine to coast, down river valleys and over Cambrian passes. Many are lost now, forgotten, swallowed up by heather and bog. Some are paved and still go where they've always gone only faster. The old tracks climb over this little country and its wind-scabbed feols like cracks across old weathered knuckles.

They say the oldest road in Wales is the Kerry Ridgeway. And when they say 'old' they mean it. Older than the Iron Age hillforts that run along it. Older than the Norman mottes guarding the trade routes along the valley Severn below. Older than the Celtiic tumps placed carefully beside it, it is thought, for the tremendous views of mighty Cadir Idris, the biggest blue lump on the western horizon impressive even at 40 miles.


The Ridgeway runs allong Kerry Hill from Cider House Farm near pretty little Kerry in Powys, Wales, 15 miles to nearly-posh Bishop's Castle in Shropshire, England.

After something of a slog up the rise to Two Tumps, the path can be called 'gently undulant' and it is through pasture and sheep on a farmer track along the sunken gully of the drovers' road. It's lumpy only with ancient tumps on which sheep are standing presumably for the view, because there is a fine Welsh Forestry Commision look-out tower - like a windier, sheepier Bridge on the S.S. Enterprise or a DJ mixing table - that you step up into and are ringed with full color, amazing maps (in both Welsh and English) of the vista before you. You look at the map, "Here are the wind turbines," you say, and then looking up, there they are on the horizon! and then you trace your finger along the Cambrian mountain vista and say things like "ok...let's see...that should be...gosh, is that Cadir Idis!? Thirty five miles. Gosh. There's Cadir Idris. Would ya look at that."


Impress Your Companions
Three rivers rise from just below the Ridgeway all within half a kilometer. You can venture up and over Feol Goch, Red Hill to find the sedgy dip the Teme springs from. The three rivers are the Teme, the whole length of which has been name a Site of Significant Scientific Interest by English Nature, the Itheon, that bubbles out of some woods across from the car park, beside Cider House Farm, and the Mule. All three of which run into the Severn. I fear your companions are waiting to be impressed. Hold on. I'll come back with something really good. Something having to do with...um....bees ma;ybe...

In Woolton: It's rainy...No! Sunny!...No, rainy...No! Damn!

Went for a run in the rain this morning. From the park, we can usually see Wales. Today, maybe whales. Har Har Har.

There were seaguls grounded by the weather, waiting in the fields for the cloud to lift. Do they not fly in the rain? Rather limiting for a seagull, I'd think....(Note to Self: Dear Self, Let's find out: Do seagulls not like the rain? Why are they washed up in Woolton Woods? Are they waiting for worms to surface? What do worms sound like rummaging around and popping out of the the ground? Is it noisy down there?)


Then! The rain stopped!.....sort of...


and the sky cleared!....sort of..


How beautiful and hopeful and positive! Oh thank you beautiful sun!

At home in the conservatory typing, it really came out! Sparking on the rosemary and the laundry





and making it impossible to see the computer monitor. Damn you Sun! Oh. There it goes.

















Damn! Come Back!

Illicit Wives and Vick's Formula 44

It is cold and rainy this morning, but I'm typing in the conservatory with the radiator radiating and the wash steaming away.

You hear about wives who, having traipsed across the planet after their husbands, and, with nothing to occupy them, take up illicit habits, like gin and baccarat and human rights activism. My illicit habi turns out to be running the heat and taking off my coat while I type. I've turned it off now, though, so it's OK.

I've shut myself into the conservatory with the laundry and it's like the Amazon in here. Outside, the rain is clattering down out of the broken gutter, and, inside in the steam, the basil and the rosemary cuttings are sprouting and thriving and you can hear the spiders swelling and bursting out of their last, now-too-small exoskeletons, and I will find their actually pretty big husks duned up in the corners.

Oh hey! Now the sun's come out! and I've rushed out to take a picture of the event.


Just as illicit as running the heater, I''m also drinking a D 'n' B soda. I love D 'n' B soda because it is a masterpiece of marketing. The bottle is black and glossy and bullet-shaped. The font and print are punches of gold. "D! Fuckin' B!" it barks, "You got a problem with that!?" with a bikini'd efferescent Sprite babe on each arm swaggering frosty out of the refrigerator, jostling the pansy Fantas out of the way.
However....
If you read the label, you notice that the "D" is written really big in swaggering solid gold block Sans Serif, but then you see, that beside the 'D' is 'Dandelion' written small and apologetically. And the "B", they break it to you means "Burdock" for crying out loud. But, to let you know that Dandelion and Burdock have Soda street-cred, the marketing department has added on the corner of the label in edgy, graffiti hacked by either a kidnapper with a blade (or a three year old with a crayon, it's not easy to tell which) the D 'n' B slogan: taLL, daRk,&DriNkSoMe.
Drinksome?
Actually, it's pretty good stuff. (To put that statement in context, I had better admit, I was a Dr. Pepper Girl even after I discovered that the spicy elixir's main ingredient was, I'm pretty sure, prune squeezings, the tidy "10 2 and 4" logo and sophisticated art deco, stream-lined clock on the glamorous, sleek glass bottle, took on an embarrassing new meaning, I reamined true.

Even when all the Cola-louts hooted in their bikinis with their icey buckets and volley-balls, and hopped on their bandwagon, its corporate wheels oiled by cane sugar syrup and the blood of the masses, Buying the World a Coke and clanking their love beads, I held fast.

Even after the horrific coup-de-grace when Denise Kerr's dad was handing out sodas from the fridge at her birthday party and he was laughing over shreiking little girls stamping their shiny buckle shoes and yelling, "OK! Who wants Coke!" to frienzied "Me! Me! I Want it!"s and he was digging in the fridge and handing out drinks with "Here you go! Wait a minute, Barry (who was the only boy there, he and Denise liked to crush earthworms together after a rain), don't pry that off with your... Oh ha ha! Well, they were baby teeth weren't they?" and
"OK! Let's see here, There's RC Cola (Barry drank RC) and some Fresca (to a resounding "Ewww!")...no...that's you're mother's. She'd have my hide...and, say, how'd this get here? Here's an old Dr. Pepper. Ha! Wonder where that came from?" and I said, "I'll take it."
The silence fell on them like they'd been un-plugged, her dad in mid bottle cap pry and kids in mid-guzzle, but Denise, at 10, already Ambassador to The Man, stepped forward to sum up the World's disdain for me and my kind with the pat: "Ew, that's prunes".
It could not be denied.
I liked it and felt an instant affinity of others who chose The Doctor. Although, I've got to say, they were thin on the ground as I recall.

So D 'n' B is pretty good. If, when you hear "pretty good", you think of Vick's Formula 44, which is exactly what it tastes like. It cost 59p, so they're not giving it away. It's also, I read here, the Official Soft Drink of the Great Britain Rugby League. An angry bunch. The label on that the black plastic bottle (very few soft drink bottles are actually black) lets slip a softer - dare I say truer side, by revealing that the bottle contains "sparkling dandelion and burdock flavour". Sparkling. Like a brook. Like a beautiful restorative quaff. And the warning: "If spilt, this product may stain." Who can be surprised?
It's made in Glasgow.

Peopleallovertheworld! Join me!

It's been raining for forty five days.

Since Tony Blair stepped down and Gordon Brown took office, there's
been a huge and general price increase, we've been attacked by terroists, and it hasn't stopped raining. Last Thursday, July 20, at 11:30, they say, the sun came out and it got up to 72 degrees.

People rushed out of their houses and office buildings, cramming the pubs and beer gardens,
laughing and taking off their shirts, and driving around with the windows down playing ELO's Greatest Hits and Love Train by the O'Jays.
It was very sweet.
Since then, in our wellies, under our brollies, through blue lips, we
are still humming...

English Appliances: A Tragedy in Two Cycles

The appliances in England are...hmmm...let me cast around carefully for the most delicate and diplomatic expression... let's see...Rickety and Poorly Designed? Ah yes, that's it exactly.

For example, you would think that designing a refrigerator would be pretty fool proof: Big Cold Box, right? Oh, but No! Our Candy Futura Frost-Free is a trim little ballerina of a refrigerator that would fit comfortably under the seat in front of you, and a freezer full of delicate plastic drawers in the bottom. The whole thing weighs about 100 pounds soaking wet, which it mysteriously, often is. You have to load it like ballast in a ship hold. Put a milk carton and a sack of carrots on the same shelf and the whole thing will list alarmingly, usually forward into your arms, like a dying swan.

But maybe it's more of a needy personality issue, rather than its delicate design. Our refrigerator is like a big lonely cow. When you walk by, the whole thing leans forward to nuzzle you. And it's so anxious to please you, if you stomp too hard past it, its doors swing open unbidden. Open the freezer and all the plastic drawers slide out all at once. It's rather pitiful, really. So, when we actually do want to open the refrigerator, we've learned that, in order to intercept all the wine bottles and lettuce and soy sauce that will come flying out of the door rack and the crisper, it's necessary to swing our bodies right into the box and sort of close the door behind us, waving our arms like we're chasing geese, in order to field and knock down escaping condiments.

Then there's the washer. It's a dryer too, which sounds like a good idea and very European, doesn't it? Well, it's all the washer can do to handle two pairs of socks and a tie. And it complains and growls through the whole process. It's got some sort of energy-saving chugging and stopping strategy. It chugs and then stops - just ceases-for a long time- some time, later, it'll give a couple of half-hearted chugs and then collapse once again. You'll be in standing in the peaceful little kitchen looking out at the summer garden, forgotten all about the socks in hours ago, and wondering whether there's any soy sauce left, when the washer will roar to life at your ankles growling and chugging . It's unsettling.

Where it really comes to life is the spin cycle, though. It sound like a Harrier jet lifting off an aircraft carrier. Quite impressive and it smashes and wrings the clothes into hard wads and cudgels.

Then it's exhausted, so the dryer doesn't work properly. It wheezes and gasps all over the clothes, going "Hagh Hagh Haaaagh" every now and then, for hours, like an old man until you just say, "Oh for crying out loud. Let me just do it." and it chuckles and goes back to sleep.

Brian Roamin' Britain

Hadrian's Wall, in 126, delineated the northern-most frontier of the Roman Empire.

At the northern-most jut in this northern-most frontier, Brian surveys the whole Roman Empire to the civilized South.






While Liz surveys the wild North.

The Wall was built of stone because, as long as 500 years before the Romans arrived, Celts and indigenous people had felled the vast oak and pine forests that had covered the island, in order to forge iron. Axes presumably.

Here are Brian and Liz goofing around with auto-photo mode looking as if they have been slain, but actually attempting to alert you to the basaltic whitstone chunk above their decapitated heads that shows dramatic and impressive evidence of having been hewn.



And hewn it had been. By a Roman craftsman-soldier, no less. With Roman craftsman-soldier tools who was thinking Roman craftsman-soldier thoughts the last one being something like: "Criminy. This basaltic whitstone is a bugger to chisel. I'm off to the baths." And here it lies to this day getting rained on and snowed on and stoats and rabbits and sheep and now we come and sit on it and look at Scotland to the north. Oh the weird time-folding under an indifferent sky.

The Wall gives the landscape an exciting "Those tha' came before us" feel. It's always pleasant to think of that "What the...!" moment of discovery: the feeling that the Basque farmer must have had brushing himself off and feeling around for broken bones after falling through a hole in what turned out to be the roof of the Altamira caves, lighting a Bic, and being surrounded by buffalo. Or the Chinese farmer digging a well on the outskirts of Xian and finding himself wallowing shin deep in scowling, terra-cotta heads. Or! just west of these photos, the English farmer out in the morning on the bog to look over his sheep in an especially dry summer, that had -unbeknownst to him (and that's the best part) - caused the peat to recede revealing a chunk of what turned out to be a Roman Mithraic temple bubbling up from the sedge. What else is in there?

They didn't know about us, but we know about them. Someone will know about us, cobbling our world together by deciphering epitaphs, graffiti, battered hard-drives, and falling through roofs of what will turn out to be semidetached houses, leisure centres, the chippy... and they'll form opinions...

Knitting Hadrian

Following a fine and loopy tradition of Kissing Day (July 6), and National Wiggle Your Toes Day (August 6) is Knit in Public Day on June 9th.


Alerted to this Noble-Day-Not-To-Be-Missed by she of www.kamsarmer.blogspot.com, I celebrated by knitting a summer cotton scarf in beautiful blues using Wendy Supreme Double Knit in the back garden of No. 2 Doe Park (Here you can see: my wattle, our purple wheelie bin, and a tiny chip of the vast, monstrous, and collossal Queen Maude Land of an un-recycled plastic water bottle iceberg in a city that does not/can not recycle plastic god damned bottles. My advice to you and everyone you know or will ever meet is this: Renounce Plastic Water Bottles! Use Your Public Water Supply! A tremendous amount of energy goes into cleaning municipal water. Bottled water is shipped huge distances in petroleum-based plastic bottles. Its sanitation is not even always guaranteed. This is a relatively unpopulated band wagon with plenty of room. Hop on with me! More ranting soon and often.);




then suddenly in Liverpool with the beautiful Iconic Waterfront looming like Shalimar beyond, then a little later 200 miles to the north on Hadrian's Wall in Northumbria along the Scottish Borderlands.




Knitting along Hadrians' Wall is to be recommended. The chunk shown here is the footing of a bridge over the Tyne, built in, oh...127-ish, after the first one washed away in a freak deluge, led to a large fort where soldiers (who were an Iberian Legion) stationed for months on the wall could R and R, and, you know bivouac, I suppose and have a sauna, and loll around practiciting hand-to-hand combat. They could also recieve their mail there. The postal system throughout the Roman Empire was so reliable and established that you could send away for harnesses wrought in Tunisia or Phonician pottery and, eventually, it would arrive at this fort on the Scottish border, the northern-most point in the Roman Empire.

Hadrian's wall is the most southerly of the several Britannic frontiers built. The first, the Gask Frontier, was much further to the north to watch the Scottish Glens and passes into the Highlands from which indigenous tribes like the Caledonii and Picts(described as 'pugnacious') would launch attacks when they weren't fighting each other.

Hadrian's Wall runs 80 Roman miles (a Roman mile is 1000 paces) from the North Sea at Newcastle, up and over the country's Pennine spine, to Solway Firth at Carlisle.

This neatly built bridge abuttment lying in a sheep pasture under some oaks, with its chisel and crow bar scrapes and phallic ornamentation (the Roman soldiers were Mithraic and rather earthy) is at a fort right at the top of the Pennines which run 300 miles down the center of England like a fold. Here the River Tyne, limpid when it isn't deluging, over which the bridge was built more than once, runs east to the North Sea, but a mile further on, we and the River Irth headed west.

When the Romans bugged out not long after this bridge was built, the wall, once about 12 feet high, and its forts, turrets, milecastles, and temples were battered into the moors and crags by the elements, dismantled and scavenged (the town hall at Carlisle is made of Roman wall stone) and pulverized for fertilizer (archeologists cringe to find lime kilns on their sites) into waist high, but 9 feet wide, stretches, tell-tale squares, a nine-foot wide ditch and mounds running across the country, the strangely lumpy landscapes that had been quarry, and the road along the back of the wall is now the the A69. In modern currency it is estimated that the wall would have cost 3 billiion pounds to construct.

When the Romans left Brittania in the

I love the Woolton Baths

This morning I swam at the Woolton Baths, which are housed in a little red sandstone gem of a 1890's building with columns and a smoke stack, and the word "BATHS" carved in bold letters into the pediment above the door.

Dripping, as it were, with Victorian charm inside too, above the pool the peaked roof is glass and held up with wrought iron struts that arch up like an umbrella's ribs. It's got a good, tiled splashy echo, like swimming in a train station or a green house. When the sun comes out and shines down on the swimmers and the waves, everyone looks up, and says, "Ah. That's loofly. Like swimmin' in th' open air."

The building was home of the Woolton Swim Club until the 30's and was a fire station during the war, after which it languished for twenty years and chunks began to fall off of it like most of Liverpool until it was taken under the weary wing, already pretty crowded with manors and gardens and clocks and towers, of the Liverpool Council, who shored it up and transformed the coal room into the Women's Toilet, and put in the chlorine equipment in a closet in the back, and hauled it back to sputtery life, although they say it can't hold on forever and "looxury apahtments" will be its final role.

I go to 'Adult Swim' from 8 a.m. to 9 when the average age of everybody in the pool is about 75 and the men have bushy mustaches and do Jack LeLane limbering exercises and would not look out of place in striped swimming costumes. The ladies push off regally together breast stroking in their bathing caps and goggles companionably gliding about in pairs sliding through the water like cormorants or turtles, then they bob in the middle chatting and say "Ah. Sorry Luv. We're setting the world to rights." when I crash into their white, sea weed-y arms.

Now Reduced for Quick Sale!

"All Cranberry, Prune, Fig, and Rhubarb Yogurt Variety Packs!
Now Reduced to Sell!"

Conversation in the kitchen of Acrefield House, Much Woolton, Liverpool UK inspired by a sign in the Woolton Tesco, April 2007



Honey? I brought you a yogurt variety pack. Mmm, yogurt. It's so good for you.

Thank you, sweetie. Is it strawberry? I like strawberry. I know you're always saying, "Mix it up with your mueslix. It's European." As if something called 'mueslix' could be improved by something called 'yogurt'. Too many vowels. But, as you know, I'm a man with an adventurous palate. I hope itÕs strawberry. Is it strawberry?

Well, no. It's not strawberry.

Blueberry? Blueberry is nice. Makes me think of Swedish girls in sunny meadows. I don't know why. They're in peasant blouses with deeply scooped necklines. Frolicing of course. They certainly love a good frolic, Swedish girls. Lots of laughing in the summer grass. Raised on a fine tradition of muesli-eating I'll bet, those girls. Strapping. ....Yes, blueberry would be nice....Is it blueberry?

No, no... I didn't get blueberry, my love. I...You know, honey, as we go through Life...

Wow. It really isn't blueberry.

As we go through life, honey, not everything is going to be blueberry yogurt and Swedish peasant girls in the barn.

Meadows. Swedish peasant girls in sunny meadows.

Yes. Sunny meadows. There may be blueberry yogurt at times. Those Golden Blueberry Yogurt Days. But, even those Swedish girls are not constantly awash and rolling in blueberry yogurt, I'm afraid.

Gosh honey. I can hardly be expected to pay attention to this conversation when you're tossing out yogurt-coated peasant girls.

Sorry. I'll be brief. The thing is, honey, the long hard, day-in day-out slog of being a Swedish peasant girl requires something more sturdy than blueberry yogurt. It requires a durable yogurt. In fact that is how the Swedish girls get all of their lovely teeth, their cute blouses, slender ankles, and brown legs with that delicate golden furze of hair that doesn't snap the handles off Gillette after Gillette in grusome shaving fracasses leaving everyone involved tearful, gashed, and pocked with clots of bloody Kleenex only to to discover at dinner that, in the badly lit shower with no glasses, a shaggy fringe of stubble on the back of a left leg has escaped the mowing and now catches on the panty-hose of the guest-of-honor making her slosh her lobster bisque and say, "Ow. Ow. Good God, what was that? I've been bitten! There must be a badger under this table!"...and everyone shrieks and dives under the table to look for the badger and defend the guest-of-honor's...um..honor. And you.... You dive with them, don't you? Pretending to look for the badger under the table, when all along you know. You are the badger. Yes. The badger is you.

Honey?

No, my love! Not everyone's life is hair-free blueberry yogurt! Sometimes Life calls for more work-a-day yogurts. All-weather radial yogurts. Sensible shoe, Tyvek, straight-back chair, Sans-a-belt yogurts. Jeep yogurts!

So, what did you get?

I got the cranberry, prune, fig, and rhubarb variety pack.

You're kidding.

No.

Gosh.

At Last! Doe Park

At last, we've settled into No. 2 Doe Park just off School Lane, among the ancient beech trees and moss of Much Woolton, Liverpool. Woolton, at 200 feet, is the highest spot for miles and was once the site of an Iron Age camp. We live across the lane from the grass sweep of Camp Hill park, named for the camp or its myth. In Camp Hill park is a Victorian walled garden, a small and blue-bell filled forest, magpies, stock pigeons the size of cats, and a magnificent view down to the John Lennon airport and the sparkling Mersey beyond.



Doe Park is a collection of 5 houses looking in to a shared grassy green. Our neighbors are "Neighbor Jane and Dave", "Across the Way Jane and Dave", Neil and Louise, and Julie and Scott and their big, pink Weimeranner, Bleu.





Everyone is rather dauntingly friendly. They all gave us "Welcome to Your New Home" cards when we arrived. I met Neighbor Dave face down in the gravel of the drive, with his arm down our shared drain hosing out a clog. He then mowed our little garden and lent us a 1898 map of Woolton.

Our green catches the last of the afternoon sun, the pink and rosy brick of our houses surrounding it is very Mediterranean. Louise and Neighbor Jane were drinking wine in the sun, and talking about Spain (Louise hadn't wanted to give her dad a watch for his birthday, so she took him to Seville). Everyone was laughing and Louise's husband, Neil, came out to join us with their baby, Madeleine, and a large glass of something golden with ice. I said, "That looks refreshing." and he said, "It's Magnus. It's a cider. Try it." And I did. And it was.

Neither Fish Nor Fowl: The Expat's Lament

Oh god! What am I doing here!?
Gazing sensibly right, I have stepped out
in front of so many oncoming vehicles that the streets and highways of
northwest of England are clogged with cars whose drivers have had to
pull off the road they were laughing so hard at the amazingly freakish
faces and acrobatic leaps that I have performed as their bumpers
grazed my patellas.

Emergency workers are finding them in their cars,
draped over their dashboards, weeping with laughter and doing the
little whoop I make as I leap over their hood ornaments. It's humiliating.

Oh god too. Here was my worst day: March 7. First, I got
yelled at by a street musician. A flautist! and then I was asked to never
come back to a particular on-line Liverpool chat room because they
thought I talked so much and so erratically that I was spam.

This is not my pond.

But it will be. I'm off now to Hightown where there is a train
station, beautiful dunes, a submerged and ancient forest, old
asparagus field ....Gee it has suddenly begun to gush rain from all
directions...weirdly, the sky is blue......it is quite a nautical
town. I guess I'll wear a hat.

The Liverpool Cathedral is Just Like A Ship

The Liverpool Cathedral is exactly and in every way just like a ship. A huge, mossy, Gothic hulk of a ship, with falls and gushes of stained glass windows, made of chocolate, and bobbing out there among the chimney pots and shining slate roofs on a ridge above this sea-faring town.

The ridge on which the Cathedral was built, provides a beautiful river vista. It was once the place the townsfolk would promenade of an evening, and was, simultaneously, it seems, a quarry (prime promenading terrain, in my book) and a garden, and is now, for some reason, the carpark for the John Moore's University Business Department, so on this, one of the first sunny afternoons of the spring, the Peugeots and Audi washing up at the cathedral's feet were sparkling like surf.

I'd come at it broadside from the west, its starboard side, which is not the direction sanctioned by the Tourist Board or the Liverpool Police Department I'm guessing. I set off through a tricky, but ideal-for-body-dumping construction site, through a mews of apartments, its dog shit and garbage sacks duned up against a maze of prison-y fencing, and bumbled around through the kind of spiny landscaping planted mostly to deter forced entry full of ensnared and shredded plastic grocery bags and Lucoade bottles, and twelve year old boys huddled by some daffodils, industriously scraping swastikas into a wall.

I had to ask directions twice, which seemed ridiculous, since the structure was looming right over us like a cliff, once from a man with eyebrows as long as my pinkie, which is pretty long for eyebrows, who, when I chimed, "Excuse me!" and came at him across the sidewalk, he looked like I'd just caught him murdering cats. But, for as hunched and hooded as everyone was, they were cheerful and helpful, and when I said, "Oh thank you, very much," they said, "Yeah. Ta luff," which means either, "Why, of course, you delightful woman. It's my pleasure to present my magnificent town to you." or "Yeah, whatever." until, at last I staggered out like a battered pilgrim, pulling shredded grocrey bags from my ankles and leaves out of my hair, and into the John Moores parking lot where there's the damn building right there. The John Moores people going to their cars in the afternoon probably bump their shoulders against it getting in their Hondas butting right up against the foundation stones that boil right out of the licheny rock all tumbled with lavender and birch and heathery shrubs. Both imposing and invisible.

The Liverpool Cathedral is shaped like a ship with a gargantuan central tower with louver blinds, forty tons of bells, and a bow and a stern and eighth of a mile apart. It is crammed with nautical imagery like dolphins worked into the wrought iron and corvettes and clippers in full sail ornamenting the copper downspouts, and gaunt saints, like Nicholas, patron saint of seafarers, standing on little shelves, gazing quietly onto the top of my head. I sat on the steps under the vast western arch in the afternoon sun with the dolphins and the Audis. Little bits of mica twinkled in the stone all around me, and the arch was like a big quiet cave, or a cove, maybe, where I and a lot of twinkly flotsam had washed up. Very pleasant.

In the 1880's, wanting their own cathedral to one-up Chester down the road, but worried that a puny classically styled cathedral would be upstaged by all the silvery domes and columns and huge clocks (the biggest clocks in England, I have read) of Liverpool's knock-your-eye-out-grand waterfront, the diocese chose to build it on a ridge of rock just south of the city, a prime vantage point from which to glower down disapprovingly on the worldly workings of the counting houses and insurance buildings of the world's busiest, and wealthiest port.

It took something like forty years to build full of waxes and wanes of money and interest and direct hits from German bombs one of which smashed through the four feet of the church's copper-coated concrete roof, lost some omph when it fell onto the curved vaulting ceiling just below, rolled off hard enough to smash through an upper vestry wall, shoot out into space, and blow up in the cemetery smashing all the windows on that side. It was finished in 1968, just as Liverpool was really going down for the count and unemployment was at 30%. It oversaw the Toxteth riots across Parliment Street when the Rialto Ballroom was set on fire and its copper dome glowed all night. The Georgian townhouses lining Hope Street, now a painfully posh address principly because of their stunning views of the cathedral's sunrise side, were just ten years ago being given away so derilict and rife with prostitution were the cathedral grounds and its wilderness of a cemetery, that settees were put out for those waiting their turn on the mattresses under the bushes. Ew.

You wouldn't know all that by looking at it now, unless you come at it from the starboard side.

Is it me?

Odder and odder, the old women of Liverpool talk to me like we've known each other for years. Since I've been here, they have been popping out from the bus shelters asking me to tie their shoe strings, saying sweetly, "Scuse me luff. Would ya fasten ma lace?" Or they turn to me in the scrum of the Tesco dairy aisle and say, "Activia 3 pound 50! In Prescot last week, they was 2 pound 90." And I do what you'd do. I tie shoes, and cluck at the Tesco people taking over the planet.

Recently, I was trudging through Blundellsands, just north of Liverpool, once a Victorian seaside retreat, where, now, as it turns out, a creepily beautiful sculpture by Anthony Gormley is. Composed of 100 cast iron men scattered down two kilometers of flashing silver coast, the men (casts of Mr. Gormley) stand hock-deep, waist-deep, and -alarmingly, if you don't know what they are- neck-deep in the surf gazing out as the last trickle of shipping in the Mersey estuary slides by and people walk their dogs and gaze out too.

Well. I was walking down toward the beach through a neighborhood notable, I would say, for its remarkably oppressive bungalow-garden-driveway endless-loop uniformity, like a bad cartoon. As I approached one driveway, there was a lady in a flowered dress standing by her garden wall while her husband placed the recycling bag (marked Recycling Bag) neatly beside the sidewalk to match the neighbors' yellow bag recyclng bags, and as I passed, she turned to me and said, "I was walking with groceries just down there, and the man ahead of me allowed his dog to foul the sidewalk." I paused, like anyone would, but kept moving, like anyone would, and said, "Well, really. Gosh. Some people. Really." which rather egged her on and she said, "Yes! That's right! Some people!" but she veered off topic with, "Are you're from Canada, then?" and I said, "I'm from the US." to which she replied, "I have a sister in Canada." She was having to yell now, " Helen in Ontario." "Oh," I yelled back. But then she called, "Are you on your way to see the iron men?" which made me stop. "The iron men?" I called. "Yes," she said, "Horrible things," which made me not only stop, but come back a little, and say, "Really? Why?" And she said, looking rather pleased I'd come back, "Well, they have their... things, you know...." which was sweet (sort of) in a up-tight, priggish, annoying, Puritanical sort of way, so I said, "Oh. They're anatomically correct, eh? Ha ha!" rather randily for me, and the spectre of 'things' was swinging around over our heads. And she said, "Yes. Horrible. The children hang things from them." and we both laughed, which was, not just sort of, but in fact, sweet. And so I said good-bye, and went to go look at them.

These aren't ancient, apple-bearing hooded crones, they're just women, seventy-ish. Not obviously insane, although maybe a little spittley and thick lensed. The thing I find odd and would like an explanation for, please, is that it's as if they've been waiting for me. They step out, or turn around, or straighten up and just continue our conversation about shoe-laces or yogurt or "things, you know...". Do they see me as one of their own? Just since I've arrived with all the various worries of leaving and arriving, I've acquired these new frownlines braided down through the soft puckery skin at the corners of my mouth. In a beauty, lips' corners turn up even when they're frowning, but in me, soup and beet juice is going to run down into these gullies some day I just know it, and someone will have to pat it dry. But who? They're there even when I'm smiling.

So it appears to be age, loneliness, or dementia we have in common. They can see it.

In contrast, the old men of Liverpool hate me. Jeez. Yesterday, B and I were walking up the exhaust pipe that is Mount Street, along Lime Street station past the homeless shelters and the Asylum Seeker advice centers that are housed in magnificent chocolate sandstone Georgian wrecks with No Loitering messages posted on the finely fluted columns, when coming down the hill, a little old toad of a man came barrelling at us all bow-legged in giant boots with crazy hair like frayed wire, and the fingers of his filthy gloves cut off, and his chin folded up like a second nose, and as we passed, he turned to me and stopped. And I stopped. And he looked at me, and blew what can only be called a raspberry. Jeez.

We're off to Pontybodkin!

It's a clear day in Liverpool! Newsworthy enough, you say, but the real news is that
we're off to Pontybodkin just over the Wirral peninsula in the shire
of Flint and the neighborhood of Mold.

We'll stop by Pontybodkin- we think it is
known for its pottery - but really, our goal is the village of
Llanarmon-yn-ial (there's a circumflex over that 'a') to stretch our
legs on Offa's Dyke the 8th century, 177-mile berm built by good(ish)
King Offa to keep out the Welsh. King Offa required every vassal and helot to contribute a tenth of a meter of wall, which we didn't think was such a bad deal, until it was noted that the dyke is 27 feet wide and about ten feet tall, with a big ditch in front to make it seem even taller. Evidently, the vassals and helots were displeased with the prospect of contributing even a tenth of a meter, so the requirement was changed to either building a tenth of a meter of wall, or - you'll like this - bring lunch.

The good(ish) folks at National Train hooted and guffawed and loped
around in their glass cage when I showed them where we wanted to go
(showed them, principally because I can't pronounce 'Llanarmon-yn-ial'), and said,
"Naw loof. It's a non-stationed town, ye see." In fact, according to
the National Train people, Llanarmon-yn-ial can only be gotten at by
taking the train to Rhyl twenty miles away and then taking a bus for
70 minutes. Twenty miles in 70 minutes, eh.


We learned a lot from the web site www.unforgettablelanguage.com. It seems that the Welsh word for 'cheese' is 'caws' and the word for 'Welsh' is 'Cymru' since 'Welsh' means 'foreigner' in Welsh.

How Civilized Liverpool

Today is World Book Day. Out on the walking street, a pretty girl was handing out books from a big plastic bag:
"Would you like a free book," she said. Jaded and world-weary I, wary as a wack-a-mole when it comes to people handing me things on the street slowed only to turn up my nose and gave her my usual, "Hurumnghunghunh," which means "I am too jaded and world-weary and thinking of important things to fall for your chicanery." But then, my brain kicked in and said, "Geez, Liz, she seems to be giving you a book." and another woman stopped and said, "Oh! Free books. That's great." So I said, "How can I turn down a free book?" and the pretty girl said, "It's World Book Day today. We're part of a world-wide effort to get people to read the same book together." She said they'd passed out 150 books today in Liverpool and another number rather big if I recall in the nation.
In fact it's the 10th World Book Day

What Do You Make of This?

I've been house hunting all week, and staggering back from viewing yet another "Stylish converted flat situated in the sought after Sefton Park area with a wealth of features that can only be appreciated by interior inspection", I didn't realize how far back it was back home, and refused to take the bus.
Convinced that at any moment I would round a bend and arrive at a street I recognized just beyond the endless loop of betting agents, derelict Air Handling Equipment warehouses, soot-caked and padlocked churches, and knots of men with naked heads the color of suet gathered together chatting about bare knuckle boxing and admiring each other's pit bulls, saying things like, "Well, ya look ta haf a winna there, Kev. He's sure ta rip the throat outta summat, doon cha kno.", I stopped in at a Home Bargains and picked up a few things including a two liter twin pack of Highland Springs organic still water (a steal at 98 p), two cans of plum tomatoes, a 100 count box of Tetley's round tea bags (they fit right in your cup), and a pack of Trebor extra cool mints.
Miles later, having devoured the Trebors to lighten the load on the steps of yet another weedy and smashed church with my bags mounded up around me like pioneers sheltering from an Indian attack, I came out into Princes Avenue (not to be confused with Princess Avenue, which is where the hospital is, when you're bleeding from a head wound and asking directions). Most people do not weep with joy when they arrive on Princes Avenue. It is the spine of the Toxteth neighborhood which beat the crap out of itself in the summer of 1981, injured a thousand police officers with smashed bottles and paving stones, setting fire to all of the once pretty Georgian townhouses, the synagogue, and the gigantic Rialto ballroom whose immense and ornately carved copper cupola glowed all night. It is still pretty bruised.
But I knew where I was, and was getting up a good head of steam, when the sidewalk filled with people waiting at a bus stop and as I weaved through the crowd, knee-capping them jauntily with my groceries, a little woman about 60 or so, in a tidy blue sweater, stepped toward me, and said, "Scuse me, luv, would you fasten my lace?" and presented to me her left foot in a little navy blue shoe with an untied shoe lace. And I looked at her and she looked at me through thick lenses and she smiled modestly and looked down at her shoe and leaned one hand against the mossy stone wall beside us and gazed into the middle distance like a little cow waiting to be milked. And I had all this baggage and clanking bottles and plum tomatoes, and I knelt down and tied her shoe and said, "Is that too tight?" and she said, "Thank you, luv." and I said, "My pleasure."
Do you think that odd?
That's what I'm doing in Liverpool UK. I think you would like the weather which is a spanking 7C with a fresh breeze that sends the litter flying. Ah! The sun's just come out. Op! There is goes back again. Ahh, tha' twus loofly, tha' twus.
Liz