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