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.