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.