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