S. Worthen | Weblog

I went to-and-from Canterbury yesterday, for the second day running, this time armed with a 24-hour photo challenge from easterbunny.

( Unexpected clocks )

The house distracted me; I was certain that the one week of the second-ever easterbunny one week LJ collection challenge ended Friday. So that's a little over a week then. Mine was this: "Choose any saint whose feast day coincides with your birthday. Find all references to that saint's name: churches, streets, pubs, and so on. Bonus points for finding pub names, streets, etc. relating to that of which the saint is patron."

After I surveyed all the options, I settled on the most obvious option, St. James the Greater, figuring that he upped my odds of finding any.

Before today, I had a whopping two items in my collection.
1. damedroiture went on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. (via cliosfolly) Tiago = Diego = James. Really.

2. At Nando's.


( And then there was today.... )

I may have chosen St. James the Greater, but you were all going to choose my also-ran theme for me. It ended up a dead heat between Olympiada the Deaconess of Constantinople (who went on post-death adventures), and the Ebernoe Horn Fair in Sussex (involves sheep-roasting, cricket, and thunderstorms). Poor Saint Anne is the only option with no votes. Pity. She was the only other one for whom I knew I could get at least one relevant photo.

Be careful in choosing your major research projects. My PhD dissertation dealt with windmills, sandglasses, and mechanical clocks, and friends and family have been giving me instances of all of them ever since. (It dealt with eyeglasses too; strangely, no one has given me any of those.) I realized long ago that - whether or not I even wanted to - I should never, ever publish a book on the history of garden gnomes. It would doom me to receive them as gifts for the rest of my life. If you had somehow missed the ubiquity of these objects in my life - not garden gnomes, the others - then it might not be clear what was part of the inspiration for what happened a week ago.

A week ago, easterbunny challenged nineteen of us volunteers to collect specific things over the course of one week. My assignment was this: "Tell me about every London (or Paris) windmill - old, new-fangled, pub name, streetname, unexpected presence in a painting or photo - that you see in the next week."

I've liberally applied my instructions to all kinds of mills, wind-powered or not.

( The London Collection... )

( The Paris Collection... )