S. Worthen | Weblog

We were still around an hour from our destination, driving west across Gloucestershire, and the sun was starting to set. I saw a sign for a historic bee shelter a mile off of the main road and suggested we turn around to go see it. A historic bee shelter!

And that's how we came to be in Hartpury on Saturday. The village has one of the country's largest tithe barn - and this fantastic mid-nineteenth century bee shelter. It was made by a somewhat local stonecarver who'd already worked on the Palace of Westminster at this point in his career, made perhaps to advertise his skill and the selection of locally-available stone, as it was made from a variety of them. In any event, it eventually ended up at a local agricultural college and then, restored within the last decade, in its current home in the churchyard at Hartpury.

It's no longer in use, but what a visionary way to keep hives!

The place further endeared itself to me through its name, whose roots are the same as "hard perry". Appropriate, regional, and tasty.

I went to Liverpool for about 24 hours. Since austengirl is leaving the country, certainly for several months of world travel, possibly even more long term than that, I wanted to pay her a visit before she headed off on her expeditions. It was a good visit, but since they were busy repainting the house, cleaning, and organizing, I spent some of my time in museums.

And more museums than usual, given the time constraints! My train arrived around 4:15 pm, so I headed straight off to the World Museum, not having previously seen it. But since that closed at 5, I had time for ten minutes with the gorgeous, beautifully-displayed, but very small Anglo-Saxon collection, plus a superficial tour of Egyptians and one fish tank from the aquarium. I particularly liked that the spindle whorls were displayed on clear resin spindles. The woman at the information desk was a wonderful city ambassador: grieved I would not be around for Chinese New Year's celebrations this weekend, and everything else there is to do in the city. (Happily, this was not my first touristic expedition to Liverpool, so I've eaten at some of its good restaurants and seen a number of its museums before.)

She also recommended the Bluecoat, a building of craft shops and exhibit space which is open until 6 pm. I had time to see much - but not all - of the Gina Czarnecki show, which was fascinating. She's a new media artist who deals with the biological sciences, and the most striking pieces were those which actively required - or which required checking to see if they required - ethical consent. Donated milk teeth embedded in a crystal resin "palace" of fanciful swoops and towers. (Donations ongoingly sought.) The casts of donated femur ends, cleaned and stabilized by flesh-eating beetles. The dental casts of corpses, IDs filed off, no longer used for corpse identification, and no longer suitable for landfill.

This morning, I saw the Alice in Wonderland show at the Tate. The concept was lovely: the original artwork, plus a long history of all it and the story has inspired. The actual realization was a little too broad and rambled a fair bit. It was thought-provoking in some probably unintended ways. Notably, the book went out of copyright in 1907, fifty years after publication, and immediately something like 14 other illustrated editions were printed. The show as a whole celebrated the fruitfulness of its inspiration; an inspiration only made possible in so many cases because it did not linger overlong in copyright.

Display cases included many other illustrated Alices, including Arthur Rackham, Tove Janssen, Mervyn Peake, and Barry Moser. There were pre-Raphaelite paintings, Dodgson's social and artistic milieu; his own photographs; lots of Surrealist artwork by "the children of Alice"; early short films based on Alice, including two early Disney ones and one by René Magritte; lots of psychedelic '60s work; modern pieces which in some more and some much, much less, obvious ways reflected on some aspect of the Alice tradition.

Today was also rainy and - worse - very blustery down at the docks. I was really rather wet and glad I'd used my water-resistant hiking backpack as luggage on this particular trip.

An American to his companion, taken aback and clearly bothered, while walking by the German consulate in Venice. He has just commented on how dirty the exterior of a church is, and generally seems to be in a critical mood: "Why is there a German shield on that building?"

An Italian to her companion, on a train which has just crossed into Switzerland, and which has just jostled about a little. Scornfully. "In Italy, trains don't move about like that." (She says it again, emphatically, a moment later.)

Three people have complimented me on my French in the last day. As my own traveling companion rightly pointed out, they only do so because my spoken French isn't actually all that fluent - it's just obvious that I'm trying hard.

We were meant to have three hours to see a snippet of Brussels between trains, but then the train was late and it was two hours, and finally I was disoriented by the poor signage in the station which failed to correspond to streets visible on my map, so we wasted another 15 minutes being on several wrong sides of Brussels-Midi.

Thus, by the time we were anywhere near our destination, the Grande Place, we were already wondering if trying to fit in token tourism there was a mistake. At least we'd checked our bags at the station, but it was nippy out, and the neighborhood was unprepossessing.

Finally, the streets narrowed, the shops became more upmarket and dense, and off in the distance we could hear the opening strains of Ravel's Bolero - perhaps a live concert? over-amped music spilling out from a classically-inclined bar?

The Grande Place was lovely, both smaller and grander than we had expected from guidebook descriptions as, in the 6 pm dark, we walked around the central Christmas tree and saw the dimly-lit buildings on the sides of the square among moderate crowds, the post-1695 bombardment guildhalls, the town hall, and an empty central stage.

Bolero, recorded, wound to a close, and then we saw this...

( Photos of what we saw... )

I was tempted to entitle this "B is for Brussels", since I've given you "A for Antwerp", but those posts are together only because the DDoS attack has kept me from posting in the interim - it was inaccessible the few times along the way I tried.

A is for Antwerp. This is in the prairie section of the tranquil Kruidtuin, the botanic gardens near the city center. Also here so far: chocolate shopping, window browsing, St. Jacob's, the Cathedral, Ruben's House (doubling as a virtual class field trip), previously underused camera settings, a pub swarming with saints, hot chocolate, beef stew, rabbit stew, waterzooi. I still haven't seen the river.

1. My train from London to York died in Doncaster. Fortunately, it developed its fault while we were in the station. But we still all had to vacate the train and decamp to one which came not long after and onto which we were urged, standing-room only and jam-packed. Except, of course, many people then found they had invalid tickets, since the new train was Cross Country and the original one East Coast.


2. The next day, I met up with two historians of science on a bus in York city center. They had meant to arrive an hour or two earlier and have time to see the Minster, but their train had died just outside Doncaster, and it was half-an-hour of waiting before they could be pushed into Doncaster station and catch a different train.


3. Today's train from York to London died in Doncaster. Fortunately, the train which came 20 minutes later had some seats left. It's really just as well I wasn't stuck standing since tracks at Grantham were closed and we rerouted via Lincoln. It took hours; but I'd known in advance it was a hazard of traveling today.

I am disgruntled with trains in Doncaster right now. But I did see Lincoln Cathedral today, albeit from the train.

While in York, I stayed in a house well-stocked in books for young children. One of my hosts was shocked I had never read Meg and Mog. Or Pants! I have now, but he still hasn't read Pat the Bunny or Goodnight Moon.

I read some other books too. Apropos of the first line in Pointy-Hatted Princesses, I have a question for you:
[Poll #1790861]

Joseph JB Priestley, Action Hero?
Joseph JB Priestley, Blue Sky Thinker?
A portrait with dephlogisticated air?



This sculpture of Joseph JB Priestley is in front of the National Media Museum in Bradford.

The museum wasn't entirely my cup of tea, but it did have its moments. I liked seeing the branch of BBC Radio Leeds hard at work, broadcasting radio, albeit surrounded by display stuff on television.

And it was amazing to see the workings of an IMAX projection booth. (With warnings not to take flash photography as the audience would be able to see it.) It was a glorious encounter with the technological sublime, reels like millstones on a floor-to-ceiling spindle, the 70 mm film passing to and from the pair of hulking projectors. I loved it.

As I now know, this was the UK's first IMAX theater and, for about 12 years, was its only one. No wonder several people enthused about it as something to do in Bradford! As it happens, I lived in Toronto for a while, home of the IMAX company, which, as a result, has a whole slew of them. They get used for non-IMAX projections too, when a multiplex has enough demand for a new film. This is how I came to see so much of Keanu Reeves' pores in one of the Matrix sequels.

But I had never seen a projection room for them before.

Technically, I have been to Bradford once before, but I was not a tourist that time. This time, I allowed a little extra time for seeing some of the sights and making use of the bus network.

It's British Wool Week, and I misunderstood the Industrial Museum's website to promise me daily alpacas. There were none. Instead, I saw the enormous carding, spinning, and weaving machines upstairs, the long, shiny collection of somewhat eccentric cars downstairs, printworks, trams, engines, and a potted history of Bradford. The mill supervisor's house was my disorienting introduction to the site, since I had not yet then found the main entrance. Fascinating back-to-back houses preserved. Biggest revelation: a spare Victorian maid's room looks pleasantly comfortable to modern eyes.

The apse of the cathedral is under renovation, so no William Morris window for me. Still, not a bad overgrown parish church. The city is a bit hit-and-miss in its way: lots of good things, lots of long-abandoned, often burnt-out churches and mills, ripe for renovation when the money and/or population justifies it; and yet the whole place looks so solid, build as it is out of grey stone, layered into the hills of Bradford Dale.

Dinner was at Prashad. Brief version: very good overall, ordered too much because it's hard to predict portions at new places, beautiful masala dosa. The best two foods for me were the kalva, banana and fenugreek bhajis with coriander sauce; and one of the dips brought before the pappadoms, made from fermented thick-skinned mangoes. Dahi puri were refreshing, but less exciting; the puri didn't seem quite right, even if they may have been exactly as intended. Fantastic, friendly service.

Edelweiss is really weird. Of course I had heard of it before, the song especially, but I never saw it before my mother pointed it out for sale at a gift shop, up in a pass in the Dolomites. Half the passersby exclaimed in delight on seeing it, and since she had paused to draw the flowers, she could hardly mistake the consensus.

I saw lots more of it the next day: it decorated every tombstone in the gorgeously-situated cemetery in the town of Colle S. Lucia.

It was not even white, contrary to the song, but a pale, pale green. Its five-plus centers reminded me of nothing so much as Cthulhoid eyes. It struck me as a notably alien and unfamiliar plant. Yet, for the locals, it is a ubiquitous badge of homeland, especially with its geometry abstracted into even fives: five centers, five short petals, five long ones, on tablecloths, hiking badges, and shopping bags.