"They have no queen this time of year. That's why they sting you," said one of two men working at the grocery store. The English, like their wasps, seem to know about monarchy.
They spoke of wasps, and much else. This fine autumn morning, wasps swarmed to and through our bathroom window here in Manchester. I went to buy a fly swatter, and toilet paper and beer. The day before we leave this house, we want it well stocked with toilet paper, a few courteous bottles of beer although we drank no beer of its owners, but no wasps; they lack courtesy.
Off I went, before 7:00 A.M., on a weekend tram and bus pass, to a grocery store one tram stop down the line. The place was opening for business, and one man was wheeling onto the sidewalk various displays. Another man, inside, was by a trolley of boxes of items he meant to unpack.
The outside man said the line that opened this little tale, and I wanted no wasp tail in my body, so I listened.
"My brother got stung in the fall when we were small. The nurse at the hospital told us that in the fall, after the queen leaves, wasps sting more often. He really swelled up. It was funny."
"For you," I said.
"Yeah."
By now, Inside Man had walked into the conversation, which hurts less than walking into a wasp.
"Do we sell fly swatters?" he asked Outside Man, having heard from me that I wanted a swatter.
"No," Outside Man replied. Wait until eight, when the Poundland near here opens. They might have swatters." Back at the house, we would later kill and dispose of more than ten wasps, and reclaim our bathroom.
Back I went with Inside Man to his cart of boxes awaiting unpacking. I was happy these two had time to talk, for I have seen many retail workers who did not have time, even if they wanted to talk. Who knows how many working people, in Manchester or elsewhere, know wasp habits? Perhaps these men's union agreement has, a clause about talk, or about wasps. The wasps seemed organized, unionized.
"I also need toilet paper and beer," I said. He not only told me where to find them and even walked me to the toilet paper. He said something funny enough to make me write this story.
"You might be drinking a beer, your head wrapped in toilet paper, and swatting wasps."
My time in England has often stung me with surprises, as I learned some of the land's quaint customs.
Saturday, September 24, 2016
Thursday, September 15, 2016
Leningrad Blockade Anniversary in Manchester
Thursday, September 15, 2016 Manchester, England
"It seems we haven't learned very much."
Manchester Metropolitan University Senior Lecturer Catherine Banks said that to a crowd of 50 yesterday, in Manchester Central Library:
http://www.mmu.ac.uk/news/news-items/4612/
Banks was explaining why she chose some items and not others for a library display marking the 75th anniversary of the September 8, 1941 start of the Leningrad Blockade.
"I was looking at a photograph of a bombed hospital in Leningrad," she said. "That day I saw on the news a bombed hospital in Syria. It seems we haven't learned very much."
Fascist Nazi Germany besieged Leningrad from 1941-44. Other fascists besiege Syria now. The Soviet Union freed Leningrad. Russia supports Syria today.
World War Two, which the Soviet Union called The Great Patriotic War, killed more Soviets than it killed in all major allied nations combined: England, France, Canada, the United States, Australia.
Late Harvard English Professor Paul Fussell was among United States soldiers who landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944, to open a second front long demanded by the Soviets, who had faced the brunt of the Nazi attack for almost three years.
The film Saving Private Ryan is not historically accurate, Fussell said when asked about his experience on Omaha Beach, the US landing spot in Normandy. The only part he called accurate was the first 20 minutes, when soldiers storming the beach faced fierce Nazi resistance.
"They should cut that film to 20 minutes and change its title to Omaha Beach: Aren't You Glad You Weren't There," Fussell concluded.
The Soviets' allies did not win the war, Fussell said. "The Soviets won World War Two, with some help from their allies."
Oh, how the people of Leningrad suffered, after the September 4, 1941 attack by Germany and its ally Finland. German leader Hitler vowed to erase the city, as he vowed to erase Belgrade, near the other end of what English leader Churchill would, shortly after the war, call "The Iron Curtain." The cigar-chomping racist who instigated the Bengal Famine during the war, killing millions, quickly forgot that the Soviets helped save his country from famine or worse during the war. True, England and its former colonies fought Hitler from 1939-45, while Russia fought from 1941-45, after Germany broke a 1939 non-aggression pact between the countries; but without Soviet help, England would have fallen into Nazi German hands. England came closer to defeat than it admitted at the time, archives released decades later show.
Leningrad came close to extinction. Professor Banks said that Hitler ordered the city of about three million demolished and wanted no prisoners taken.
The city evacuated thousands of children north, across Lake Lagoda, in the fall of 1941; but as the above photo shows, many died, and fewer and fewer were born as the siege continued. Germany and Finland had cut rail and road access in other directions. An ice road, The Road of Life, across the lake became the only supply line during the hungry winter of 1941-42.
Below, we see remaining children, and women, pressed into non-traditional work. Children made bombs, put out fires from Nazi bombs, and risked being bombed themselves while they weeded the many gardens the city planted, on every piece of available land.
Still, hundreds of thousands of people died from starvation or diseases related to starvation and related to a destroyed water and sewer system. The destruction which Canada helped bring to Bosnia, Afghanistan, Libya, and Haiti in more recent years differs in degree but not in kind from the destruction that Nazi Germany brought to Leningrad.
Culture continued despite the fascist onslaught, as the two photos below show. People moved more than 500 000 artworks from the Hermitage Museum to safer places, as Parisians had moved artworks from the Louvre Museum before German occupation. Leningrad, unlike Paris, was never occupied.
The composer Dmitry Shostakovich was in Leningrad when the siege started. He got out before the worst of the siege, and composed The Leningrad Symphony. Orchestras in Moscow, England, and the United States performed it. Bloodied but unbowed, Leningrad gathered enough musicians, half starved, almost too weak to play, and performed the symphony there on August 9, 1942.
That was my mother's fourteenth birthday. When I was growing up, she told me of wartime rationing of sugar, gasoline, and other items. Dad, nine year older, was in the Royal Canadian Navy during the war, in North Atlantic convoys bringing supplies to Europe. He told me that in Glasgow he met seamen from ships that would bring the supplies north to Murmansk. I suspect these northbound ships faced at least as much danger of attack at sea as Dad faced.
Before the symphony performance, heavy bombardment by Soviet guns that surrounded the city quieted the German lines, for the duration of the performance. The Soviets used large speakers to broadcast the music toward the Germans. Imagine if those Germans, from the country that produced Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, had listened, put down their weapons, and gone home.
Soldiers in 1917 left World War One, called an by the Soviets an imperialist war, returned to Russia, and overthrew Tsarist tyranny. After the unauthorized Christmas, 1915 ceasefire agreed between the Germans and French in World War One trenches, commanders from each side punished the organizers, and moved the troops up or down the line, so they could resume shooting, this time at strangers. People's natural urge is more to create than to destroy.
Sports also helped morale, as the photo to the left below shows. The besieged Leningrad people organized a soccer match between Dynamo, a league team, and a team made of factory workers. The halves were 30 minutes, not the regulation 45, because the players were weak from starvation and/or disease. Still, like the saving of the Hermitage artworks, like the Leningrad Symphony performance, this event told the besieging fascist armies that this city's people would do cultured, beautiful, fun things despite the siege.
Below, right, are wartime Soviet cartoons, one showing the allies surrounding fascism. How many words is a picture worth?
In the years after the war, western-organized coups overthrew socialist governments in Greece twice, subverted socialism in Italy at least as many times, and in France, and in Iran, and in many Arab countries. The United States and its stooges have been on the wrong side of liberation struggles, Arab and other, ever since. One might think they resume Hitler's work, as they encircle Russia, and enlist Japan to help encircle China. Italian partisans had already rid Northern Italy of German soldiers and organized a socialist government before the United States and Canadian troops got there, coming from Southern Italy. The U.S. Office of Strategic Services, which later became the Central Intelligence Agency, began during wartime, partly to subvert socialism in Europe.
Now, Europe is farther from socialism than it was even 20 years ago, let alone at the end of the war. I have seen many people begging and/or sleeping on the street in Germany and England since I came in early August from Canada for a European vacation. Still, there is hope. In 1962, a frosty year that the Cold War almost became hot enough to kill us all during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Manchester and Leningrad became sister cities, which they remain.
The Soviets under Stalin were little better than the United States and their war poodle England, as millions of subjugated people in Russia and elsewhere knew. In Yugoslavia, partisans had already swept German soldiers out of their country when the Soviets showed up, and agreed not to run over the victorious partisans, as they had run over Polish partisans. The Yugoslavs were stronger than the Poles, and Stalin didn't want to risk war with them, lest he endanger his own grip on power, his main concern. Postwar oppression in East Germany and other Soviet vassal states harmed people and hampered socialism.
United States General Patton, upon meeting his Soviet counterpart in Berlin in 1945, apparently asked his political superiors if he should continue east, that is, attack the Soviets. He, like Napoleon and Hitler, would have gotten into Russia, but not conquered it. Perhaps a war then would have prevented the decades of cold war militarism that followed, on both sides of Churchill's Iron Curtain.
The United States might have used nuclear weapons against the Soviets, as the U.S. used them against Japan that same year, 1945. Leningrad musicians performed their namesake symphony on my mom's fourteenth birthday. A United States plane dropped a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, Mom's seventeenth birthday. She grew up in wartime and survived, or I would not exist to tell you this tale.
How many people, each of them special, each loved by someone, died in heroic Leningrad resisting occupation? More than a million. How many died in wars and occupations past and present? How many die daily in the poverty and violence our system breeds? The Leningrad Blockade is long over, and we who heed history can learn from it: war never again, between nations, between individuals.
We can learn much. Professor Banks hopes so.
Sunday, September 11, 2016
U Boat, The Blitz, Ice Cream, and Dome Poem
Sunday, September 11, 2016 Brighton, England
A U Boat, the Blitz, ice cream, and a dome,
Are memories I put into this poem,
Two weeks before my roam brings me home.
U-234 sat in Hamburg's harbor,
A floating chunk of the second world war.
No submarine hat I bought on that score.
Across the channel, by a church, locked,
A woman, 90, told Blitz tales that shocked
Me, lifelong in peace happily docked.
Europe's craze, ice cream, Curator Loske told,
Rose two centuries past, in King George's bold
Brighton Pavilion, under a dome now old.
The shore raged under moving clouds last night.
Now the sun shines under waves rippling bright.
Past and future exist now, in the mind's sight.
A U Boat, the Blitz, ice cream, and a dome,
Are memories I put into this poem,
Two weeks before my roam brings me home.
U-234 sat in Hamburg's harbor,
A floating chunk of the second world war.
No submarine hat I bought on that score.
Across the channel, by a church, locked,
A woman, 90, told Blitz tales that shocked
Me, lifelong in peace happily docked.
Europe's craze, ice cream, Curator Loske told,
Rose two centuries past, in King George's bold
Brighton Pavilion, under a dome now old.
The shore raged under moving clouds last night.
Now the sun shines under waves rippling bright.
Past and future exist now, in the mind's sight.
My First Catholic Masses in England
Sunday, September 11, 2016 Brighton, England
My parents raised their children Roman Catholic in Canada, where that religion has more adherents than any other religion. I married in the church in 1993, the first Catholic wedding in my family since our parents married in 1950.
Like most "cradle Catholics," I rarely go to mass. In the past three days, however, I went twice in England, my first masses outside Canada; but the masses differed from each other, and from masses I recall in Canada.
St. Mary Magdalen Church, about a kilometre from where my sister and I stayed in Brighton, is a brick church built in the 1800s. It has masses in English, Polish, and Latin.
What was there in 1830, when England, after almost 300 years, reduced restrictions on Catholics and others who would not swear to faith in the Church of England?
Quakers I met at a Saturday open house at their church told me of restrictions their church faced from a few decades after their mid-1600s beginnings until the late-1820s "emancipation act" of parliament.
Before emancipation, instead of ministry, many Quakers went into business. Quakers started the Cadbury and Rowntree candy firms, and Barclay's Bank, for example. Quakers also famously opposed slavery decades earlier than a mass movement rose against slavery. Even before their own emancipation, Quakers emancipated others.
The Quaker women I met were happy to hear that United States folk music singer Joan Baez grew up Quaker.
After the English government rescinded laws requiring non-Church of England people to swear to the church in order to advance in certain areas of society, Catholics, Quakers, Baptists, and other "dissenters" were allowed to attend and teach in universities, to sit in legislatures, and freely to practice their religions.
A Baptist church near where we stay had a cornerstone dated 1834, less than a decade after emancipation. The Baptists got busy quickly, I thought when I saw that brick church. They are among the "dissenters," people with religions neither Catholic nor Church of England, which we Canadians call Anglicans. Two Anglican churches I was in here had crucifixes behind their altars the first time I saw that. I suppose these are High Anglican, unlike the Low Anglican church, which has no crucifix, in my hometown of Williams Lake.
The dissenting churches suffered in England, and elsewhere, and still do in parts of the world. Dissent can prevent or reduce tyranny, so tyrants, whether religious or secular, don't like dissent.
Getting back to mass so to speak, I sensed a different spirit of dissent in each of the two masses I attended here in England.
The first was a Traditional Latin mass, not to be confused with a Tridentine mass, the standard mass form before the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s changed the content of the mass and approved it for use in languages other than Latin. I was a child when this change came, and I do not remember the Tridentine Latin mass.
At age 20, when I lived in Ottawa to finish my Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature at Carleton University, I went to a Traditional Latin mass. Almost 35 years later, last Friday night, I went to a Traditional Latin mass at St. Mary Magdalen Church here in Brighton.
Most of the 20 or so participants, some of them children, knew more of the words than I knew. A girl of 10 or 12 sitting in front of me seemed fluent, including singing the Latin hymn that ended the mass, the first music in this mass.
The priest and his assistant faced the small altar to the right of the large altar. They did not face the congregation, but this was a modern mass in Latin, not a Latin mass using words common before the Second Vatican Council. That is, this was not a schismatic event, such as some theologians critical of the council began, to revert to the old forms.
This mass merely served people who wanted a modern mass in Latin. This dissent strengthens the church and perhaps the faith, by expanding the range of people it welcomes.
Perhaps the church should expand its offerings more, but past a certain point, it would lose unity; this is a delicate balance, as it is in all areas of society where dissent exists. Each person accepts a different level of disagreement from those around him or her.
Incidentally, the First Vatican Council, in the mid-1800s, was, like the second council a century later, an effort to make the church more relevant, without discarding what makes the church endure. Unlike the Counter-Reformation of the 1600s, these councils, especially the second, were less efforts against Protestantism than efforts for Catholicism.
Catholic with a small c means inclusive. John Milton, the 1600s English poet and republican, wrote for inclusion, and against Puritans and Anglicans and Dissenters and Catholics who saw their way as the only way to salvation. He infuriated both the monarchists and the republicans, during that era that largely formed the Christian traditions that continue to this day, in varying degrees, in Europe, America, and the rest of the world.
The Friday Latin mass felt inspiring, and inclusive by virtue of its linguistic echo of centuries-old traditions followed by many; but the Sunday English mass felt inspiring and inclusive, too. On Sunday, we said more of the mass in Latin than I ever said in an English mass: the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Apostle's Creed, and the Our Father. People also used the communion rail, something removed from churches in the late-1960s but returning in the past decade.
Most inspiring on Sunday was the singing; the priest and people sang the whole mass. The last time I was at a mass that was all sung was in the mid-1980s in Edmonton, at St. Alphonsus Church, the one my dad attended during his early adulthood. "When you sing, you pray twice," St. Augustine's words, were on the church bulletin.
The same priest said both the Friday and the Sunday masses; versatile priest. He invited people for refreshments after the Sunday mass. As people left, he stood at the door and shook each hand.
"Hello from Canada," I said, a greeting I use here to alert people to my Canadian accent.
"It's good to have you," he replied, with his English accent.
In a complex world, which was always complex in different ways in different eras, people seek help, answers, inspiration, meaning, and hope, from religion, nature, work, play, learning, love, and many other sources.
"We're all going the same place on different roads," Mom said more than once. She converted to Roman Catholicism before she married Dad, who grew up Catholic; but she converted from choice, not compulsion, Mom and Dad both said. Others her age in our hometown were in mixed marriages and wed in the church.
"What's your religion?'" Dad used to quote himself from their courtship days.
"'I have none,' Mom replied."
"'Want mine?'"
"'OK.'"
This is less a theological debate than a proof of the devotion of two people to each other.
Like most Catholics, I rarely go to mass. The church I go to mass in the most is in my spouse's community in the Cariboo Region of Western Canada. That mass has almost no Latin, some singing, and a sermon that sometimes inspires and sometimes infuriates me.
I have been to other religious services, mostly for funerals: Jehovah's Witness, United. I have been to a Lutheran service and various fundamentalist and revivalist services.
The United States folk singer Woody Guthrie once mused that he did not know which religion was right, which wrong, and whether any of them was any good. He concluded that love matters most, echoing the Ancient Roman poet Virgil: amor vincit omnia, "love conquers all."
My parents raised their children Roman Catholic in Canada, where that religion has more adherents than any other religion. I married in the church in 1993, the first Catholic wedding in my family since our parents married in 1950.
Like most "cradle Catholics," I rarely go to mass. In the past three days, however, I went twice in England, my first masses outside Canada; but the masses differed from each other, and from masses I recall in Canada.
St. Mary Magdalen Church, about a kilometre from where my sister and I stayed in Brighton, is a brick church built in the 1800s. It has masses in English, Polish, and Latin.
What was there in 1830, when England, after almost 300 years, reduced restrictions on Catholics and others who would not swear to faith in the Church of England?
Quakers I met at a Saturday open house at their church told me of restrictions their church faced from a few decades after their mid-1600s beginnings until the late-1820s "emancipation act" of parliament.
Before emancipation, instead of ministry, many Quakers went into business. Quakers started the Cadbury and Rowntree candy firms, and Barclay's Bank, for example. Quakers also famously opposed slavery decades earlier than a mass movement rose against slavery. Even before their own emancipation, Quakers emancipated others.
The Quaker women I met were happy to hear that United States folk music singer Joan Baez grew up Quaker.
After the English government rescinded laws requiring non-Church of England people to swear to the church in order to advance in certain areas of society, Catholics, Quakers, Baptists, and other "dissenters" were allowed to attend and teach in universities, to sit in legislatures, and freely to practice their religions.
A Baptist church near where we stay had a cornerstone dated 1834, less than a decade after emancipation. The Baptists got busy quickly, I thought when I saw that brick church. They are among the "dissenters," people with religions neither Catholic nor Church of England, which we Canadians call Anglicans. Two Anglican churches I was in here had crucifixes behind their altars the first time I saw that. I suppose these are High Anglican, unlike the Low Anglican church, which has no crucifix, in my hometown of Williams Lake.
The dissenting churches suffered in England, and elsewhere, and still do in parts of the world. Dissent can prevent or reduce tyranny, so tyrants, whether religious or secular, don't like dissent.
Getting back to mass so to speak, I sensed a different spirit of dissent in each of the two masses I attended here in England.
The first was a Traditional Latin mass, not to be confused with a Tridentine mass, the standard mass form before the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s changed the content of the mass and approved it for use in languages other than Latin. I was a child when this change came, and I do not remember the Tridentine Latin mass.
At age 20, when I lived in Ottawa to finish my Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature at Carleton University, I went to a Traditional Latin mass. Almost 35 years later, last Friday night, I went to a Traditional Latin mass at St. Mary Magdalen Church here in Brighton.
Most of the 20 or so participants, some of them children, knew more of the words than I knew. A girl of 10 or 12 sitting in front of me seemed fluent, including singing the Latin hymn that ended the mass, the first music in this mass.
The priest and his assistant faced the small altar to the right of the large altar. They did not face the congregation, but this was a modern mass in Latin, not a Latin mass using words common before the Second Vatican Council. That is, this was not a schismatic event, such as some theologians critical of the council began, to revert to the old forms.
This mass merely served people who wanted a modern mass in Latin. This dissent strengthens the church and perhaps the faith, by expanding the range of people it welcomes.
Perhaps the church should expand its offerings more, but past a certain point, it would lose unity; this is a delicate balance, as it is in all areas of society where dissent exists. Each person accepts a different level of disagreement from those around him or her.
Incidentally, the First Vatican Council, in the mid-1800s, was, like the second council a century later, an effort to make the church more relevant, without discarding what makes the church endure. Unlike the Counter-Reformation of the 1600s, these councils, especially the second, were less efforts against Protestantism than efforts for Catholicism.
Catholic with a small c means inclusive. John Milton, the 1600s English poet and republican, wrote for inclusion, and against Puritans and Anglicans and Dissenters and Catholics who saw their way as the only way to salvation. He infuriated both the monarchists and the republicans, during that era that largely formed the Christian traditions that continue to this day, in varying degrees, in Europe, America, and the rest of the world.
The Friday Latin mass felt inspiring, and inclusive by virtue of its linguistic echo of centuries-old traditions followed by many; but the Sunday English mass felt inspiring and inclusive, too. On Sunday, we said more of the mass in Latin than I ever said in an English mass: the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Apostle's Creed, and the Our Father. People also used the communion rail, something removed from churches in the late-1960s but returning in the past decade.
Most inspiring on Sunday was the singing; the priest and people sang the whole mass. The last time I was at a mass that was all sung was in the mid-1980s in Edmonton, at St. Alphonsus Church, the one my dad attended during his early adulthood. "When you sing, you pray twice," St. Augustine's words, were on the church bulletin.
The same priest said both the Friday and the Sunday masses; versatile priest. He invited people for refreshments after the Sunday mass. As people left, he stood at the door and shook each hand.
"Hello from Canada," I said, a greeting I use here to alert people to my Canadian accent.
"It's good to have you," he replied, with his English accent.
In a complex world, which was always complex in different ways in different eras, people seek help, answers, inspiration, meaning, and hope, from religion, nature, work, play, learning, love, and many other sources.
"We're all going the same place on different roads," Mom said more than once. She converted to Roman Catholicism before she married Dad, who grew up Catholic; but she converted from choice, not compulsion, Mom and Dad both said. Others her age in our hometown were in mixed marriages and wed in the church.
"What's your religion?'" Dad used to quote himself from their courtship days.
"'I have none,' Mom replied."
"'Want mine?'"
"'OK.'"
This is less a theological debate than a proof of the devotion of two people to each other.
Like most Catholics, I rarely go to mass. The church I go to mass in the most is in my spouse's community in the Cariboo Region of Western Canada. That mass has almost no Latin, some singing, and a sermon that sometimes inspires and sometimes infuriates me.
I have been to other religious services, mostly for funerals: Jehovah's Witness, United. I have been to a Lutheran service and various fundamentalist and revivalist services.
The United States folk singer Woody Guthrie once mused that he did not know which religion was right, which wrong, and whether any of them was any good. He concluded that love matters most, echoing the Ancient Roman poet Virgil: amor vincit omnia, "love conquers all."
Friday, September 9, 2016
"England is Milk Chocolate"
Friday, September 9, 2016 Brighton, England (200 000 people, short of dark chocolate)
"England is milk chocolate. Europe is dark chocolate," a man in the Boots drugstore in Brighton told me this morning.
Watching him put bags of potato chips on the rack in the drugstore, I said, "I wish I'd eaten something easier to replace."
He joked that I could take a train through the English Channel tunnel to France and find dark chocolate. I told him that, when I returned home to Canada, I would pass on his news that England is milk chocolate and the rest of Europe is dark chocolate.
Then I left this huge drugstore, unburdened by dark chocolate, and continued my quest, a quest born of accidental eating.
I accidentally ate the Brazil nuts covered in dark chocolate which I found soon after my sister and I reached the Brighton place she agreed to watch during its owners' absence. They are house sitting in Seville, Spain. Perhaps they have Brazil nuts covered in dark chocolate there, the rest of Europe apparently awash in dark chocolate, unlike England.
I found these treats, 20 or so, in a clear glass jar. I ate a couple, and later a couple more, and over the next few days I ate them all. Resolved to replace them, I went out to try to buy some. For two hours per day for two days, I failed to find Brazil nuts covered in dark chocolate.
I looked in grocery stores, including the big ones, Tesco, Waitrose, Sainsburys, in the Co-op grocery store. I looked in corner stores, in gift shops, in specialty food shops, and in two health food stores, and found nothing.
In the department store Marks and Spencer (M + S), I found a shelf label advertising, for four pounds, about seven Canadian dollars, a 200g box of Brazil nuts covered in dark chocolate, but no boxes. "We're out of stock," a clerk told me.
The M + S woman liked it when I called my search a quest, wished me well, and continued using her scanner to record what was in or out of stock in the candy section. The next closest M + S was miles away, "a bus ride," another clerk said, suggesting that I ask Customer Service to get another store to ship some to this store. I commended her enthusiasm but said I would continue looking.
The first M + S woman suggested a place that the Boots clerk suggested Choccywoccydoodah:
This place sells chocolate in the shape of a full-sized human skull, but no Brazil nuts covered in chocolate.
The Boots man also referred me to Thornton's, a high-end chocolate shop in Churchill Square, the downtown shopping mall. Thornton's had a wide variety of chocolates, most of them in gift boxes, and even a whirling post of melted chocolate about the size of the whirling post of meat in a place that makes donairs; but no Brazil nuts covered in dark chocolate.
At the start of this third day of two-hour hunts for Brazil nuts covered in dark chocolate, I had gone into Poundland, England's version of a dollar store, that Canadian oasis of party supplies, affordable snacks, and much else.
In Poundland, I had found Brazil nuts covered in milk chocolate. I decided that they would have to do if I found none covered in dark chocolate. For a pound I bought a 140g, that contained about as many as I ate. I plan to fill the jar before I leave Brighton on Monday, September 12.
Fox hunting would have been easier.
As I wandered, lonely as a cloud, on my quest, I thought about Carol, and Cardinal John Henry Newman's 1800s book The Idea of a University.
I met Carol, born in the 1930s, when my and my stellar spouse Carla's daughter Chelsea was an infant. We were at mass in Sacred Heart Church in Williams Lake, where I live. After mass, Carol came to me and said, "You sure were good with your little girl during mass. She had things to play with, and you interacted so happily and peacefully with her.".
Today, during my chocolate search, I saw a woman pushing a baby buggy, with one baby inside and another riding on the edge. She was talking back and forth with the infants, and the one on the edge seemed keen on all that was around him. A dog walked by and the little boy pointed and said "A woof!" I wish I had commended the woman for being such an indulgent parent. Next time, I'll flatter what good I see in people, and there is plenty to flatter.
Carol and I volunteered to catalogue the library in Williams Lake's Catholic school, which Chelsea attended. We and a third person, Trish, met one evening per week in the library to catalogue books, most of them donated. We taped their edges, found appropriate Dewey Decimal numbers in a cataloguing book the library had, wrote cards, and put them in card pockets we glued into the backs of the books.
This was the late-1990s, a few years before another volunteer and I computerized the library's book collection.
Carol, Trish, and I talked as we worked, for a few hours per week for two school year. I mentioned a book I had that I thought might interest Carol: John Henry Cardinal Newman's mid-1800s The Idea of a University. I read in a 1987-88 Carleton University Victorian non-fiction course. Carol was interested. The next time we met, I brought the book, a paperback I had bought used in Ottawa for a few dollars.
I neither expected nor wanted the book back, but a couple years later I asked Carol how she liked it.
"I lost it," she replied. I said not to worry because I did not want it back.
"Oh, I ordered another one," she said.
Like me searching for Brazil nuts covered in dark chocolate to replace ones lost in my stomach, Carol searched out, and got, by special order from Williams Lake's book store, The Open Book, a replacement copy of the book she had lost:
9
She paid $50, I think, for this book, including shipping, she said. I gracefully accepted it. I still have it, more than ten years later.
I hope this entertained and enlightened you. I thought of the book as I looked for the chocolates. Many words came to mind as I pondered what to call this story: Catholics and Chocolate, John Henry Newman and Brazil Nuts, The Idea of a Universal, and you can think of other titles.
Dare I eat another Brazil nut covered in dark chocolate in England?
(Several hours later, on Friday night....)
I found Brazil nuts covered in dark chocolate, an hour or so after I wrote the above searching tale of woe. Charlie's Sweets Emporium, at 28 Ship Street in Brighton, mere blocks from the English Channel, sold me about 200g in bulk for 2.50 pounds. The little bag, enough to fill the little jar whose nuts I ate, sits by the jar on the cupboard as I type.
This place was the closest to the English Channel of every place I checked for these chocolates. Get closer to the rest of Europe and get dark chocolate, perhaps?
"England is milk chocolate. Europe is dark chocolate," a man in the Boots drugstore in Brighton told me this morning.
Watching him put bags of potato chips on the rack in the drugstore, I said, "I wish I'd eaten something easier to replace."
He joked that I could take a train through the English Channel tunnel to France and find dark chocolate. I told him that, when I returned home to Canada, I would pass on his news that England is milk chocolate and the rest of Europe is dark chocolate.
Then I left this huge drugstore, unburdened by dark chocolate, and continued my quest, a quest born of accidental eating.
I accidentally ate the Brazil nuts covered in dark chocolate which I found soon after my sister and I reached the Brighton place she agreed to watch during its owners' absence. They are house sitting in Seville, Spain. Perhaps they have Brazil nuts covered in dark chocolate there, the rest of Europe apparently awash in dark chocolate, unlike England.
I found these treats, 20 or so, in a clear glass jar. I ate a couple, and later a couple more, and over the next few days I ate them all. Resolved to replace them, I went out to try to buy some. For two hours per day for two days, I failed to find Brazil nuts covered in dark chocolate.
I looked in grocery stores, including the big ones, Tesco, Waitrose, Sainsburys, in the Co-op grocery store. I looked in corner stores, in gift shops, in specialty food shops, and in two health food stores, and found nothing.
In the department store Marks and Spencer (M + S), I found a shelf label advertising, for four pounds, about seven Canadian dollars, a 200g box of Brazil nuts covered in dark chocolate, but no boxes. "We're out of stock," a clerk told me.
The M + S woman liked it when I called my search a quest, wished me well, and continued using her scanner to record what was in or out of stock in the candy section. The next closest M + S was miles away, "a bus ride," another clerk said, suggesting that I ask Customer Service to get another store to ship some to this store. I commended her enthusiasm but said I would continue looking.
The first M + S woman suggested a place that the Boots clerk suggested Choccywoccydoodah:
This place sells chocolate in the shape of a full-sized human skull, but no Brazil nuts covered in chocolate.
The Boots man also referred me to Thornton's, a high-end chocolate shop in Churchill Square, the downtown shopping mall. Thornton's had a wide variety of chocolates, most of them in gift boxes, and even a whirling post of melted chocolate about the size of the whirling post of meat in a place that makes donairs; but no Brazil nuts covered in dark chocolate.
At the start of this third day of two-hour hunts for Brazil nuts covered in dark chocolate, I had gone into Poundland, England's version of a dollar store, that Canadian oasis of party supplies, affordable snacks, and much else.
In Poundland, I had found Brazil nuts covered in milk chocolate. I decided that they would have to do if I found none covered in dark chocolate. For a pound I bought a 140g, that contained about as many as I ate. I plan to fill the jar before I leave Brighton on Monday, September 12.
Fox hunting would have been easier.
As I wandered, lonely as a cloud, on my quest, I thought about Carol, and Cardinal John Henry Newman's 1800s book The Idea of a University.
I met Carol, born in the 1930s, when my and my stellar spouse Carla's daughter Chelsea was an infant. We were at mass in Sacred Heart Church in Williams Lake, where I live. After mass, Carol came to me and said, "You sure were good with your little girl during mass. She had things to play with, and you interacted so happily and peacefully with her.".
Today, during my chocolate search, I saw a woman pushing a baby buggy, with one baby inside and another riding on the edge. She was talking back and forth with the infants, and the one on the edge seemed keen on all that was around him. A dog walked by and the little boy pointed and said "A woof!" I wish I had commended the woman for being such an indulgent parent. Next time, I'll flatter what good I see in people, and there is plenty to flatter.
Carol and I volunteered to catalogue the library in Williams Lake's Catholic school, which Chelsea attended. We and a third person, Trish, met one evening per week in the library to catalogue books, most of them donated. We taped their edges, found appropriate Dewey Decimal numbers in a cataloguing book the library had, wrote cards, and put them in card pockets we glued into the backs of the books.
This was the late-1990s, a few years before another volunteer and I computerized the library's book collection.
Carol, Trish, and I talked as we worked, for a few hours per week for two school year. I mentioned a book I had that I thought might interest Carol: John Henry Cardinal Newman's mid-1800s The Idea of a University. I read in a 1987-88 Carleton University Victorian non-fiction course. Carol was interested. The next time we met, I brought the book, a paperback I had bought used in Ottawa for a few dollars.
I neither expected nor wanted the book back, but a couple years later I asked Carol how she liked it.
"I lost it," she replied. I said not to worry because I did not want it back.
"Oh, I ordered another one," she said.
Like me searching for Brazil nuts covered in dark chocolate to replace ones lost in my stomach, Carol searched out, and got, by special order from Williams Lake's book store, The Open Book, a replacement copy of the book she had lost:
She paid $50, I think, for this book, including shipping, she said. I gracefully accepted it. I still have it, more than ten years later.
I hope this entertained and enlightened you. I thought of the book as I looked for the chocolates. Many words came to mind as I pondered what to call this story: Catholics and Chocolate, John Henry Newman and Brazil Nuts, The Idea of a Universal, and you can think of other titles.
Dare I eat another Brazil nut covered in dark chocolate in England?
(Several hours later, on Friday night....)
I found Brazil nuts covered in dark chocolate, an hour or so after I wrote the above searching tale of woe. Charlie's Sweets Emporium, at 28 Ship Street in Brighton, mere blocks from the English Channel, sold me about 200g in bulk for 2.50 pounds. The little bag, enough to fill the little jar whose nuts I ate, sits by the jar on the cupboard as I type.
This place was the closest to the English Channel of every place I checked for these chocolates. Get closer to the rest of Europe and get dark chocolate, perhaps?
Friday, September 2, 2016
Sunny, Historic Brighton
Friday, September 2, 2016 Brighton, England
Our first four days in Brighton were hot and sunny, an unusual welcome to the English Channel coast. One day was very hot, but the rocky beach deterred me from jumping into the sea: hard on the bare feet. A couple days later, I bought rubber-soled shoes with cloth uppers that tie, for about 12 dollars. Now I can join the waders, swimmers, kite surfers, and sail boaters in this wavy sea that reflects whatever color the sky is.
Where we house sit is a ten-minute walk from the waves, and the other day I walked in the other direction, to St. Nicholas Church, built in the 1200s. The nearby Chichester Cathedral is as old, but I did not see it. St. Nicholas began before 1100, not long after the Norman French conquest of England in 1066. History is steep here, but this resort city glitters with tourist shops and cafes to serve the Londoners who come for fun.
This week's highlight was a play version of Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen's early-1800s novel. The play was on an outdoor stage.
Alas, clouds have formed, not surprisingly; but our Saturday day trip to London will be mostly out of the weather, either in trains or in that city's fabulous, free art galleries and museums. Have photos from our Friday visit to an arts and craft and local history museum in Hove, the city where we are staying, beside Brighton, where barbed wire and anti-aircraft guns lined the beach during World War Two.
Our first four days in Brighton were hot and sunny, an unusual welcome to the English Channel coast. One day was very hot, but the rocky beach deterred me from jumping into the sea: hard on the bare feet. A couple days later, I bought rubber-soled shoes with cloth uppers that tie, for about 12 dollars. Now I can join the waders, swimmers, kite surfers, and sail boaters in this wavy sea that reflects whatever color the sky is.
Where we house sit is a ten-minute walk from the waves, and the other day I walked in the other direction, to St. Nicholas Church, built in the 1200s. The nearby Chichester Cathedral is as old, but I did not see it. St. Nicholas began before 1100, not long after the Norman French conquest of England in 1066. History is steep here, but this resort city glitters with tourist shops and cafes to serve the Londoners who come for fun.
This week's highlight was a play version of Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen's early-1800s novel. The play was on an outdoor stage.
Alas, clouds have formed, not surprisingly; but our Saturday day trip to London will be mostly out of the weather, either in trains or in that city's fabulous, free art galleries and museums. Have photos from our Friday visit to an arts and craft and local history museum in Hove, the city where we are staying, beside Brighton, where barbed wire and anti-aircraft guns lined the beach during World War Two.
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