Where in the World Wednesday

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Brixton, London, England; September 2, 2014

Where in the World Wednesday

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Chipping Norton, England; August 4, 2014

A Day at the Lambeth Country Show

Posted on July 22, 2014 by lisafindley

It took til midsummer, but I finally got to my first festival of this year. Brockwell Park, in southwest London, has hosted the Lambeth Country Show for the last forty years. It’s a big ol’ party, with a large music tent, a crafts area, booths for various charities, tons of food stalls, and a farm and livestock area. People from all over the district come to have a day out in the country in the middle of London.

That's an English place--bouncy castles, food tents, church spires

That’s an English place–bouncy castles and church spires

Tasty meatballs stand

Fuuuun!

The excellent Liz, who along with her flatmates is hosting me in London this summer, was working at the Bee Urban tent. Bee Urban keeps bees at a lodge in the city, and it educates people on how to plant flowers that will attract bees. I helped out at their candle-rolling station, showing five-year-olds how to press the wick into the wax and carefully roll it up and stick it with a pin to keep it all in place. The kids were all adorable, and so pleased with what they created.

Let’s make candles

Various tents had falcons, geese, and owls

Naturally, when we heard there was camel racing, we had to go see that. The announcer was great, nonstop chatter about the camels and their jockeys. Her favorite camel was Bertie, the youngest of them all, with the longest legs, which shows promise for speed in the future, but for now, Bertie hardly knew what to do with them. He galloped like kids do when they’re pretending to be horses–galump, galump–not the smoother pace of the older camels. Maybe next year he’ll be a winner.

The race started when the four camels were more or less facing the same direction

For once, Bertie was not last

I ate a pork-and-stuffing-and-applesauce sandwich (delicious), lay on the grass in the summer sun and listened to classic reggae (blissful), and watched dozens of kids running around gleefully, their faces painted and their hands sticky with sweets (beyond adorable). It was a perfect festival day, right up until the point the skies opened up and drenched everyone in rain so torrential that the fair was closed only about twenty minutes later. Even that is kind of part of the full festival experience, though, isn’t it?

We took shelter under the sweets tent when the rain started; not a bad way to pass the time

Luckily, we’d brought towels in case we went swimming, so we got warm during the downpour

The Opposite of Light Packing

Posted on July 21, 2014 by lisafindley

I found a baggie of British coins in my things when I was packing at my parents’ house a week ago, and I put the whole thing in my backpack, figuring I’d use it all up when I got to England. It made my bag noticeably heavier, but no matter, it’ll all be gone soon, right?

Several pounds’ worth of pounds–get it?!

When I opened up the bag on the train into London, to count how much I had, I found that about two-thirds of the coins were from my first solo trip, when I collected coins from different European countries before the euro went into effect. Oops, that’s a lot of dead weight I’m carrying around.

The Next Few Months

Posted on June 26, 2014 by lisafindley

Hello, dearest fellow travelers. Some of you have asked for an update on where I’m headed next and what my longer-term plans are. I’m excited about what’s next: On Sunday, I fly back to the States for a couple weeks, to visit with family and friends. Then in mid-July, I fly to London. I’ll visit with family and friends in England, and my cousin and I will take a trip somewhere in western Europe together. I hope to go to the Edinburgh Fringe Fest, and maybe see some parts of the UK I haven’t before. If you’re in the UK and want to meet up, let me know!

I think I can stretch my money til the end of the summer. After that, well, that is a good question. I need to get a job somewhere. I have an EU passport, so I could work anywhere in the EU, or I could return to the States. Both of those sound appealing to me, so I might cast a very wide search and see what happens. If you know of any freelance editorial work, even just proofreading a resume or something, or if you hear of any leads on long-term office work, please let me know at lisa dot findley [at] gmail dot com. Steady work after two years will be the next adventure!

Spying on Bletchley

Posted on May 12, 2014 by lisafindley

Bletchley Park would probably be just another stately home in Buckinghamshire, except that it happened to be the codebreaking hub for the British government during World War II. Apparently, when they broke the Germans’ Enigma code and could then spy on German communiques, they shortened the war by a couple years. For years after the war, everything about the place was secret–what really went on there, who worked there, etc.–but now the records have been unsealed and the park is open to the public.

Some of the many machines used for codebreaking at Bletchley

The mansion is surprisingly empty, or I suppose not so surprisingly when you consider that it’s hired out for events and they need the space. The interesting stuff is all in the surrounding “huts,” one- and two-story concrete buildings that adjoin the mansion. The museum starts you off with a few rooms showing what life was like at the start the war. Walking through this section, past a reconstructed middle-class kitchen and a schoolroom full of tiny wooden desks, my siblings and I listened to my grandmother talk about daily life back then; she was six years old when the war started.

A massive codebreaking machine

Downstairs, you can see a bombe, the machine that broke Enigma (brainy people figured out what kind of pattern they were looking for, and then they built this machine to do the tedious work of sorting it all out on each message that came through). There were some explanations of how the bombe worked, and what a difference it made to work with four code digits versus five. This kind of code working was all important groundwork for computers, too.

Stephen Kettle’s slate statue of Alan Turing at work

Alan Turing, a major figure in computer science, had a position at Bletchley, and he was one of the key people to break the big codes. He did more computing work after the war, but then in 1952 he was convicted of the criminal activity of homosexuality. He had to choose between prison and chemical castration, and he chose the latter. He died two years later from cyanide poisoning (the official ruling was suicide, but due to the chemicals he worked with, it could have been accidental). How completely messed up is that? It took until 2009 for the British government to officially apologize for Turing’s prosecution, and until 2013 for the Queen to posthumously pardon him. Pardon him for being gay, that is. There’s a plaque about Turing’s postwar career and death in the museum, and cool slate sculpture of him that makes me think of bits of code stacked up to make his body hunched over a typewriter.

Some of the many files the codebreakers worked with

Most of the people working at Bletchley were women, some in secretarial roles but many more doing pre-codebreaking work, sorting through intercepted messages, looking for patterns, etc. They also did a lot of the grunt work involved in operating the machines, running the various numbers until the machines interpreted messages correctly. These women get their due, sort of, at the museum. I say “sort of” because the focus was definitely on the Oxbridge men who were in charge, and the women who proved so crucial to the operation were “girls” who helped out.

I am forever interested in the paranoid propaganda posters of WWII

Also interesting was the class bias that formed Bletchley. The men were Oxbridge (Oxford and Cambridge graduates), and the women were daughters of the upper-class. The museum exhibit unquestioningly talked about how much more inherently trustworthy the upper-class was, and so naturally that’s where you’d go to recruit people for your secret mission. Implicit in this, since you needed to be really smart to work there, was that the rich folks were smarter, too. Sketchy stuff.

You caught me–I might not be spy material

The final part of the exhibit was a display on some of the most famous British spies, including a criminal playboy who just kept sleeping around as part of the job (shades of Bond), and a black-market trader and saboteur.

Architecture and Austen in Bath

Posted on May 6, 2014 by lisafindley

I hope we shall be in Bath in the winter; but remember, Papa, if we do go, we must be in a good situation. (Persuasion, p. 29)

I hadn’t seen my parents in nine months of travel, so I was excited to meet up with them in Bath last May. We were in a very good situation–they’d found a great bed and breakfast for us to stay in, and I settled gratefully into my own bedroom with en suite bathroom after months of shared dorms and bathrooms down the hall. I mean, the woman who owned the house we were staying in made her own soaps. I was using handcrafted soaps in Bath, which actually fits my image of that town perfectly.

Well situated, indeed

In Jane Austen’s time, it was a playground for the rich, a place for fashion, gossip, and soaking in the thermal baths that give the town its name. Today, it mostly trades in tourism, for the baths themselves and for the Georgian architecture that dominates downtown. It’s not the fashionable spot that it once was, but it’s still pretty expensive.

The abbey, as watched by a warrior at the Roman baths

The Roman Baths

We visited the Roman baths on a blustery day, but the surface of the large green pool barely rippled in the wind. This seemed right to me, because for all their atrocious laws and conquest-hungry power moves, the ancient Romans were fine architects, and they built things to last. Why shouldn’t the very water of the place be as still as the columns and statues surrounding it?

The baths of Bath

Of course, as with most things the Romans stumbled upon, the local people had been aware of the baths for hundreds of years. The Celts built a shrine to local goddess Sulis, and when the Romans built up baths here in about 60 CE, they folded her into their conception of the place, and dedicated the baths to Sulis Minerva. The audio guide and educational texts posted around the baths emphasized that taking the waters was a religious experience for the Romans and locals. They were immersing themselves in sacred waters overseen by a wise and stern goddess.

Some of the curses in the baths

That doesn’t mean very human concerns didn’t have their place here. The museum displays dozens of curse tablets that were unearthed here–mostly requests for the goddess to inflict severe pain upon whoever stole the supplicant’s clothes while they were in the baths. Some people even helpfully provided a list of names of possible culprits, an extra step which I’m sure the goddess appreciated.

Coins from earliest Britannia

The baths were a marvel of construction, of course; there were steam rooms and smaller pools in addition to the great pool, and an elaborate system of pipes and drains underneath kept it all in working order. No one uses these pools to bathe in anymore, although there are pricey places in town you can visit if you want to take the waters. Apparently people even drink the water sometimes, in an attempt to access those healing powers the sulfuric stuff is known for. I had a sip at the museum and can’t recommend it.

Foundations from one of the steam rooms

Jane Austen

She disliked Bath, and did not think it agreed with her; and Bath was to be her home. (ibid, p. 9)

Jane Austen could have been writing about herself with that line. She disliked the bustle of Bath, but she had to live there a couple different times in her life. I’m willing to call it ironic that the center dedicated to study and appreciation of Austen’s works is based in the town she loathed. Ah well, she might appreciate that irony if she knew.

The ceiling of the abbey–I love that design

The Jane Austen Centre is just up the street from Queen Square, so that’s where Mom and I left Dad when we went in to see the exhibition (my dad is an enlightened modern man, but we still haven’t convinced him to like Austen yet). We were ushered upstairs and sat in a Regency-period drawing room, where we listened to a college student in costume give us a few quick facts about Austen’s life in general, and her time in Bath in particular. Then he fielded questions, which was a little tricky, as the audience ranged from people who have only seen the Pride and Prejudice movie, to amateur experts with very particular questions.

The Assembly Rooms; I did geek out a little about standing in the same place as one of my favorite fictional characters

The next stop was a too-crowded set of rooms downstairs, which acted as museum display. Our guide said he’d be available for questions, but I didn’t see him again. The focus in these rooms was on Austen’s life in Bath, and on the bits about Bath that appear in her novels. One corner contained a rack of dresses and a box of hats and fans; I have never played dress-up at a museum for adults before, but it was kinda fun.

The music room of the Assembly Rooms, ready for a concert that night

I liked the last couple rooms the best; in one, the only known painting of Austen was hung, and right next to it, a modern painting, taken from descriptions in letters and journals. The official portrait (by Austen’s beloved sister Cassandra) is, frankly, ugly, and the artist who made the new one justified it by pointing to letters from Austen’s relatives who complained that Cassandra’s portrait didn’t capture Austen’s liveliness or prettiness.

Melissa Dring’s portrait of Jane Austen

The last room holds some photos from the movie version of Sense and Sensibility, and a charming handwritten letter from Emma Thompson. Also, an inkstand and paper so you can try writing like they did back then. It is hard. You have to write in the tiny, cramped script you always see in original documents; writing any larger just dries the ink out of the quill and leaves a mess.

The abbey and entrance to the baths

Georgian Architecture

There are a few independently designed places in Bath–Robert Adam’s Pulteney Bridge and the 16th-century abbey in the center of town come to mind–but for the rest of the city, it’s all John Wood. John Wood the Elder and John Wood the Younger, a father-son team of architects who designed the Royal Crescent, The Circus, and other grand residential places in a neoclassical style. (Apparently, the correct term is Palladian, after a particular architect who revived Greek and Roman styles in the 18th century. The more you know.)

Royal Crescent, which looks out over a large park

In what had to be a parody of rich kids, these teenagers stumbled out of one of the Royal Crescent apartments, jumped the fence to their private lawn, and started glugging champagne in the afternoon sun.

It’s this consistency of design that got Bath listed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and while I think I would go a bit crazy if I had to live in a town this uniform in style, it is striking to see, and I can appreciate the harmony of the local yellow stone forming row after row of columns. After all this uniformity, it was all the more surprising to see two front doors on the Royal Crescent painted a different color than all the other front doors. Surely there’s a fine for such an affront to the 250-year-old look!