The Cornish Heatwave

Posted on July 25, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

It’s hot in Cornwall. For days, everyone’s been telling each other that. And the papers agree. “Heatwave!” they write. Shock! Horror! Remind the elderly to drink liquids!

The elderly have been drinking liquids all their lives. That’s one reason they lived long enough to be the elderly. So unless we’re talking about the demented (in which case, don’t be shy, just say so), mind your own damn business. And drink your own liquids, while we’re at it.

What’s a heatwave here? Temperatures are soaring into the low 80s F. Yes, all you Minnesotans, you New Yorkers, you sweat-soaked Southerners, the low 80s. You’d count that as a nice summer day, wouldn’t you? Not a heatwave but relief from a heatwave.

Mostly irrelevant photo. The cows are probably hot too. Photo by Ida Swearingen.

Before I go on, I should say that I live about a mile from the ocean, so “hot” here is cooler than it is inland. And temperature’s relative. To anyone used to the British climate, the heat’s real. Take our dog, for example. I mention her instead of a person because she’s not what you’d call imaginative. She doesn’t fancy herself hot or cold or put upon or much of anything else, she simply is what she is, at whatever moment we’re talking about. If she wants attention, she doesn’t complain about the heat, she brings a goobery old chewy and dumps it in your lap. And she’s been hot. When we walk, she pulls for the shade. She lies down in it if we stop. She perks up if we soak her down. So yes, I accept that by the standards of this time and place, it’s hot.

But still, I swear the British have a strange relationship with hot weather. They crave it. They talk about it. They wilt in it.

M. stopped by. She picked up the village newsletter and fanned herself.

“It’s so hot,” she said.

“Mind you, I’m not complaining,” she added, in case someone tried to do her a favour by canceling her subscription.

This spring, before the heat set in, J. said, “I want to go someplace hot.” She said it with the kind of longing people usually reserve for life-changing wishes.

I don’t want to descend into national stereotypes here (and isn’t that just the kind of disclaimer you find before someone dives right in?) but it’s not just J. Sometimes I feel like every single person in Britain wants to go someplace hot. Except Wild Thing and me (or I, or both me and I), and maybe one or two other immigrants and weirdos. The rest of them, though, want to pack up and move someplace hot. They want to push poles into the ocean and shove the whole island south so they can sit by a pool and wait for tropical fruit to drop into off the trees and into their mouths.

The facts that (a) fruit trees don’t grow beside pools and (b) if they moved they’d have to work and wouldn’t have time to sit by a pool tell you something about the nature of the fantasy.

And then it hits 80—and they wilt.

“It’s so hot,” they say.

Umm. Yes. This is the price of hot weather.

Wild Thing let herself get lured into a conversation about hot weather a while ago. “This isn’t hot, she said,” she said, and she tried to describe a Minnesota summer. Hot, sticky, the air so thick you expect schools of fish to swim past. Wild Thing’s from Texas. She can’t help herself. And no, I would never stoop to relying on stereotypes. I can only refer you to a favorite phrase of hers: Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Me, I tell the truth, and the truth is that I’ve made up the opening lines of this particular conversation because I want to get to what the other person said, which was this:

“But you all have swimming pools in America.”

Sure we do. Every sweaty one of us. If we have four people in a family, we dig four swimming pools. If we live in apartments, we dig them in the bathrooms and call them tubs.

You can tell when people have been watching too much TV.

Anyway, it’s hot in Cornwall, and people aren’t complaining but they are spending a suspicious amount of time talking about it.

Giving Directions in Cornwall

Posted on July 23, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

Britain’s as romantic as it is confusing. Outside the cities, British house are more likely to have names than addresses. You want to name your house Island of the Floating Feathers? As long as you work it out with the local council, you can. Although I don’t know how the council would react to that one. They’re more used to The Smithy, The Old Schoolhouse, Oak Tree Cottage, Trelawney. Every village in Cornwall has a house called Trelawny (or Trelawney), after John (or Jonathan, depending on your source) Trelawny, a Cornish national hero who got in a wrangle with James II back in the 17^th century and had a song written about him in the 19^th, by which time it was too late for him to appreciate it. That’s the sad bit about being immortalized.

But going back to the Island of the Floating Feathers: The council might agree to it. You can be pretty sure there won’t be a duplicate in the village, which is another reason to nix a name. And it’s not as if you’re calling it My Neighbour Painted Her House an Ugly Colour, which any council could find a reason to turn down.

Rock Cottage, by Geography 2013

The advantages of house names are romance, atmosphere, self-expression, and tradition. Ah, tradition. There’s a lot of that over here. I don’t know when houses were first given names, but it was long before civil engineers were invented. Naming houses is as natural as naming people. You have a bunch of these things, and you have to distinguish one from another. As soon as a settlement got too big for everyone to know everyone, a medieval village, say, might start informally talking about the manor, the blacksmith’s cottage, plum tree cottage, river cottage, bridge cottage, the old lady with the wart’s cottage. Eventually those became the houses’ names, only sooner or later the old lady with the wart’s cottage would be shortened to Wart Cottage, until someone new moved in and said, can’t we change this to Island of the Floating Feathers? And the person in charge at the council replied, “Please state your reasons for wanting to change this house name.” In triplicate and black ink. If you have to file a paper copy of anything official in Britain, they’ll want it in black ink.

Except for the black ink and the business about the wart, of course, I’m making this up. House names probably started much earlier than the medieval period. But it’s good to remember that everything started somewhere, at some time, with some set of people who had no idea what they were setting in motion.

The down side of this arrangement is that anyone from outside the village is immediately lost. Say you’re driving a delivery van with a package for Craken Wartha, and you’re new on the route. You’ve found the village, but after that you have two choices: Drive around aimlessly and hope you see a sign that says Craken Wartha or stop and ask directions. Or you can do both, one after the other after the other, with increasing degrees of frustration. Anyone marketing a sat-nav system with all the house names programed into it would make a fortune, but no one’s done it yet, so imagine you spot two women walking a small, silly dog. They look local, by which I mean they’re not carrying the beach or hiking gear that would mark them as visitors. Salvation, you think, and you roll down the window and ask where Craken Wartha is.

As it happens, the two women are Wild Thing and me (which should, grammatically speaking, be I, but c’mon, who actually says it that way?). And we smile and point and say, “Go down the hill, cross the ford, go up the hill, take a right at the chapel,” and so on, but you’ve stopped listening because we don’t sound like locals.

Have I mentioned that Wild Thing and I have American accents? And that we came by them honestly? No one who asks for directions believes a word we say. Their eyes glaze over and their faces get this look that says, There has got to be someone else I can ask.

Sometimes we don’t know the directions. It’s surprising how many times you can pass a house but not remember where it is when someone asks for it. It’s tempting to spew out a string of lefts and rights and obscure landmarks, since no one’s going to follow them anyway, but we don’t. We say what anyone else would: “Ask at the post office. They know everything.” And we point them to the post office, knowing that if they see anyone else on the road, even if they’re staggering under a load of beach gear or a snootful of alcohol, they’ll roll down the window and hope to hear the right accent.

British Brownies and U.S. Scones

Posted on July 18, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

My last post included a traditional British scone recipe, and American readers immediately wrote in (on the blog and on Facebook) and said, That sounds great. Can I add cranberries, chocolate chips, and marshmallows? The answer is, of course you can, and it may taste great, but it won’t be a British scone, it’ll be more like a British brownie.

Why is a brownie like a scone? Because once it crosses international boundaries you can’t recognize it.

Irrelevant Photo #2. Dorset. Photographer, Ida Swearingen

Let’s start with the American scone. It’s great, but it’s got only the faintest relationship to the original. Which is British, and a cousin to the American baking powder biscuit—plain, round, workaday, and delicious. Usually. If it comes in cellophane, be suspicious. It’s usually a little sweeter than a baking powder biscuit, and sometimes comes with raisins, which for reasons I don’t expect to ever understand are called fruit. I mean, yes, they are fruit, in a dried-up sort of way, but the world’s full of fruit. We don’t insist on calling a carrot “vegetable” instead of “carrot,” do we?

Never mind. The fruit scone has raisins. The cheese scone has cheese. The plain scone doesn’t have either one. And the scone with ginger and lemon and blueberries and chocolate chips and deep-fried Mars bars? It doesn’t exist. But the cream tea does exist. It’s tea with two plain scones, jam, and clotted cream, which is cream that’s been beatified. If you see one and you’re not in (a) a highway café or (b) a railroad café, try it.

The American scone is a British scone on steroids. Triple the sugar, double the shortening, quadruple the size, and add every kind of fruit and candy you can think of. Exactly when every American turned into a Texan (you know: Everything we have is bigger, and everything bigger is better) I don’t know, but somehow we did. Or it looks that way from here.

What about the brownie? The British call anything dark, slab-shaped, and sweetened a brownie. Mind you, I’ve had a few over here that were delicious, but if I see them advertised I approach the display case with extreme caution. Wild Thing ordered one in London once. It looked pretty reasonable in the display case but turned up at the table decked out with ice cream, whipped cream, chocolate sauce, and a blood-pressure monitor. The theory must be that if it’s American and you go over the top with it, it must be authentic. I mean, look what the bloody Americans do to the scone.

How to Bake a Scone

Posted on July 15, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

I can’t keep writing about life in Cornwall without posting a scone recipe. And not just any scone recipe, an English scone recipe.

You should understand that there’s no single, definitive English scone. Not only do scones divide into plain, fruit, and cheese (or savory, which is spelled savoury), but any one of those three will vary. You can also find griddle scones and drop scones. They’re like the brownie that way. Or religion. Lots of variations; lots of recipes; lots of people damning each other to hell for doing it wrong. You’ll also find regional variations. I could be wrong about this, but I believe scones get larger as they go north. It may have to do with the weather, or the longer O in the northern accents.

Some recipes include eggs, which is any right-living person would tell you is heresy, so this one doesn’t. I have no idea where I found it, or how much I’ve tinkered with it over the years. Whoever developed it, I’d give you credit if I could. All I can give instead is my apologies, and my thanks, because it makes a damned good scone.

Scone with jam. Photo by Benson Kua, and it’s from Canada, not the U.K.

Scones: Makes 5 or 6

1 ½ cups flour, unsifted (see below)
1 Tbsp. cold butter
1 Tbsp. sugar
½ tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. cream of tartar
½ tsp. salt
[raisins if you want them]
Enough milk to pull the ingredients into a ball

Sift the dry ingredients. (I was taught to sift flour before measuring, transfer it grain by grain into the measuring cup, then sift it again after measuring, but I can’t be bothered. Half the time I can’t be bothered sifting it at all, I just mix the dry ingredients together. If we’re talking about kitchen heresies, this is a big one, but my baking comes out fine, thanks. Just don’t whack your measuring cup down on the counter to make the flour settle, because it will and you’ll end up with too much.) Cut in the butter. (You want to keep the butter cold, which will keep the scone from being heavy, so if you can cut it with a pastry blender, do. If you use your fingers to crumble it into the dry ingredients, handle it as little as possible.) If you want raisins, this is the time to add them. Stir in just enough milk to form the dough into a ball. Roll out to about ¾” thick on a floured surface and cut with a biscuit cutter or, if you don’t have one, the rim of a glass. If you twist your cutter, the scones won’t rise evenly. If your scones don’t rise evenly, it won’t make the least bit of difference, so don’t lose sleep over this. Place the scones on a greased cookie sheet and bake 12 to 15 minutes at 400 degrees. (To make sure they’re done, take the cookie sheet out of the oven, pry one open partway, and peek inside. If it’s gooey, put the cookie sheet back in for a couple of minutes.) Eat with butter—lots of butter—or jam, or both. They’re fine cold, but they’re better hot.

This is the real thing.

Sports Talk in the U.K.

Posted on July 12, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

I’ve been the victim of sports talk recently. To sympathize properly, you have to understand that I have a sports allergy, and it’s severe.

At singers night at the pub last week, K. was oblivious to my condition and talked—not to the world at large, but to me specifically—about the World Cup. The U.S. team, he said, was his idea of what a team should be.

At this point, I plugged my ears to keep from breaking out in a rash, so I missed part of the conversation. Which wasn’t a conversation, both because I had nothing to contribute and because my ears were plugged. Still, I’d heard enough to wonder how a U.S. team could play world-class football. (And if you’re American, you have to understand here that football means soccer, not that game with the funny-shaped ball and the beefy guys running around in the modern-day equivalent of armour.) I mean, when I left the U.S., soccer never gave me a rash because I never heard about it. I’ve been gone for eight years now, but surely it takes longer than that for a sport to take hold of a culture and attract obscene amounts of money.

Of course, K. might have been messing with me. It’s hard to tell with him.

I took my fingers out of my ears long enough to hear him say that if the English team played well it would upset the natural order of the universe. So being an English football fan must be something you do to build character, not to enjoy yourself.

I went home scratching my rash.

Tour de Yorkshire. Photo by Dave Pickersgill

But it hasn’t just been the World Cup. The Tour de France, for reasons I can’t explain, ended up in Yorkshire this year. Is this the Second Coming of the Norman Invasion, using bikes instead of horses? Did someone post the route wrong, tricking the riders into hundreds of miles of wrong turn? If so, how did they get the bikes get across the Channel?

Whatever the explanation, swarms of bike riders zipped through the English countryside in a race with a French name. The Tour’s director suggested that close to 5 million people from Yorkshire had turned out to watch. If that’s true, it’s amazing, because the official population of Yorkshire is 5.3 million, and some of them surely had the flu, or a sports allergy serious enough to have kept them home.

Fortunately, Yorkshire’s a long way from Cornwall, and if they ever hold the Tour de France here they’ll be hard-pressed to get 5 million out of our population of 532,000 lining to roads to watch.

English Food: Cheese

Posted on July 8, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

The last time I wrote about English food, it was to make fun of baked beans. So let’s talk about a good part of English food: The English are known for their cheese, and justifiably. Cheddar takes as much space in the cheese aisle as baked beans do in the canned vegetable, only it tastes good. And it’s not just connoisseurs and food snobs who go in for the strong stuff, it’s normal people—kids, adults, people who eat baked beans on toast. Cheese turns up in soups, in sauces, on baked potatoes. Okay, everything turns up in baked potatoes, but still. If a store only sells one vegetarian sandwich, it’ll be cheddar. And it’ll be grated, not sliced.

English Blue Stilton. Photo by Dominik Hundhammer

Every year, at Cooper’s Hill in Gloucester, people race—or slide, or roll—down an insanely steep hill chasing a wheel of double Gloucester cheese. The winner gets to keep the cheese. And a generous portion of mud. The race’s official site says of the 2013 race:

“Due to warnings from the police … a substitute, plastic cheese was used this year, so a real cheese was not in fact rolled*.

“This did not seem to matter to either contestants or spectators, but it was a failure as it just did not have the weight to roll properly! In the ladies race, one lady (not the winner) picked it up and carried it down to the finish line.”

“*Upon careful analysis of the movement of the cheese in the videos of the events, it appears that the “cheese” in the first event was significantly heavier than the ones used in subsequent races, it was the only “fast cheese” of the day, it also bounced a lot higher. There is a strong suspicion that this was a ‘real Cheese,’ the ones in the remaining races were made of foam plastic and were much slower, in most cases being passed by the contestants.”

The only injuries that year were a dislocated shoulder and a broken leg. It took more than two hours to get the guy with the broken leg off the hill, with the rescuers walking backward and held back by ropes. It’s that steep. But, hey, the prize is a cheese, right?

One winner said publicly that she didn’t like cheese and was going to offer her prize on E-bay. The bids didn’t come up to reserve price and I hope she learned to love the stuff, because she was the proud owner of an eight-pound wheel of the stuff.

English Dog Owners

Posted on July 5, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

This has happened to me twice now: I was walking the dog—a lovely cluster of fluff and enthusiasm—when another dog walker stopped some 20 feet away and asked, “Is that a dog?”

I looked at her as if I needed to check. Half of me did it to play along with the gag and the other half did it because the question was so strange that maybe it wouldn’t hurt to check. Yes, she was still a dog. Small, I grant you, but so am I. It doesn’t change what we are.

I looked back up.

“Um, yes,” I said. Even the second time, when I knew better.

Would you have to ask if this is a dog?

The other person, both times, reeled his own dog in, explaining that the dog’s snappish with other males, although he’d be fine if my dog were a bitch.

By this time, I understood what the other dog walker saying—bitch, female; dog, male—but excuse me, you can’t call my dog a bitch, and while we’re at it, you can’t tell me my dog’s not a dog. I mean look at her, she’s down there wagging her tail. My cats don’t do that. You want bitch, buddy, talk to me.

But that little drama plays out in my head. When you live in a village you don’t run around starting wars on a whim. Or, yeah, some people do, but their wars enter to gossip chain and circulate forever. Think of it this way: The village keyboard has no Delete button. And whoever you just started a war with? You’ll run into them for the rest of your life.

I admit, I wouldn’t have started a war over this if I was still living in a city. It’s too silly, and I’m not that quick to fly off the handle. But living in a village colors the way I don’t say it. I kept the vague smile that had landed on my face I was first asked if my dog was a dog and I said, “Oh. That. Female. She’s female.”

At which point, both times, the other person let his dog approach and they gave each other a good sniff. The first time, the dog who would have been fine if my dog had been a bitch turned bitchy himself and snapped at her before being hauled off. Which goes to show you something, although I’m damned if I know what.

I won’t swear that any of this is particularly English. We have dog breeders in the U.S., and they probably talk about dogs and bitches, but no one in the States ever asked me if my dog was a dog. Not once.

Folk Music and English Accents

Posted on July 1, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

I’ve lived in Cornwall for eight years, and I’ve gotten used to the gap between, on the one hand, Wild Thing’s and my accents and on the other the accents of pretty much everyone else we know. Most of the time, I don’t hear the difference. Even when I listen to the other Americans in the village, I don’t notice their accents. I’m listening to words, not what they’re wrapped in.

Except for the times when I do, of course, when it’s like being hit on the head with a rock. A small, soft rock, but still a rock.

I was at Singers Night at a nearby pub last week when out of nowhere I heard my accent. Whack: small, soft rock to the side of the head.

Irrelevant Photo #2: Bude Canal in the late evening light. Photo by Ida Swearingen

Singers night is a wonderful, unpredictable gathering of mostly amateur singers, although one professional shows up regularly, for the sheer love of singing. In the summer, the place gets crowded, with some of the visitors singing and others listening and occasionally taking pictures, which is strange since they’ll go home with pictures of a bunch of people in chairs, with their mouths open. But who am I to judge? This particular night gathered in a strong group singers, and any song with a chorus sounded great—rich voices, good energy, harmonies. I admire the hell out of people who can harmonize spontaneously.

G. had started a song whose chorus repeats the line “Didn’t I dance?” and we must’ve sung the words three times before I heard myself: dahnce. My accent had melted into the accents around me instead of sending that good ol’ American A up my nose to spin itself so flat you could use if for a plate.

Dahnce? I thought. Dahnce? Who the hell am I turning into?

Some people pick up accents when they move, but I’m not one of them. To lose my accent, or even modify it, has always seemed like a much larger loss, as if I’d be losing some part of who I am, or hiding it behind a cardboard cut-out of a personality. I lived in Minnesota for decades without picking up more than a bit of shading on the O. Or so M.’s friend, who’s a dialogue coach, tells me. I’d have sworn I still sounded like the purest of New Yorkers, but she has an ear for accents, so I’ll have to take her word for it.

I’m not claiming my attitude’s better than anyone else’s, and to demonstrate how little sense it makes, I’ll tell you that I’m not bad at picking up accents in other languages. In my head, that’s a matter of respect—for the language; for the people who speak it. In English, though, I count the same act as disrespect.

To make even marginal sense of this, I have to mention the toxic history that imitating other people’s accents has in the U.S. When I was a kid, whites imitating African-American or Mexican accents did it badly and to make fun of them. It was skin-crawlingly awful. These days, I know white kids (okay, they used to be kids; you turn your back for ten minutes and they grow up) who adopt African-American accents because they like them and want to blend in. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but I don’t suppose it matters, because it’s not my feelings that count.

My point here is that there’s a do-not-cross line in my head that keeps me from picking up accents in English, but there I was, singing dahnce.

Every language, and every accent within a language, is a song. I’d love to claim credit for that insight, but I heard someone say it in a radio interview. Unfortunately, I haven’t a clue who it was. A woman, I think, so that narrows it down a bit. Whoever you are, I apologize for not crediting you. But to illustrate your point, whoever you are, when I was still living in the U.S., I heard a recording of kids playing in a schoolyard, and without being able to catch a single word I could tell they were English. The song of their accent rose free of the words. And that’s what swept me along in that chorus: the song.

British singers often sing in American accents. It drives the purists nuts, and they blame it on American rock music. If you listen to enough of it, the accent pours itself on top of the notes and you may not even notice that you’ve picked it up.

Unfortunately, picking up an accent doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get it right. You’re likely to revert to your own accent at any time. Sometimes a word is so firmly stuck in your head that you don’t notice you’re reverting: Michigan comes out Mitchigan; Houston comes out Hooston. The line that tickles me is from a hard-luck, down-and-out folk song with the line “I can’t go back home this a-way.” Only it was an English singer, and it came out as cahn’t. “I cahn’t go back home this a-way.” Hard-luck, down-and-out meets silver-spoon. Cahn’t isn’t limited to a silver-spoon accent here, but put it in an American song and it sure sounds like one. And that’s one of the problems with singing in accents that aren’t your own.

Me? I avoid songs that demand an accent transplant. Most of what I sing is American folk music, and the U.S. is a long way from here, so if I end up singing songs I can’t lay claim to by right of either geography or heritage (and I do; they’re fantastic songs), from this distance they don’t sound as absurd as they would if I were back home.

To the extent that I sing English songs, I keep my accent in place and avoid anything I know is going to sound ridiculous. And if anyone who’s heard me wants to warn me off some particular song because I do sound ridiculous, just throw a nice, soft rock at my head. It would be a kindness.

Tea

Posted on June 25, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

Americans think tea’s something you drink with your little finger in the air, as if you’d broken it and put it in a splint. We think it’s something you put on a funny accent to ask for. And America’s tea snobs reinforce that. You can’t just drink tea, you need tea made from leaves that were picked while the morning dew was still fresh on the plant and which were then individually dried and sung to the whole time—by a tenor, thanks; a soprano might crisp the edges and a bass would leave them open to mold. And you need to pay lots o’ money for the resulting tea. I’ve been to restaurants, when I still lived in the U.S., where asking for a cup of tea meant the waiter had to haul out a wooden chest left from the time when restaurants kept a set of dueling pistols on hand in case, you know, a customer needed them. Only now it holds a complete set of hermetically sealed packets, each entombing one lonely teabag. And after all that, they bring you water that isn’t hot enough to lift any flavor out of the tea so you end up with, basically, a cup of bath water.

Irrelevant Photo: Launceston Castle

An English friend was so traumatized by her visit to the U.S. that she still talks about “that gray stuff you call tea.”

I hate restaurants like that. Not because of the tea. And not because everyone who works there is dressed better than I am. I’m used to that: I’ve always been dyslexic about style and have now gone entirely post-fashion. It’s because I keep thinking I’ve wandered into some private club and the butler’s going to throw me out any minute.

Are there still butlers loose in the world?

Anyway, tea: In Britain, it’s just a drink. If someone comes to fix the leak under your sink, you ask if they want a cup of tea. If you want to know why three guys are digging a hole in the middle of your street, you wander over and ask if they want a cup of tea. Add a biscuit—which is a cookie, and it doesn’t even have to be homemade—and they’ll tell you anything you want to know. Tea is the kind of drink you put in your thermos to take to work, if you happen to take a thermos to work. People talk about ordinary tea, or breakfast tea, to distinguish it from the fancy teas—Earl Grey, say, of green, or herbal (they pronounce the H). A. calls it builder’s tea, and sometimes builder’s butt tea. Her husband’s a builder, so she gets to say stuff like that.

A builder, by the way, builds buildings. Or fixes them. And a joiner’s a carpenter, not someone who belongs to a lot of organizations. All of them will drink tea. And so should you if you visit, because Wild Thing, who was once a dedicated and not at all fussy coffee drinker, tells me the coffee’s terrible. I gave up coffee long before I moved here, so I can only take her word for it.

A cup of tea is also a measure of time. If I drop by someone’s house and they offer me a cup of tea, they want me to stay long enough to drink it. Friendship is a highly caffeinated undertaking.

Summer Solstice in Cornwall

Posted on June 21, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

This far north, the longest day of the year goes on for 26 hours.

Okay, that’s not the literal truth. It’s more like 27.

This morning, Wild Thing and I got up at 3:15 (that’s a.m.), staggered out to the car, and drove down the hill to pick up J. so we could drive to a double set of stone circles some 40 minutes from here and join a group of people who gather at the summer and winter solstices to sing up the sun.

Waiting for sunrise

If that sounds new agey and corny, it probably is. I’m not given to new aginess myself, but when you’re surrounded by ancient monuments the way we are here, you can be forgiven for sliding into a bit of nouveau-pagan celebration once in a while. Those who take it seriously do, and those who don’t can still stand inside a stone circle put up by prehistoric people for purposes we can only guess at and be overwhelmed by the scale of human history. It’s the closest I’ve come to touching my ancient ancestors—who (by way of full disclosure) aren’t my ancestors at all, except in the spirit of all humankind being one family. But humankind is one family, and those circles get to me. Not for any magical properties, but for their sheer age.

Sunrise

At the stone circles, we joined some hundred other people, dressed in everything from long skirts and ivy-leaf hair thingies, to shorts and blankets, to winter jackets (it gets cold on the moor), and we sang, and the sun came up, as red as it ever was when our ancestors watched it all those thousands of years ago. Then we headed to village pub, which had opened early for us, and we ate breakfast. It wasn’t an exact replica of the way our ancestors and not-ancestors celebrated the solstice, but everything changes with the times.

Stone circle

This evening, a group of women from the village will gather on the beach to watch the sun go down. J.’s organized the gathering for several years running, but this will be the first time we’ve gone. All I know is that it involves a bonfire and food. Our ancestors would have understood.

Wild Dartmoor ponies, happy to have the moor to themselves again

This is the first year that J. started the day by getting up at silly o’clock to watch the sun come up, and I told J. I half expect the evening to end with her falling asleep on the beach and everyone gently carrying her home.

She said everyone would be more likely to dump her in the sea.

Notes from the U.K.

Exploring the spidery corners of a culture and the weird stuff that tourist brochures ignore.