Five Quirky Facts About Thanksgiving

Collective groan. It's that weird holiday I don't understand again when people do that turkey thing a month before Christmas - just because. Don't get me wrong. I can understand July 4. I even celebrate it. We escaped home out of the mosquito-ridden swamps to get some decent tea. But what's with Thanksgiving?

Still, at some point in the early afternoon I'll be invited over to the ex's to be quizzed on the whereabouts of the turkey and reminded about how I forgot to buy rice crackers in July, 2013. I will then be forced to point in the direction of the 40 pound cat.

Nope - thought not

If you want to know more about the historical roots of Thanksgiving you can read my blog Why I'm Still Feeling Queasy after Thanksgiving.

If you can't be bothered here are Five Quirky Facts about Thanksgiving...

1 Hundreds of Thanksgiving days were observed in New England in the 17th Century. Only one church record refers to a feast and there is no further record of a feast for 150 years. Stop stuffing yourselves people - it's historically inaccurate.

2 Although pumpkins have their origin in the New World the first recipe for pumpkin pie appeared in a British cookbook...so naaaaa

3 Sarah Josepha Hale is credited with making Thanksgiving a national holiday. In the days of slavery she believed the holiday would break down America's sectarian tensions - a move that has clearly worked perfectly. She was one of the first women to write a novel and is credited with the verse Mary Had a Little Lamb But She Ate Her Pet Turkey Instead.

4 In 1835 the doctor William Alcott wrote that he was opposed to Thanksgiving on moral reasons as well as medical reasons, lambasting it as a carnival loaded with luxuries. He was also a vegetarian.  if he were alive today he would probably be breaking out the Ramen Noodles - just not the chicken flavored ones.

5 The most famous Thanksgiving poem was written by Lydia Maria Child. It's called "The Boy's Thanksgiving Song" and is best known by it's first line "Over the river and thro' the wood." Nope - sorry - never heard of it but will probably be heading for the woods by 6 pm.

Bill Cosby - American Icon. Rapist?

I haven't worked in marketing for long but long enough to have started waving a red flag at the notion of Bill Cosby's latest Twitter campaign. I don't always do these things as forcibly as should so I would probably be standing meekly at the back of the Cosby suite, waving a small red flag and mouthing the word 'no.'

But it would certainly have been red. Not even remotely orange.

So here's a man who has been accused of a number of  rapes. Oh well then - let's invite people to form a meme campaign around his glittering, sublime, oh so funny, and not in the slightest bit scary date raping personality (allegedly etc).

The results were a bit predictable...

Although this post is in a semi lighthearted vein there's nothing funny about the accusations leveled against Cosby. They date back to the 1970s but only now are they gathering momentum. One of his alleged victims Barbara Bowman claims Cosby drugged her and raped her.

The episode makes me think of Sir Jimmy Savile and anything that makes me think of Sir Jimmy Savile is not good. The famous British DJ and TV host was lauded as a character while he was alive. The stories about little girls were laughed off. Sir Jimmy was influential and did lots of good work for charity. After the death of the venerable Sir Jimmy, the lavish commemorations and the commissioning of statutes of the great man, those allegations of sexual abuse came into the open. It was later revealed that Sir Jimmy had sexually assaulted hundreds of victims of both sexes from the ages of 5 to 75. Sir Jimmy's tawdry soul got away with it because he was a star.

I'm not equating Cosby's alleged acts with those of Sir Jimmy who may have been one of Britain's most prolific sex offenders. But there is a certainly a similarity in the willingness of the establishment to turn a blind eye.

I Miss Our Little Talks

I have always loved this song because I miss our little talks by Of Monsters and Men. Even when I first came across it I knew a time would come when I would miss our little talks.

I also loved the song because of the feeling of northern solitude it gave me; it make me think of Beowulf and the frigid forests of Scandinavia. It made me think of lands where monsters came out of the mists. It made me think of the fearsome Norse Gods and the long ships on the freezing waves. It makes me want to drive to the nearest IKEA and to buy a van full of uncomfortable beds called Bjorack, or something of the like.

I miss our little talks but know now I was shielding myself from a truism - namely that the heart isn't a coherent whole. It can be divided into many pieces, each one attractive enough and shining like pale glass on the beaches of a fjord on a bright morning, but ultimately as illusive as the sun in these rarified northern climes.

It's a great song whatever you read into it...

The Sirhowy Arms Hotel Cannibal and the Map of Love

When I read about Matthew Williams who attacked and ate a woman at the former Sirhowy Arms Hotel in Argoed, Blackwood, I was forced to pull up a Google map.

Where in the world was Argoed and how could such an unsettling thing have happened? The news reports pointed to somewhere in Wales. The former Sirhowy Arms Hotel was now a halfway house for homeless people. I had written about such places in sleepy communities across Britain back in the day. Local people never wanted them on their doorstep, thinking they would encourage undesirables. The normal reaction was to label such folks NIMBYS (Not in My Back Yard) but some of the elderly residents of Argoed, may have had a fair point after Williams' sickening attack on a woman he appeared to had a relationship with.

Some locals said the halfway house had been the source of trouble. "We's even had people sleeping rough overnight in the hedgerows," said one villager. I was a bit perplexed by that comment as sleeping rough in a hedge did not seem to be up there with cannibalism.

The Brecon Beacons

In my efforts to find out where this had happened, I pulled up the map and expanded it. The familiar shapes of the Welsh valleys came to me and Cardiff and the majestic River Severn. It was close to the place I had grown up and I was surprised by the feeling of homesickness that swept over me. I remembered that gray day, when the water was as a gray as the milky sky and the mud lapped on the Severn and we pulled a mighty fossil from the river bank, the mud lapping on our shoes. The ammonite fossil was a relic from a prehistoric sea that had lapped here long ago millions of years before Gloucester was the great strategic crossing of the Severn.

I had never thought of Gloucester as a lovable place but slowly it unfolded in the map of love. When I grew up in Gloucester it has lost the strategic significance it had in Roman times when two roads crossed at The Cross, In Medieval times a vast cathedral had risen in Gloucester but it seemed out of place back in the days when I wandered through the avenues of quietly crumbling half timbered buildings past the largest expanse of stained glass in Europe.

The serrated green lines to the north of Blackwood marked the Brecon Beacons, where majestic hills rose like a whale with a smooth back. To climb up their expanse on a sunny day was to ascend to heaven and to look down on a lake like a mirror. The long contours of the mountain range proved to be a map of love and hate. On a day when the mist hug heavy over the mountains I had ascended into the dankness with V. hoping the breathless heights would revitalize our relationship, only to be met with a litany of complaining and the inevitable downward descent.

Llanthony Priory

But to the east the map proved to be more sunny. I saw the Black Mountains and the ruins of Llanthony Priory, one of the prettiest places in all of Christiandom. The memories came flickering back - a smile and a sea of purple flowers winding away to the high hills.

Then I thought of the Golden Valley and how we had woken to see the mist drifting down the river. We had made a pilgrimage here after seeing the movie Shadowlands. The Goilden Valley proved to be illusive and beautiful in an understated way associated with places off the beaten track. We drove through small villages and ate in stone pubs and heard the lilting accents of Wales just over the border. The land of song and dizzy heights.

Raglan Castle

Then we drove along the border past the savage ruins of castles that marked the days when this place was the Gaza Strip of its age. When you walk through the old gatehouses and see the holes where burning hot ash was dropped on attackers, you feel a chill even on the warmest of days.

Perhaps the map of love is not so far removed from hate and cannibalism - the flip side of the human condition that we don't want to contemplate.

The Sinister Clowns that are Haunting our Towns

A few stories in the news have  reminded me again of a great universal truth that far too few people admit to themselves, namely...


CLOWNS ARE NOT FUNNY - THEY ARE DEEPLY SINISTER...


There. I said it. I'm not sure who ever thought men dressed in bulbous shoes with big noses, wild hair and squirty flowers would ever be funny, but he was no doubt demented. Still we are lulled into believing this great lie; we are taken to circuses and encouraged to laugh at the clowns until we wet ourselves (well when we are infants anyhow).

We have a fixed smile even though deep inside we are feeling uneasy not to mention queasy. We turn to our parents, unsure, questioning how such macabre creatures can really be our happy friends, and they turn to us, smiling and clapping and thus perpetrating the great lie that has been passed down from generation to generation - namely that clowns are jovial and funny.

Recently reports of fake clowns engaging in acts of violence in France have undermined the faux feelgood feeling clowns were supposed to give us.

ABC reported on how pranksters dressed as evil clowns have turned up in French cities, some armed with knives, guns and baseball bats. It's part of a trend that started in California a few weeks ago in which scary clowns spooked passersby.

Now the World Clown Association is concerned the trend is giving clowns a bad rap. "People dressed as horror clowns are not real clowns," pointed out president elect Randy Christensen.

This is true unless you believe real clowns are horrific and many people do. There's even a word for a fear of clowns. It's Coulrophobia. Clowns even have their own serial killer, and not a very nice one at that; although, by their nature, serial killers don't tend to be pleasant.

Pogo the clown

Nevertheless, John Wayne Gacy was prolific even for a serial killer. The "killer clown" murdered at least 33 young men and boys. Gacy would dress as "Pogo the clown" - a character he devised himself - at children's parties and charity fundraisers.

Makes me glad we only had lame magicians at children's parties when I was growing up.

The Earth Hole

I spent weeks wondering how he did it. The earth in Greg's garden was smooth and a lustrous red. The summer rain washed over it and it failed to lose its coherence. That summer we went to work with our shovels and dug deep into the slick loam behind his house. We carved out a a snug den with a side tunnel that led into it, smoothed out as if some gigantic worm had gone to work on the structure.

The bridge above the side tunnel held strong and the tunnel because a shoot that we could use to slide into the main den. It was one of the most perfect things I had seen in my four years on the earth.

On a chilly day a month later I set out to emulate Greg's hole at the foot of my garden. The clouds were moving fast across the suburban sky, threatening rain. I was alone as my spade bit the thin soil. The earth here was very different from Greg's. It was flimsy and ashen and whenever I dug a clear, clean hole, the soil fell back into it. I thought of the bitter smell of ash in my grandparents yard in Glasgow. A shrubby wasteland fell away to the hedge behind me where the foxes had killed a pet rabbit the previous year.

The stubborn earth coated my clothes and mocked my efforts to tame it. However deep I dug, the earth fell in again. My hole was going to be nowhere as big and deep as Greg's. My attempts as a side tunnel were useless. I looked into the dark heart of the earth and lost all hope. Then the rain started to fall on my face, sending rivulets of mud running into my hole. I looked at the last bright gap in the sky and a hatred of Greg grew in my heart. I started to question the whole basis of our friendship which was forged when I found him eating out privet hedge and invited me into my back garden to strip big chucks off the Mountain Ash tree.

Two weeks later Greg was howling in pain with the bicycle chain trapped in his fingers. I didn't do it but I remember seeing the accident as it was about to happen in slow motion. The reflex that usually urged me to shout out deserted me.

Our friendship failed to last the rest of that fitful summer.

James River State Park in the Fall of 2014

When your life is fragmented, you pay more attention to the pieces. A uniform mirror presents an unremarkable surface. When it's broken the pieces glitter more brightly at sun down.

When you get older you pay more attention to the moments. In your mind you can see an imaginary egg timer and each one of those grains of sand you were so careless about in your youth, now seems worth re-examining. The voice from the end of Trainspotting urges you to "choose life."

Yet there are so many pressures to do otherwise. There are so many codes and so many ways we stop kids from being kids. There are so many fetters to the free spirit, so many restrictions  on how we should let the breeze fall on our faces.

Recently I took the kids camping to James River State Park. On so many occasions, all of the practicalities have overwhelmed me and I have given up, just one click away from booking. This time I went through with it and almost four hours later the undulating foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains were opening up before us.

The camp site was primitive - which means there are no showers and the toilets are holes in the ground. In other words only places you frequent in case of a serious emergency. But the site itself was gorgeous, a grassy meadow beside the James River. We put up the tent but still the infernal demons returned from time to time. Why give the kid a hard time for dropping wrappers? Why stress about where I was going to get 12 chunky batteries for the mega light?

I put the infernal demons to one side and we set out on a path beside the river. The sky was high and drifting and the crickets sang in the marshes. The corners of the river were coiling slowly and turning brown with fall, but the succulence of the summer was still heavy in the fields. Finally the pettiness and petulance was ebbing away from me in the vast beating heart of nature.

At night we started a fire. It did not matter that the hamburgers tasted like they were some kind of dead animal back in the day. At night we lost the mega lantern that we had spend a fortune loading up with batteries at the camp shop. We used a free give away flashlight instead. The temperature fell away and I stepped out of the tent in the middle of the night. I expected to see stars, but not stars like this. In the heavens above were layers of constellations intermingled with layers of constellations, winding like silvery cobwebs back to the dawn of time and beyond. I stopped there on the wet grass, taking in my own insignificance in the grand scheme of things. I let the cold wrap around me and imagined drifting away in space forever. Then I headed back to the comfort of the blanket.

The next day we walked to Tye River Overlook - the wooden platform that is known as the highlight of the park. The overlook affords a dramatic view of the confluence of the James and Tye River.

In the morning sunshine we read the story of the night the James River flowed backwards. As the remnants of Hurricane Camille moved through the mountains in 1969 it caused massive rainfall, flooding the Tye River and causing the James River to flow backwards, claiming 113 lives. I had never heard of such a tragedy back when I was a child. I felt a passing chill.

Even on the brightest days and in the most beautiful of places there is a darkness lurking in the most unlikely of places.

What the Heck is the West Lothian Question?

It's high time we stopped our obsession with mid life sex or what was Joan Rivers' doctor doing to concentrate on the things that really matter - namely, what we should do about the West Lothian question.

The West Lothian question reared its head again this week when Scotland voted against independence. Yep the Scots may not be big fans of scones and the plum voiced British Prime Minister David Cameron who would be treated to a 'Glasgow handshake' in some of the rougher bars of Scotland's biggest city, but the vote revealed they like the English really. Or at least they are fond of the Queen's Corgis and her right to shoot deer on their land.

Linlighgo Palace, West Lothian

Renewed talk about the West Lothian question gave me an uneasy feeling of a former life, like those kids who realize they used to be Civil War soldiers who died at Antietem.

Had I not researched this decades ago in preparation for law school interviews? My worse interview was for the University of Bristol, an experience which I stammered through and talked about the virtues of using water cannons on rioters. My interviewer was a communist public law professor. Fortunately, I was from a state school, so was still admitted.

I was admitted without once mentioning those three golden words - West Lothian question.

So without further ado, here's the definition of the West Lothian question - via the Independent.

"The West Lothian question, or the issue of “English votes for English laws”, regards the concept that in a devolved system, Scottish MPs can vote on England-only policies, but English MPs do not have an equivalent say on how Scotland is run because it is led by the Scottish parliament.

The same is also true of Wales and Northern Ireland.

If more powers are now devolved to Scotland as David Cameron has pledged, this means there will be more devolved areas which English MPs cannot cast their vote upon. However, these restrictions will not apply to Scottish MPs."

We are likely to be hearing a lot more about the West Lothian question as Scotland gets more powers, not that this will appease my Corgi-hating Scottish aunt.  So that was worth waiting for? The place around the corner does great egg, lard and bacon sandwiches. I really should not but....

Kate Bush and the Demise of Old England

Americans don't get Kate Bush much. "Who's that wailing woman?" is the usual response I get while one girl tried to persuade me that Pat Benatar has a better version of "Wuthering Heights."

Pause for unpleasant fit of spluttering...

I have always liked Oh England My Lionheart because it takes me back to something half imagined and intangible but if you could put a description on it, to the England after the war when the evil of Nazism had been vanquished and everything would be perfect from there on in.

The England half-imagined would look like the fabled Hovis bread ad. of my childhood, which is filmed on Gold Hill in Shaftsbury one of the loveliest streets in England, made more lovely by the presence of a pub at the top of the cobbled street.

In the 1950s when the images of the dead at Belsen and Auschwitz walked behind a generation like Banquo's ghost, Britain built up the welfare state to provide a net of care from "cradle to grave." The England we grew up in the late 1960s was meant to be a harmonious place - old fashioned and not rich but, nevertheless, good to the core. When I grew up we would tour static old museums and see the Spitfires that brought down the might of the German air force. We would watch films of well spoken pilots with impossible moustaches who stood up against evil against the odds and went home to tea in quiet market towns.

By the 1980s we were beginning to reappraise as greed became good and the police fought running battles with the miners.

And now from a distance England feels an epoch away from the cozy place we grew up in, lulled by children's presenters who were later exposed as pedophiles. I still recall the feeling of terror that swept the underground on July 7, 2005, the day nails ripped through commuters in tunnels and England felt like it was on the verge of a wave of panic that would never subside.

Today the man in the executioners' mask who beheads the hostages speaks with an English accent - continuing a grisly line from the block at the Tower to Tyburn.

Perhaps the image of England as a cradle of civilization was always a cruel illusion. Scratch the surface on any street corner and you will find evidence of Medieval barbarity just a few feet away from WH Smiths.

The Lincon Memorial and the Fat App

I took my daughter on a mini vacation to D.C. recently because the need for a cultural injection can get overwhelming when you live in a place known as Tidewater.

I'm not quite sure that's what we got, though, thanks to the fat app. Some time ago Zara was given an iPod. I'm not sure if this is the right term. It's like an iPhone that you can't make calls on but you can do some kind of face time as well as playing the obligatory games.

I didn't think much about it as we left the camp ground and prepared to get our culture vulture wings out. It's funny because I have backpacked around Europe in the harshest of circumstances but as soon as I go sightseeing again I revert to being the worst kind of tourist. The middle aged, efficient woman at the camp ground explained meticulously how to use the bus passes which were also train passes and handed me a leaflet giving clear instructions on how to get into D.C. Still I found myself switching into tourist mode - a pose which involves one hanging out tongue, a slight lisp and cricked neck and obvious questions such as "Is that the bus?" while pointing to a stretchy out sort of vehicle that looked very bus-like.

Once we got to D.C., Zara got all excited about the first monument she saw - some general on a horse on a big plinth and proceeded to take 100 pictures of it and then lost interest.

Undeterred, we pressed on to the Natural History Museum. Zara was briefly interested by the Sponge Bob letter box before disappearing into iPod world. The pouncing stuffed tiger and giant whale got her off it for a short time - not so much the talk about evolution which explained how humans are descended from a rat-like creature called Morgie. The narrator may not have realized the profound effect of that unfortunate name of our great grandmother x million years ago. Morgie was the name of the small girl who released Zara's prize balloon at her fifth birthday and was hitherto shunned for the rest of her existence. Just the mere mention of the name was enough to reawaken ancient horrors - a bit like Palestine. But different, really.

Still there was plenty of time for us to realize that the Washington Monument is a lot further away that it looks and the Lincoln Memorial is even further away than that. The memorial held some interest until Zara found the fat app.

As we are ascending the escalator she is saying : "fat, fat, fatty fatty fat." into the microphone and playing it back into am image of her face with an extra 200 pounds and a wagging tongue in a small mouth hole in the vast expanse of errr fat.

"If you upgrade you'll get another 400 pounds with pustules and break-outs," she is telling me.

"No thanks. Let's save the dwindling account for Starbucks."

A woman at the monument looked less than impressed at the prospect of pustules. Lincoln himself looked rather stony faced, although I am guessing that's the way he looks anyhow.

Still we pressed on against the odds. At the National Museum of American History I tried to describe the significance of the Greensboro lunch counter but by this time Zara has got hold of the old person booth and was proceeding to give herself extra lines and gray hair.

On the way back we sat on the subway train next to a woman who was probably pushing 400 pounds, albeit minus the breakouts. Zara reached for the IPod. I broke into a nervous sweat.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial - A Monument to Hubris

I had always wanted to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial because it strikes me as being one of the most moving legacies to the futility and mass sacrifice of war.

Just as there is a long and twisted saga to the Vietnam War there is a tale behind this stark wall that contains 58,272 names on reflective stone from Karnataka in India.

It was designed by Maya Lin, who won a design competition as an unknown 21-year-old architecture student, and immediately stirred up controversy.

James Watt, a Secretary of the Interior under Ronald Reagan, even denied it a building permit initially. James Webb, initially a supporter, said: "I never in my wildest dreams imagined such a nihilistic slab of stone."

The strength of the opposition led to a more conventional memorial - The Three Soldiers - being placed near to the Memorial Wall. Lin objected to an idea to place it near the entrance to the wall and a compromise was reached.

Like many other projects that are controversial at the time, the Wall has since become accepted as an institution, and is as integral part of the D.C. landscape as the Eiffel Tower - another project that caused an outcry - is to the Paris skyline. It evokes many feelings including starkness and solitude and there is much that is poignant about the reflections of trees and passing clouds on the names of the vanquished.

The Vietnam War is still is less comfortable fit. For a while I read widely about the Vietnam War in the vain hope of finding a justification. It became clear this was less a war of design and ideology than a slippery slope - as smooth as the wall itself - that dragged hapless American presidents deeper into the mire - leading to unspeakable horrors on both sides.

The veterans paid twice over - both in terms of the physical and psychological trauma they faced and the fact they were shunned and mistreated when they returned home from the misplaced war that America lost. The wall is stark but its most powerful aspect is the sheer volume of names in small type that run away to a distant vanishing point. This is less a monument as a warning about futility, the dangers of stubbornness and why we should always question the motives of those in the faceless offices and big mansions before heading blindly into the jungle.