England performance leaves us feeling green

I confess to going to watch England's game against the USA yesterday with a swagger and a degree of arrogance.
Frankly when we are talking about England both are dangerous qualities that are likely to result in acute embarassment and leave one a mumbling, shuffling mess after 90 minutes.
Indeed I have lost count of the number of times I have been watching England in the opening match of a World Cup or European Championship game, only to feel the euphoria draining away as quickly as the beer in my glass.
This time the beer wasn't even cold, but at least they have Boddington's at the Pub in Hampton.
And they also had Brits, looking around and blinking in a confused manner in the half light, as if they had been roudned by the Brit Bus half an hour earlier.
OK they also have rather confused servers wearing kilts and the flag of St. George at The Pub.

But there's little point explaining to Americans that Scots would rather see anyone win than England.

On the positive side it was good to see Americans getting genuiely fired up about their team. The decibel level was high in The Pub and the American fans even seem to have latched on to the British ability to sing rude songs.

Admittedly there were some customers who didn't get it. Families were showing up at the Pub at the time of the match and throwing their toys out of their kids' prams when they didn't get a table because nobody was leaving their places for the game.

All of which is a rather nice distraction from the match itself which can be added to the long litany of English disappointments.
Not that it seemed that way when Gerrard scored in the 4th minute. I joked to a colleague it would be 4-0 by the time I returned to the bar.
I had not reckoned on Robert Green and his now infamous green fingers. The rest is England history.
But at least if it calms all the usual fare in tabloids about how our lads are going to win it and Rooney is the new Pele, it's not all bad.
And let's not forget a poor looking Italian team drew with the USA four years ago and went on to win the World Cup.
I'm not holding my breath any more than Jules Rimet is still gleaming. But - who knows - it may be glittering darkly in some obscure place.

Football's coming home - almost

If one thing's going to make me feel homesick in the USA it's the World Cup.
Eight years ago on a visit to the deep south following the big match was about as hit and miss as prospecting for gold.
I'd rush to bars only to find the screens dominated by baseball or the wrong kind of football, a game played with protective helmets and shoulder pads bigger than Crystal from Dynasty. Queries to the management would be met with knitted brows; knitted monobrows in some parts of the deep south, actually.
And given that the World Cup was being held in the Far East, the time difference proved a nightmare.
I miscalculated England's crucial game with Brazil by 24 hours but at least I missed another abject defeat.
But it's getting better slowly. Today's game between England and the USA has engendered quite a bit of interest Stateside although football remains America's sixth most popular sport. I refuse to use the 's' word because an Englishman dies somewhere everytime it's uttered.
The good news is Hampton has a British pub and they are showing the match shortly. And while it may not be quite like home I'm sure after a few overly chilled glasses of Newcastle Brown I can get over my phobia of English men in kilts and fish and chips that doesn't quite taste like the real McCoy.
And finally England has a decent manager and has thrown together a few good results.
So maybe we'll make it through a few rounds before we crash out to the Germans on penalties.

Back to Blogging Bootcamp

A visit to the library today has led me to ask myself some hard questions about blogging.

I don't visit my local library as often as I should but whenever I do the women in there give me wary looks, although I could be just imagining this.

I'll come clean and admit I used to be paranoid but I am fine now because I have realized only half of the people who used to spend all day following me are tailing me now.

Even so I still feel the strain in my eyes in the library as my pupils dilate and I take on the expression of a random alcoholic in an ABC store as I gather in books from east and west, knowing I'll probably never read any of them from cover to cover by the due date.

I hadn't meant to get out Blogging for Dummies but when I saw it I thought - what the heck? What the heck one day I may look back on this as one of life's seismic what the heck moments.

Now I find myself randomly opening pages and getting more and more disenchanted each time. Of course there are the normal frustrations brought about by my rampant technopobia but I can cope with that. I don't need to concern myself with heading off free template problems because I have no clue what these issues might be. Likewise blog markup languages, pinging, RSS feed and Apache which until now I thought was a type of helicopter that got into trouble in Somalia.

I'm more worried by the perceived goals of a blog which include the number of readers attracted, the number of comments, followers and the ability to sell a product. By any and all of these measures if I was at Blog Bootcamp I'd be the overweight guy walking down a dirt road four miles into a 10 mile run.

I try not to consider the stats but 17 followers in over a year and a couple of comments on each post if I'm lucky, certainly ensures my blog is a failure in the terms defined by Blogging for Dummies.

And in the era of social networking when following is everything let's face the harsh truth. I'm hardly a virtual Moses whose followers would walk through parted seas for me.

Page 151 of Blogging for Dummies has proved the most dispiriting so far. "A blog that gets lots of comments is a sign that the blogger is resonating with his or her audience - even if just to make them mad. A blog with no or few comments is probably just leaving people flat and maybe just isn't being read."

This advice makes me wonder if I should be more controversial. What a great job BP is doing in the Gulf. That kind of thing.

Another thing I should be doing, according to Blogging for Dummies is lurking on other blogs. This sounds slightly sinister like I should be wearing a dirty rancoat as I trawl through successful blogs, getting increasingly frustrated by their abject success.

The author Susannah Gardner suggests turning an offline hobby into a blog can lead to a successful hobby blog that's read avidly by likeminded people. "One of my hobbies is knitting, and let me tell you, the knitters have caught onto blogging in a huge way," she writes.

One of my hobbies is not knitting, unless knitting of one's brows while reading a help book counts, but this won't stop me putting in a link to a successful knitting blog because linking is apparently as important as lurking in the blogisphere.

http://www.crazyauntpurl.com/

That wasn't so painful. So maybe this is a cue to supply the links of the hardy followers who have stumbled across my blog in the blogisphere and have stuck with it against the odds.

http://www.theenchantedearth.com/ or http://snickerbaraddict.blogspot.com/ and http://cutand-dry.blogspot.com/

I owe you all something - a Snicker bar, maybe.

Gardner also suggests reporting news is a good source of blog traffic. I shouldn't have a problem there although apparently the more specialized the reporting the better. Maybe I should curtail my blogs to news about crop circles in southern Wiltshire, although I fear I would run out of material in about 10 minutes.

Then there's always the personal diary blog approach espoused by life bloggers; my personal battle against weight loss and how I wrestled on the floor for an hour with a Frankfurther sausage that alone contained my daily input of saturated fat before man beat food. That kind of thing.

But when it comes down to it I fear my blog is too random. Topics occur to me such as how I have suddenly rediscovered The Beautiful South after practically forgetting about the group for a decade, or how Sam's Club gets me down more than any other store in America or how people drift in and out of one's life like the tide but leave an indelible impression that never quite washes away.

But for now I will focus. I will re-read Blogging for Dummies and get my RSS feed up to speed. And I'll buy that raincoat to go lurking.

Today I cheated

I'm not sure if I'll burn in hell or not but I'm off to the confessional, anyway. But will the fact I'm not a Catholic bar me? To be fair I have liked most of the Catholics I have met, even though I think the Church has major issues. Father I posted my work blog on my personal blog site because I haven't had time to blog in a personal way. On well here goes...

Hampton's 400th celebrations have concentrated on a lot of feelgood stuff about the harmonious relationships between the city's three main founding cultures; the Europeans, the Native Americans and the African Americans.


The three founding figures will be featured on a permanent memorial in due course.

Reading the overview for next Monday's mini conference at The American Theater in Phoebus, The Day Kikotan Became Hampton, I found myself thinking this might be more of the same.


Three years before a sunny July 9, 1610, the Kikotan Indians first beckoned to some white men whose ships were anchored at Point Comfort.

The Indians escorted the strangers to their nearby village to be feasted and entertained with music and dance.


Forget the hospitality of the Wampanoag Indians to the Plymouth colonists in 1621 that gave rise to a national holiday. The Indians were doing hospitality in Hampton 16 years earlier.


Soon English copper, tools and weapons were being swapped for Indian corn, fresh meat and fish. The good relations continued and around Christmas 1608 the Kikotans sheltered John Smith and his men while icy gales swept round Hampton Roads.


At Jamestown where Smith become governor everyone was having a horrendous time in the winter of 1609-10 known as the "starving time" as Indian hostility reduced the number of colonists from 200 to about 60.


Not so at the Eden that is modern day Hampton. "Residents of brand-new Fort Algernoune at Point Comfort flourished on fresh oysters and fish. They had sufficient abundance to fatten their hogs. Their plethora presumably was supplied by Kikotans," the conference overview material notes.


But in the description of the steamy summer day of July 9, 1610, a serpent enters the Eden.


An English tabor player appeared before the Indian village, rapping a little drum and dancing a jig. It was an accustomed way to issue invitations. the villagers surged forth into the sunlight "expecting a happy surprise."


"Never would they have expected the explosion of musket shot until it ripped their bodies, never did they see shooters hidden in the woods. This was the final day Kikotan was Indian, the first day it began to be English," the overview notes.

In other words the Day Kikotan Became Hampton was one of the first in a long catalogue of events that saw the native people driven from the land they had lived on from 1610 to the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890.

Monday's conference which has been organized by the Hampton History Museum Association begins at 6 p.m. The presenters will be Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Helen Clark Rountree, Wayne E. Lee, Stephen R. Adkins, Jeanne McDougall and Bob Zentz.


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Last orders at First Landing

Looking at them on the beach at First Landing made me feel old; overtanned bodies, their muscles barely contained beneath the lightly tattooed skin, military haircuts and sleek beer filled coolers from the back of their boats. Beach volleyball and shouts. And a self consciousness that runs through youth.
The girls had none of those 40-something inhibitions about them, flaunting it in skimpy bikinis and cackling across the sharp sand.
Their conversations cracked across the languid afternoon of a hot May weekend.
"Yeah. I told her she could go and f... herself."
I found myself thinking youth does not necessarily buy sophistication, my thoughts falling and rising on each twitch of her cigarette.
Calypso music twanged out from another boat and a couple locked into a dance that was closer to a gyration. Pleasure on a pleasure boat on a sultry afternoon with all the time in the world ahead of them.
Still eventually time like the tide waits for no man. By the evening the small boats would be gone and the wilderness would again close over the beach and take it back into its thorny embrace.
In half a century the revellers would have limbs as contorted and twisted as the tree roots that knotted their way across the beach. In some dark place they would perhaps recall a Calypso day on the beach, but probably not.
And knowing I would be long gone, I skipped away from the beach, up a winding path that offered tantalizing glimpses of a less sullied shore, the sand blanched white in the late afternoon sunshine, the beach full of lonely tree remnants fashioned by the ebb and flow of the river.
The path climbed and the trees cloaked themselves in Spanish moss until the path ahead resembled a shimmering cathedral as austere in it own way as Salisbury with its fine white arches and soaring spire.
The clatter of the beach was far behind. Ahead lay the silent uncertainty of the trees and the marshy deeps of the state park.
I had been here before by the high and magnificent beaches overhung by moss, but then I was on my 12th mile and the state park took on the daunting dimensions of an unexplored rain forest. Fatigue blurs the mind and plays tricks with distances. The low hum of bugs turns into the crescendo of a demonic orchestra and the return journey becomes a route march of uncertain length.
In a clearing pierced with shards of evening light I came on a lonely bench. I wondered, not for the first time, about the name on the plaque. What he looked like and what he did with his life.
But lives had come and gone and people had sat on that bench, and spoke in close, low tones, never to reunite and never to return.
By the time I got back to the parking lot the young people were growling and muttering and packing up their oversized SUVs. The last cigarette was stubbed out on the gravel and the boats were heading away down the river.
By the end of the day only the wilderness endured.

The Sound of Silence

My new favorite song is The Sound of Silence by Simon & Garfunkel.
I haven't seen The Graduate, for which the song is a soundtrack for eons, but when I do it always fills me with a feeling of immense possibility in a world bound up with restraints. Do people really burst into churches and save the girl at the altar, fight off irate family members with a large cross and escape on public transport?
Well maybe not the last part in this area. The plot would rapidly unravel as they waited two hours at the bus stop.
When The Graduate was released in December 1967, I was only slightly older than my son is now.
I assume my parents also came to appreciate the sound of silence.
After three hours of screaming which a large bottle of formula, a diaper change and a pacifier (I apologize for the use of two American terms) failed to quell this morning, I found myself looking in vain for a bus to throw myself under.
The warm glow of a happy day in Richmond on Friday free from Jackson's squeals was beginning to subside, but I kept the feeling within to calm me.
Then in desperation I resorted to the vacuum cleaner and started on the stairs detail that I have postponed for a couple of weeks, telling my wife I couldn't find the attachment.
That was indeed true, although I am not a good looker as evidenced by my regular appearances in unmatching socks.
Strangely enough the nearby hum of the vacuum cleaner did somthing no amount of bottles could achive. When I returned to the bedroom a small miracle had taken place and Jackson's eyes were closed.
Hopefully for long enough to complete this blog.

Sex, lies and Duro Sheds

Duro Sheds aren't very sexy unless you are unfortunate enough to wake up one morning and discover you are the Unibomber, but they've already caught me in a lie today.
And it has been a long day that started at 5 a.m. and involved heading to Langley Air Force base to see Air Force One land and take-off with the added bonus of three minutes of the side of Barack Obama's head.
By 2 p.m. I was tired and seriously decaffeinated. I meandered to Chesapeake Square Mall to get belated Mother's Day cards to find out the only card shop I know in Chesapeake had vanished.
I asked a few dissolute shopkeepers about its whereabouts but encountered only blank looks. It was as if it had never existed which was diconcerting as I still have memories of the saccharine sweet smiles of the elderly ladies who worked there.
It seems traditional shops are already vanishing from malls to be replaced by odd places that tempt children in with bouncy castles and lunar golf. Already the Internet seems to be devouring the traditional shopping experience.
On the fringes of the parking lots surrounding this vast mall I was curious to see a row of Duro sheds.
They looked so lonely out on the asphalt wastelands of a beautiful blue day that I was prompted to stop my car and take photographs. The isolation of the Duro Sheds matched my mood. I wondered how people who seized life or fell in love could ever have anything to do with Duro Sheds.
They made me think fancifully of somewhere else with more meaning, of Southwold with its pretty painted beach huts that sell for a pretty penny, where families hang out in the summer and take their picnics out of Laura Ashley baskets.
In contrast the Duro Sheds were a sad pastiche of those huts so beloved of artists; rough hewn and industrial on the far fringes of the parking lot that felt like the dark side of Pluto.
I took a couple of pictures before I noticed one of the Duro Sheds contained a Duro Man who was showing an interest in my interest.
I quickly moved towards my car but he followed me.
"Are you in the market for a shed?" he asked as my hand fumbled with the keys near the car door.
This threw me at first. I always think of a literal market when someone uses that expression. I thought of the Medieval market in the center of Norwich, a place of huddled huts, pungent smells and archaic sights.
Not wanting to explain that I had no idea why I was photographing Duro Sheds, I had thought they could look artistic but the pictures had ended up as interesting as a day out in Lowe's, I concoted a tall story about my wife showing an interest in Duro Sheds, down the line.
Driving away I felt sorry for the Duro Man out there in the airlessness of a shed on a hot day although he didn't seem to be the kind of guy whose artistic sensibilities would take a battering.
But still as I looked at the sky over the concrete facades of the box stores, the cars jerking in and out of the gas pumps outside Sam's Club and heard the dull rumble of the Interstate I couldn't help but feel life was lurching away and I should do all within my power to spend it in a beach hut rather than a Duro Shed.

Misty in Chincoteague

I have been meaning to blog about Chincoteague Island ever since we returned from a weekend away, but have been seized by inertia and a lack of enthusiasm.
That's not to say Chincoteague is not interesting but, to be fair, neither is it Venice. It's not even Sienna.
When you have lived for a while near the coast of North Carolina, barrier islands cease to be a novelty. Even wild horses, the signature attraction of Chincoteague, are less of a novelty when your beat has been Corolla and the northern beaches of Currituck County, roamed by the descendants of Spanish mustangs.
Of course we went through the motions and ensured Zara was clutching her copy of Misty of Chincoteague as the low green marshes that usher in the approach to the town, appeared out of nowhere.
I promised to read her the novel, but like most of the best laid plans, got sidetracked by one of those large bottles of Pinot Grigot that cost less than $10 at Food Lion and taste better on the third glass than the first.
I still have no clue who Misty was and little indication to find out. I assume she's dead as there's a kitchy little statue in the town. Our hotel displayed a bill board for the movie that dates from 1961, an era when movies were feelgood affairs in which avulcular grown ups patted kids on the back, a drama comprised getting lost in the wilderness and nobody would ever dream a producer would one day make a movie like Seven where a detective finds his wife's head in a box in the final scene.
Still Chincoteague is in something of a time warp. I'd like to bet it boasts few paid up members of the Bloods and the hotel manager had a blue rinse from yesteryear along with an archaic attitude that her purpose in life was to sort out our dinner plans.
We didn't mind too much. Being lazy is part and parcel of being on holiday.
Unfortunately, I also have a competing urge to follow each dotted line that denotes a walking trail on the map to its logical and waterless end. I planned to hike all the way to Maryland, a state that I'm told is owned by the Catholic Church and requires one to whip out the rosary beads to gain admittance.
The requirement was moot. In the end I never walked further than reception to get towels for the swimming pool, although the water was too cold to venture into in May.
On Sunday we drove to the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge. Our first question to the staff at the visitor center was clearly a new one on them.
"Where can we see the wild horses?"
Resorting to auto pilot mode they pulled out maps and gave a spiel on the best time to see the horses in the wild. But they advised us against using the trails because the mosquitoes were "bad."
I resisted the tempration to quip: "So when are the mosquitos good then?"
Apparently recent rainfall had boosted their numbers and dimensions and they were almost as big as the horses.
Still we drove around, paranoid about opening the car window, until we came to a paddock where some wild horses were wandering around aimlessly.
Frankly seeing wild horses in captivity in the wild is no more interesting than seeing horses on a farm, but at least I was able to convince Zara that one of them was Misty, which was another advantage of not reading the book.
After that we made a half-hearted attempt to lie on the beach, but the clouds came racing over right on cue. I visted the lighthouse that again in 2009 received the "America's Lighthouse Most Deserving of Paint award."
Then it was off on the real business of the day; eating.
The ice cream parlour was something of a disaster. Zara's double chocolate affair, heavily spooned over a tiny cone like a mushroom cloud, began to melt about 4 seconds after delivery and I was paralysed in convulsions of laughter as it ran down her arms onto the table and all over her new outfit.
My wife didn't see the funny side. I went away rather glad that Jackson is still a baby and thus ineligible for lopsided ice cream cones.
Other than that the only highlight on the trip back down Virginia's Eastern Shore was passing a grim, festering trailer park, implausibly named Dreamland, that houses Hispanic workers at a hulking chicken slaughtering plant nearby.
Weekends in Chincoteague may not be the building blocks of the American Dream, but suddenly we felt like Misty's half sister Lucky of Chincoteague.

A storm approaches

On the indistinct water's edge where the crumbling land meets Hampton Roads, these fishermen seemed to be more wary of my camera than the approaching storm.
Behind me Tidewater Community College was a low slung and abandnoned mass of concrete bunkers following the recent relocation of the Suffolk campus.
In front of me trash blew across the tumbled breakwaters and into the oily water, to float away north to the darkening towers and coal mountains of Newport News.
The fisherfolk also seemed fleeting, transitory and wary of identification.
The storm was already swallowing up the western sky, shutting out the blue like a curtain of iron, while the wind was whipping up the water.
If the fishermen were fazed by it all they didn't show it as they continued to cast out their rods with scarcely a glance to the western skies.

The Age of Adventure

Looking over slabs of cracked concrete and sodden parking lots as is often the way during these interminable afternoons at work, I am struck by how the world has changed and the days of adventure are as dead as the cold remnants of my coffee cast into the trash hours earlier.
To be fair I have never planned an expedition across the wastes of the Kalahari desert or returned half frozen from an obscure ledge in the Himalayas. I have never even been forced to eat my dog which I'm told is the act that separates the men from the explorers.
I have never set out across the Pacific on a rudimentary raft like Thor Heyerdahl and his crew on the Kon-Tiki expedition or charted an unknown waterway like John Wesley Powell who stumbled on the Grand Canyon, which is no small thing to tell your kids.
And had I organized an expedition where would I have gone? There are no unchartered places; there are few empty spaces on the map. There is no wilderness big enough for a modern day Lewis and Clark to find.
Nor is there enough space on this constricted and much charted planet for those heroes who I had half forgotten about such as TE Lawrence, whose exploits as Lawrence of Arabia brought some of the romance back to a public mired in horror at the bloodshed of the Western Front.
Lawrence was a classic 'boy's own hero' beloved of a generation growing up in Britain in the early 20th century.
The Empire and the glorious days when half of the planet was pink, spawned many heroes in its day. Only with the benefit of hindsight has it become clear that Empire that the sun never set on was as corrupt and unforgiving as anything the French or Germans could ever impose.
These heroes lived courageously and died in the call of duty. Tennyson wrote of Gordon of Khartum who was killed in the Sudan. "Warrior of God, man's friend, not here below/ But somewhere dead far in the waste Sudan/ Thou livest in all hearts, for all men know/ This earth hath borne no simpler, nobler man."
But to me Horatio Nelson was nobler still and is England's greatest hero. The diminutive admiral had all the elements of a storybook hero; a humble background, a reputation for acts of brazen courage, an affair that scandalized polite society and a hero's death at Trafalgar in the midst of his greatest triumph.
Today there are no heroes and warfare is a mechanised mismatch of smart bombs and technological capabilities.
We can see the unforgiving wildernesses and Polar wastes from the comfort of a cruise liner; we can fly above the deserts and jungles where explorers died of dystentry or from the wounds inflicted by poison darts.
And we are surely the poorer for it.
In my adolescence I charted the course of suburban rivers and fought the willows upstream. I was entranced by the small time forbidden wildernesses of the overgown railway line and the chance of sudden death in the form of an express train.
And in my late teens I spent nights in terraced homes meticulously plotting long distance hikes that we made along the cliffs of the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, the South West Way and the West Highland Way.
Waking up in a tent on the lonely and lovely north shores of Loch Lomond was hardly the stuff of Captain Scott. When one of my friends announced he was going outside and would be gone some time he was usually clutching a roll of toilet paper.
But waking up to a new mountain and clouds drifting across Rannoch Moor was a mini adventure.
For so many years now I have been closed off from these big horizons. The urge to explore had been curtailed by the leaden wheels of prams or the call of duty.
Yet lately something has stirred in me like the half memory of the road less trodden that leads through an olive grove and gives tantalizing views of the shimmering Aegean beyond.
The feeling makes me turn to Tennyson again to re-read Ulysses and to think of far off places and adventures on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
But the only thing ringing tonight was my trolly at Wal-Mart. The one with the squeaking wheels that runs to me like a lost puppy dog every time I'm there.

Beachy Head

I love this picture of Beachy Head, not just because it's unusual to get such a shining, azure day that sparkles on the chalk in England, but because it reminds me of youthful irresponsibility.
Beachy Head is big and it's brash. it's the highest chalk sea cliff in Britain; it's like the white cliffs of Dover on acid.
And the lighthouse nestling at the foot of the cliff like a twist of seaside rock, a perfect afterthought of a little light house, completes the composition and makes the scale of this 530 ft. high beast apparent.
If Beachy Head had a personality it would be a large, raw boned Cockney fellow. He doesn't hail from Dorset or the gentle shales of East Anglia, but prefers the gaudy pleasures and amusements of Brighton.
I think of Michael Caine, in Alfie - or maybe even Get Carter.
Because like Jack Carter, Beachy Head has a sinister side. Since the 1600s the chalky rocks tumbled at the foot of this great behemonth have been stained with the blood of jumpers, making it Britain's most popular suicide spot and the third most popular place in the world to jump.
It seems jumpers are keen to make a spectacle and their mark on a landmark. Rather than a concrete car park in Basildon they would rather free fall from the magnificent heights of Beachy Head or from the world's number one suicide spot, the graceful span of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
Today the railings at the top of the sea cliff are festooned with signs giving the Samaritans helpline number. It hasn't helped much.
But most of us are content to gaze on Beachy Head as a style icon and a cheeky chip of old Britain.
It's no conicidence that the Mod scooter goes crashing to the ground off Beachy Head at the end of the film Quadrophenia.
If it was off a hillside in Swindon, it just wouldn't have been the same.