Although I often feel Hampton Roads is a Godforsaken mosquito-infested swamp there are times I am grateful I am not landlocked. Like people in Kansas or Texas. Across miles of prairie and leagues of tumbleweed, hemmed in by ironstone hills and waterless deserts with only the specter of a twister to stir the sluggish air.
The Tall Ships, Norfolk, VA (David L Macaulay)
I have never believed the coastline around these parts is real. My highlight on the coast was the spring day the sun shone down on the tumbled cliffs of North Devon and the waves crashed noisily on the rock stacks of Hartland Point.There could be nowhere more beautiful, although the gentle lanes of South Devon that opened up into coves and hidden beaches under the eggshell blue sky came a close second.
Here there are no cliffs; just dunes and beaches and rivers and marshes which have a charm of their own, although at times I can long for the windswept headlands now receding into antique memory.
But when the tall ships came to Norfolk I felt the call of the sea and harbored an urge to be there under the sails watching the shores of a distant and savage land hoving into view.
I could lose myself in the labyrinth of sea and tide and estuaries and be happy in the knowledge that nobody knew me and I had no ties to the land. There's a thrill in the charts and uncharts drawn up by Captain Cook as he cheerfully greeted new lands.
But he left nothing for the rest of us; nowhere unexplored, nowhere uncharted.
The tall ships at sunset made me think otherwise and to dream of raising the anchor and set sail to an undiscovered Continent.
We spend too long mired in familiarity. Our spirits are dashed by routine. We tack toward adventure but hesitate and are lost in a retreat back to a safe harbor.
For a few hours Norfolk became exotic and unpredictable. Sailors speaking Spanish sauntered along the boardwalks, exotic women laughed from the decks of yachts. And the temptation to drift away on a tide of laughter came and went.
The ebb and the flow and the dizzy heights of masts. And suddenly the tall ships had gone to grace another harbor with their dangerous dreams.
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar;
There seemed to have been a lot of selling points for having a garden at the time. Great for the kids, BBQs etc.
Since acquiring a large expanse of urban grass I have also been counting the downsides. The fact the bugs make it too dangerous to hang out in for half the year, the pine cones that need to be removed all the time and the quick growing grass.
I have a special face for mowing the lawn. It isn't a pleasant one. Women pushing babies past in strollers tend to cross the road when they see it playing over my features. Even the rough mothers - the ones whose strollers are packed with enough crack to keep Whitney Houston going for a couple of days, look afraid.
The lawn mower's a pig anyhow. Half of the time it doesn't start and the rest of the time you have to douse it with gasoline and light a match. I thought about starting my own landscaping company.I thought again.
Now I have putrefying wildlife to add to the list of garden gripes. The kids had been going on about a dead bird so I set out to investigate one bright morning, magnifying glass in hand like Sherlock Holmes at a crime scene. I got suspicious when I saw the curled up foot. The dead bird turned out to be a putrefying squirrel and it stank. The dead squirrel was the best argument I have ever seen for cremation.
It was also covered in crawling things. Even after three garbage liners the smell was discernible. We shoved it outside gate with a vague plan of dropping it into the wheelie bin of a neighbor we didn't like. But nobody was brave enough to carry it across the street so it resided on the front lawn until Friday when household refuse is picked up.
In 2010 Jones courted more controversy by threatening to burn 1,000 copies of the Quaran. He incidentally ruined my day when I was asked to find outraged Muslims in a city with few Muslims and worked long hours finding the information for an article only for Jones to renege on his threat and for my article to be scrapped on deadline.
Of course this wasn't the most serious casualty of Jones' actions.
He later staged the burning of Islam's holy book last year. That event was blamed for subsequent riots and the killings of at least seven United Nations workers in the Middle East.
Whatever your political affiliation or religious view, I think it's an indisputable fact that this man is a moron. And don't even get me started on his fashion sense. It's a real shame about the putrefrying squirrel because it had Terry's name written all over its fast disappearing features.
When you are young you believe in the tooth fairy. When you are a bit less young but still impressionable you are moved by "God Save the Queen."
In 1977 when the Queen celebrated her Silver Jubilee I was 10. There were parties in the street, bunting and those curious plastic red, white and blue hats. We ate jelly and crisps and it was bright and breezy with a tinge of low cost flimsy naivety that was unique to the Seventies.
The crown was cheap too; a cardboard replica of the heavy headpiece that the Queen wore during the 1953 Coronation. It was enough to win me the class crown competition even though the velvet was derived from old curtains whereas the real thing, the St. Edward's Crown, made in 1661, weighs 4 pounds and 12 ounces and is made of solid gold.
It was first used by Charles II as it had to be redesigned after the Restoration, the time the monarchy was brought back after Charles' father parted company with his head . There is speculation the lower part of the crown might be from Edward the Confessor's crown predating the Norman conquest in 1066. The Queen has not been known to wear it to ribbon cuttings and flower shows.
"Does one really have to do this dreadful north of England thing with all these commoners with bad teeth and acne?"
By the time of the Queen's Golden Jubilee in 2002 the monarch had endured a number of deaths not to mention scandals such as the divorce of Charles and Diana, Fergie toesuckingate etc.
In the ragged East End of London I tracked down some of the people who had held street parties in 1977 for a newspaper article but found most of them staring out through net curtains at the empty streets strewn with trash. The spirit of 1977 had gone, they told me, community had been broken down bit by bit. Most of the homes were occupied by people from Pakistan and India who had little time for the Monarchy and - this bit you can't print - they would say before telling me something borderline racist that I would never dream of printing anyhow.
Still I recall a concert and a big screen in Hyde Park and wandering through the crowds feeling indefinably lost.
And in 2012 I'm simply not there for the Diamond Jubilee, neither geographically nor spiritually. I haven't even seen any TV footage. It's not that I feel ripped from Britain or her monarchy - it's been a long departure.
It's also been a while since I saw the point of Elizabeth and, to be honest, she always paled into insignificance compared to the previous monarch to bear her name.
While Elizabeth II's biggest crisis may have been whether or not to return to London after the death of Diana, as depicted in the movie, Elizabeth I was rallying the troops at Tilbury in 1588 as a massive fleet gathered off the waters of England in the form of the Spanish Armada.
"I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm."
Of course Elizabeth I was scheming and ruthless. She had to be to remain as a woman on the throne for more than 40 years in the 16th century. And while the current Queen's biggest dilemma may be what to wear at a garden party, Elizabeth 1 faced quandries such as whether to execute her cousin Mary Queen of Scots and how to bridge a religious schism created by her father.
She was also iconic with her striking appearance and shock of red hair, notwithstanding the stories that she really had black teeth and was considerably less attractive than the painters - who valued their heads - would lead us to believe.
At least she wasn't dull, although it's sometimes hard to lose Miranda Richardson's comedic portrayal of her in Blackadder.
It was a normal sort of day in the neighborhood. The sun was shining.
Rudy's girlfriend said he woke up early, made coffee etc. She said he looked in a closet and left home to go catch up to a "homeboy."
He left home with a Bible in his hand. She didn't say if he waved goodbye as he headed down the street or patted the Labrador on the head.
But some time later that day, things took a slight turn for the worse when Rudy was shot dead by cops for eating the face off a homeless man, while naked, on a causeway in Miami.
The case of Rudy Eugene is truly horrific even for Florida but it has fascinated a prurient public as much as it has appalled.
Before the attack Eugene's criminal record had been limited to a few misdemeanors for smoking pot, although there were some pointers toward a violent nature.
Bruce Baker writing in examiner.com says Eugene's girlfriend believed he may have been under a Haitian Voodoo curse and subject to a ""zombie apocalypse" at the time.
That or he had taken too many bath salts. Do you believe an apocalypse involving zombies is nigh? asks Baker before suggesting we follow him on Pinterest. See it's not just for girls.
Whatever the cause it's clear we have an unhealthy obsession with cannibals be they the small guys deep in the forest who shrink heads or Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the sinister character played by Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs, that won the Welsh actor an Oscar.
Implausibly we are invited to start liking the cold blooded cannibal as he helps find another serial killer. We can't understand cannibals. It's the last taboo. We are horrified but we are also fascinated.
Because Rudy Eugene is dead we will probably never know what caused this appalling attack. But we'd be safe in assuming he wasn't reading the nice, touchy feely parts of his Bible.
It was odd to have a conversation my folks at the weekend and to find them all stoked up about the Eurovision song content. My folks don't get excited about much apart from every five years when they replace the lavatory seat so this was quite something.
A kind of distant memory stirred in me at those three words - Eurovision Song Contest. I recalled funny hurdy gurdy voices distorted now as if underwater from a long way away, using expressions such as "null points." There was a dim sense of shame and defeat as the German jury came in to deprive the UK of the points it needed to win.
Buck's Fizz won Eurovision quite a few years before this picture was taken - Man Alive
Some psychologist probably has a theory that helps us deal with the Eurovision song contenst. There are four stages of Eurovision - belief, disappointment, shame and displacement. When you are a certain age you actually want your country to win. Later on you feel disappointment when it doesn't. Soon afterwards you realize that winning is more embarrassing than losing. The song contest, you soon realise, is that dorky Trainspotting/coin collecting club you were a member of at school. You want to forget it ever existed. You blank it out.
But when it comes to one's parents the psychologist will be confounded. They never left stage one of belief, bordering on stage two when the United Kingdom inevitably lost. No chance, now they told me - the song contest is dominated by the disparate parts of the former Yugoslavia which all vote for each other and are hell bent on delivering Blighty a good kick in the Balkans.
Frankly this surprised me as I couldn't imagine the Serbians enthusiastically voting for Bosnia and Croatia given that they were lobbing grenades at them a few years ago, but I let it go.
"So who won?"
"Sweden."
"Um right."
I winced as my mother compared the Swedish entry to Kate Bush as you really just can't compare Kate to anyone. Then my folks proceeded to get all sentimental about a group of Russian grannies who took second place.
It appears they were talking about Buranovskiye Babushki. Now call me cold hearted but I find it hard to warm to a group of aged peasants in period costumes. Maybe I have read too many Tolstoy novels but it's hard for me not to be weirded out by Russian peasants, not least because the only famous Russian peasant I can think of was Joseph Stalin, a not altogether nice all round dude.
Nor was my parents' complaint that the United Kingdom never wins Eurovision exactly accurate. I remember Brotherhood of Man and Buck's Fizz, albeit a few years ago. When Rolf Harris filmed his show from our school hall, showcasing his big ol' didgeridoo, Brotherhood of Man were the featured band. I recall their Rolls Royces outside our beat up school hall and the smug superstars emerging in fur coats as if they were the Rolling Stones after they followed up their Eurovision success with one hit. And that was it. And who ever thinks about them now? Well me - obviously. But just because I'm on the subject.
Bucks Fizz were more successful but nobody ever took them seriously. The United Kingdom last won the contest in 1997 with Katrina and the Waves.
André Claveau at the 1958 Eurovision Song Contest in Hilversum
Apparently the UK's 2012 entry was by someone called Engelbert Humperdinck who was 76 and I had last heard about in 1976, although what appeared to be repeated botox treatments made him look - well like a tortoise of indeterminate age.
And the contest was held in Baku - which is nowhere near Europe when I last looked. Apparently most countries don't want to win it because it costs a fortune to host it the next year.
America is blithely oblivious to this weird time warp competition. I can't say I miss it but there's something curiously reassuring about it, like coming across the arm chair you used to sit in as a kid. I sometimes find it odd that my parents never change with the times. But, in saying that I'd be way out of my comfort zone if I turned on the webcam one day and they were bopping round the coffee table to Rihanna.
Back in the day when men were men and sheep were nervous and we had better things to do than farting around with blog templates, there were Cornish pasties.
The pasties were made by the womanfolk of Cornish tin miners who toiled in damp and hazardous conditions underground. They could be dangled down on ropes and were hardy enough to withstand the deprivations of nature.
The Cornish Pasty Association cites references going back to the reign of Henry III in the 1200s. But the pasty with its crust became a mainstay during the heyday of the tin mines.
"There are hundreds of stories about the evolution of the pasty's shape, with the most popular being that the D-shape enabled tin miners to re-heat them underground as well as eat them safely. The crust (crimped edge) was used as a handle which was then discarded due to the high levels of arsenic in many of the tin mines," the association states.
This morning a newspaper I once worked on in the south west of England declared "Victory," on its front page. It was declaring the Government's climbdown on its plans to introduce a tax on Cornish pasties and other hot snacks after critics said the uppity crew of Eton educated boys who are in power today were targeting the working classes and their snacks.
Apparently pasties will no longer be taxed, as long as they are still hot.
It's curious that the victory of the humble pasty over the disdainful elite should make such headlines at a time when kids are being massacred in Syria, but news is as much about escapism as it is news.
I have something of a soft spot for the Cornish pasty as it reminds me of family holidays in St. Ives, although the pasties invariably seemed to contain something crunchy like grit and the meat was a curious grey color as if a convenient rat had been passing when the makers were stirring the nefarious ingredients.
No matter. Like haggis the pasty is a part of British culture. As a kid I was always fascinated by the ruins of the tin mines that clung precariously onto the edges of the Cornish cliffs. A scene from the bodice ripper Poldark would come to mind when there had been a tragic accident down the mine and the womanfolk would rush weeping to the coast.
My fond memories of Cornwall come rushing back, not that I appreciated it much when I lived nearby. Maybe it was all those infernal stories about pasties that I was forced to write.
It's very hard to believe that in a short space of time this front bed will soon be an urban paradise.
Even harder to believe given that it got really hot and humid and I downed tools to find a beer after I found a mosquito the size of a rabbit feasting on my arm. Now a thunder storm is coming over which ties in rather nicely with my motto "if you don't succeed at first, give up."
The house in the backgroound belongs to our smug neighbors BTW. They always succeed in mowing the lawn in diagonal lines while I'm lucky to get the mower anywhere near the grass. They have neat plants in the beds. Nothing too daring or fancy. They flower right on cue. I'm sure cloning was involved somewhere down the line. I prefer the organic and random approach. The four foot tall dandelion plant may have been somewhat ungainly but it had a flower on it didn't it?
If we start rooting out creatures that look different to us the next thing we know we'll be driving Edward Scissorhands out of suburbia. Do we really all want to be the same? Why the drive to be the perfect neighbors next door? I have theories about folks who have strimmers on their Christmas list.
Contrary to common belief I used to have an interest in gardening. I saw my white and purple rock garden as a triumph of serene art over the prosaic nature of everyday life. The whites twinkled out there in the moonlight by the tinking water feature.
But successive in-laws saw fit to rip up my efforts (yes the size of my violin grows with every word written). Perhaps then I should have stormed outside screaming about the defilement of art and how the Nazis burned books en route to the Final Solution. Probably they didn't understand. They did spend a fair bit on landscaping to be fair.
But instead I grew peevish. The dreams of a perfect garden shrank to a small kernel in my head to the extent that the motion of weeding became as remote as a moon walk off one of Saturn's little known satellites.
My retreat from being Suburban Man was complete. I was lazy and worthless and labelled as such. My solution was to grab a beer and to look up the Picture of Dorian Gray.
Still I realized there is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us. That and the fact that "conscience makes egotists of us all."
So perhaps the answer is to be found in unconsionableness because only then will be cease to be egomanicas. More practically the answer is in gardening. We can only bring about transformation when we learn to hate the weeds, loathe their coarse stems and raggedly heads, wake up in a cold sweat with our hands round the necks of thistles like war veterans who wake up choking an imaginary enemy.
And if some guy with scissors for hands comes anywhere near my new look front yard he'll be driven out of the neighborhood.
How do you like the new template BTW - I got bored with the last one but I'm not sure about this one either?
One of the biggest problems I find adjusting to normality after the A-Z challenge - what the hell normality constitutes - is I keep thinking of bands I should have included.
The trouble is we are all collectors at heart. We are pale faced philatelists with fat knees trapped in our parents' basements greedily collecting our empires of stamps. When the lights come on and someone enters our foul lairs we grasp each tiny stamp into our pasty arms, determined not to give away a single one. At least metaphorically speaking.
From the outside we may put on a rather nifty act of being cool, calm and sophisticated. But inside we are screaming maniacs being pushed down the aisles of Lowe's at a breakneck speed on a cart like the kid with the bike in The Shining screaming: : "I want to collect garden gnomes."
And if they come with cute fishing rods, so much the better.
So tonight I found myself wanting to add Mumford and Sons to my collection, even though it had long gone.Gosh I am sounding like a character from a Nick Horby novel.
I instinctively like these guys and not just because they're English and have a name that should be over a store in a sepia photograph. They have a kind of farmer's boy with cello chic and look like they would be rather good fun down the pub. Not that I have done any research this time. They could be manic depressives for all I know who want to spent all night talking about the Corn Laws of 1804. This is probably a bad example as I have something of a passing interest in the Corn Laws of 1804. Is there a Corn Laws chat room? Back to the basement.
Anyhow I have no idea what Little Lion Man is about but I instinctively know it's my theme tune.
I'm not sure I used to be a virtual person. Quite probably I used to be a real one. Now I'm not so sure.
Today I will be developing a new website for a client. And reading an article about forthcoming changes by Google and what they mean for SEO. From there I will be synthesizing and publishing a piece on my professional blog about what this means to the slaves. By this I mean all of us who are enslaved to Google, Facebook and Twitter as surely as the mill workers in the 18th and 19th centuries were slaves to Arkwright's spinning frame.
Part of me lives on on this blog but I'm not sure which part. What was euphemistically coined the World Wide Web back in the day has taken away much of our world.
It makes me wonder if we develop web personas; if we talk to people in a certain way in cyberspace and then struggle to relate when we meet them. Or maybe we struggle to relate period.
Last night I met some people from my former newspaper. We exchanged the inevitable jokes about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic and about how one day it would be just another page in cyberspace, perhaps sooner than anyone cared to recall.
And when the conversation fell silent we sought solace in our laptops or in searching feeds on our Blackberries.
All of which makes me wonder how we lived when the world was lit only by fire. How we clung to each other with just the stars to light our way, how the night seemed immeasurably long and our lives run with the seasons.
In some deep place I had a romantic notion of the Middle Ages, picturing the Pilgrims winding their way to the shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham lit only by the Milky Way
Inevitably, my shallow perceptions defied reality,. Some time ago I wrote about Graham Manchester's book A World Lit Only by Fire in which he described a world of dangerous medieval villages where the locals would as soon butcher you and eat you as they would welcome you; of a world where nuns and monks spent most of the time copulating; of a world of short life spans and disease and filth, so at odds with the idea of knights and round tables and damsels in distress.
Between the desire
And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow
Sir Walter Scott has much to answer for I fear. TS Eliot - less so.
Conscious of a loss of identity and just an indefinable sense of loss generally as I drifted past the lonely planets out there somewhere in hyperspace, I sought solace in nature.
Hoffler's Creek is only remarkable in its unremarkableness. It's a small urban park but it feels far away from the soul numbing strip malls. Yet it was a beautiful May morning of gusting breezes and bright sunshine. The pull of nature was too powerful to resist. I abandoned my laptop and headed for the road less traveled, a dirt track with the silent waters to my left and the teeming woods to my right.
Sunlight slanted in and out of the eaves and tall purple flowers danced by the silver water. The sun and wind put me in mind of a day in Ireland so many years ago, by the fast moving waters of a creek on a day when the clouds moved fast in their pools of sunlight, the boggy mountains basked in the rays and I spied a jolly azure boat lying bottom up by the water. The moment was no more remarkable than any other. But it lived with me somehow.
Gazing at the white herons over the marshes I was reminded how it is possible to find redemption in nature. We may feel lost but we only need to reach out and touch.
I recently received a Kreativ blogging award from Mina Lobo at Some Dark Romantic who is clearly my favorite Goth mom of all time; although to be fair I'm not sure I have met any others.
Lust, bitterness, & despair look great on her, apparently. Of course it looks great on all of us once we reach a certain age. Just as Brut 33 smelled good on us when we were 15.
So thanks Mina. I don't receive many awards, probably because I can be too lazy to pass them on as is correct etiquette in polite blogging society. Indirect thanks to Tracy for giving the award to Mina.
The rules are I have to pass this on to six (oh so lucky - you will hate me in the morning) people and say 10 things about myself that nobody knows. It's hard to narrow it down to six deserving bloggers, even harder to find 10 things about myself that I haven't bored folks about on numerous occasions on Brits. OK so one can but try.
1 - Betty Manousos - Cut and Dry - Betty is officially the world's nicest blogger. She spends ages saying positive things on other people's blogs (even mine) and posts pictures that make me nostalgic for the Devon coast.
2 -Jayne at Suburban Soliloquy - Jane's blog is so highbrow I sometimes have to read her posts twice. I feel like reaching for the dunce's cap and I passed my 11 plus (I think).
4 - Mollie at OK in UK - Mollie is sort of me in reverse. She's from America but transplanted in an extreme part of England.
5 - Robyn Alana Engel - Life by Chocolate - Make a point of not reading her dating ads. from men posts at stuffy formal functions because you will a - get an inferiority complex re being a man and b - people may not be very impressed when you wet youself in public.
6 - Abi at Happy Frog and I - heartwarming stuff that will remind you of how completely stupid you were in the Eighties and that your affinity for Doctor Who is bordering on dorkdom.
And 10 things folks may not know about me.
1 - I convinced my daughter I was the first man on the moon by showing her photographs of Neil Armstrong and telling her a stone from the garden was a moon rock. She now thinks I am a pathological liar.
2 - I only lie when my lips move.
3 - I always wanted to be a top musician but failed the recorder rest and had to make do with banging the triangle in the school play.
4 - I didn't talk to anyone for my first three years of school but spent six months convinced I was a helicopter. Yeah I was really weird for a while back there.
5 - The Eighties didn't look great on me either. But I had this sad delusion I looked good in pointed pixie boots, skin right jeans with red stripes, a yellow string vest and Sun In sprayed in my hair.
6 - I had an odd addiction to the novels of Thomas Hardy when the rest of my class hated his guts.
7 - I support Liverpool because the school bully tried too force me to support Manchester United.
8 - I am the only journalist in Britain to ever interview a suicide bomber. Unfortunately he didn't tell me his intention at the time and I had erased the tape by the time everybody got interested.
9 - I once had a conversation with Emma Thompson on Hampstead Heath without realizing who she was.
10 - I have an aversion to revealing secret things about myself.
