The Village

When you're an American kid and you see movies and television about village life in England, you think it's all pubs and tweed and walking large dogs and wellies and men smoking pipes and hand-rolled cigs and everyone knowing each other.

It's all true. At least it is here in our bucolic little village (which I will from now on refer to as Bulitworth, pronounced 'BEW-lit-worth'). Except maybe the pipes and tweed. But it isn't autumn yet, so there's still time for tweed.

Movies and soap operas might also make you think there's a dark underbelly to English village life -- a gentlemen who may or may not have locked up his mad wife in the attic; a wealthy spinster who lurks in her darkened manor house, plotting to break young men's hearts; a population of friendly eccentrics. The first two are not true; the third kind of is. I hope to write more on that in future posts.

Based on movies, you might also think the pub is the center of village life. Sadly, that is no longer always true. In Bulitworth's one pub, it is.

A recent Saturday night at the pub:
A live-music duo doing covers. The village 'ambassador' works the room, says to people, "Have you met John and Donna? They just moved to the village."

It's important to note that I stand out. To start, I dress in bright colours (not very English of me). And people don't always understand my accent, espciallly when there is a band playing.

Band members picked me out of the (small) crowd and asked about where I was from. At which point the village ambassador seized the opportunity to request 'Massachusetts', which made me a little bit homesick.

Next weekend, it's all happening in Bulitworth. A classic car and motorcycle show on Saturday and a music festival on Sunday. Watch for more dispatches.

A Triumph car club meeting at Bulitworth's only pub

Summer Time

Nothing written for four months, and now two posts in one day. It's just, you see, the title of my last post reminded me of Madness' performance at the Queen's Jubilee concert, and then that reminded me of the Jubilee celebration we attended in our new village, which reminded me that maybe I should write something about this exciting summer. After all, everyone else is.

The days are long here in the summer. Today is 16 hours, 32 minutes and 51 seconds long. The day of the summer solstice will be 16 hours 38 minutes and 19 seconds long. I can't sleep with all this light. When I wake up and see that it's light outside, I'm convinced that either my alarm is about to go off or it hasn't and I am going to oversleep. Since the latter is less likely, I lie awake waiting for my alarm to go off. And it doesn't. See, that's because the sunrise is at 4:44 a.m. I have one hour and six minutes before I have to get up. I wish someone would tell my sleepy brain.

But I promised you excitement.

We spent the four-day Jubilee weekend celebrating after a fashion:

• In London on that Saturday to soak up some atmosphere without the wall-to-wall people. 
• In our present village on Sunday to go to a rain-soaked hog roast that I'm not sure was so much spoiled by the weather as by the fact that it was a hog roast. So we bought beer and picked up fish and chips and watched the Thames pageant in our nice dry living room. 
• In our new village on Monday to see a coronation memorabilia display in the village hall, watch a tug of war, and say 'aawwwwww' during the 'dog show'.

Okay, not that exciting. Maybe for the Olympics.

Our House

The last four months must be hanging out with the socks in my house. I have no idea where they went, although time seemed to disappear more quickly when we bought our DVR. Big Bang Theory repeats aside, we really have been busy.

A lot of our spare time over the last few months was spent looking for, and now buying, a home. One blurry Saturday, we looked at six houses. We bought none of them. Instead, we bought the house that kept drawing us back to it.

We first liked it for its setting across from cow-filled fields. Then for the tiny village it was located in, for its 13th-century church and 17th century pub, for its friendly and inviting residents. So why, we wondered, could we afford this house in the country with plenty of space? It must be, we thought, because of its proximity to Gatwick airport. So we went back at different times of day and different days of the week. We asked the locals how they felt about aircraft noise. We event spent the night at a local B&B to find out for ourselves.

The result was our entry into the long and stressful process of buying a house in England, where the buyer spends a fortune on surveys and solicitors before the seller is legally committed to sell you their house (and you to buy). In the end, we will be homeowners again this Friday, the 15th of June 2012.

Baby, I Can Drive My Car (Past Catherine Howard's Ghost)

Remember when you were teased as a kid and your mom would say something like, "ignore them and they'll go away"?

It doesn't work with blogs.

They wait there on the internet, taunting you. "Why haven't you written anything on me in over a month? It's because you don't have anything interesting or witty to say, isn't it?"

I'm sorry to say that it kind of is. Life has, for the most part, become sort of routine. Up at 5:50 a.m., work from 8-ish to 5-ish, home by whatever time the gods of the M25 see fit.

Occasionally, the gods' whims help me see how I've been completely removed from any routine I previously thought I had. One day the traffic was particularly bad, and I heard on the radio that my exit was closed. I groped in my glove compartment for the GPS and remembered that it was in the other car, as were the maps. I called John, who went online and directed me to the best route available, where everyone else was doing what I was doing, so I continued to sit in traffic. It wasn't until I turned left at Hampton Court that traffic cleared.

Once I got home and John handed me a glass of wine, I thought, "Holy crap. I turned left at Hampton Court to get home." It's a little bit of a rush for an Alison Weir geek to realize that I drove by, as a matter of routine, the place where Henry VIII married Catherine Howard and Kateryn Parr, and where the former was under house arrest and now frequents the Haunted Gallery.

Since my last post, there have been other non-routine events, like passing my UK driving test and spending Christmas in Kent, but I hope I continue to find the prizes amid the day's routine events. In fact, I hope we all do.

Building a Mystery

It started as an idea for an unusual Christmas gift -- a playing-card caddy bought at the Princess Alice Hospice charity shop.

The decorations on the box looked like something John's mother would like, so I took it down from the shelf thinking it could be part of her Christmas gift, since she loves playing cards.

A few aspects of this purchase begged to be investigated:

1) I had hopes that the cards were vintage.The Missions to Seamen is is still around. Since 2000, it's been called The Missions to Seafarers. The name Britannia Airways was used from 1961 to 1995, so the cards date from then. No way of knowing yet if it's nearer to 1961 or 1995. But maybe, I thought, the next piece of the puzzle would give me a clue.

2) When I tipped the cards out of the box, I found this clipping:

Now I was on to something. Could this box have been owned by Laura Francatelli's nephew? Maybe he even received it from her estate. Was I holding an object that was within two degrees of separation from Titanic history?

The auction, which took place in 2007, also included a letter Laura wrote shortly after the disaster, and her affidavit from the subsequent legal inquiry. The life jacket was signed by people aboard that last lifeboat she shared with, among other people, Lady Duff-Gordon and Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon.

None of this, of course, proves that the box belonged to Laura's nephew. None of the sources I found mentioned the nephew's name, much less where he lived and if and when he died. No clue then, if the box may have been from his estate.

3) The bottom of the box has this tag affixed to it:

Do the numbers indicate the year it was made, or is it just the number of the box? What about the company Persian Crafts? Were they importers, located in the UK, or did the owner pick this up on his or her travels? Is the company still around? Google remains silent on the topic.

If anyone reading this has any ideas about this -- or any other part of this mystery -- please share.