Horror photography!

I just got back from hiking the East Highland Way in Scotland. While I was up there I discovered a new setting on my camera. In the "text" option for taking photos of print, there are four settings. One looks indistinguishable from a regular portrait setting, one is black and white, one is negative black and white, and then there's this one, a reversed color image. Looks like a cover for some Gothic horror novel! This is the cathedral at Durham in northern England.
Another view of the same cathedral. Not sure why the sky changed color.
Julián, my four-year-old son, took this one of Papa emerging from the grave.
This decayed tomb is carved in the image of a knight. What horrors lurk beneath?

Next time: more mucking about with the camera!

Missing Oxford

I left Oxford a couple of weeks ago and now I'm in Missouri researching my next Civil War book. I'm also doing a bit of fiction, as usual, including my novel-in-progress that's set partially in, you guessed it, Oxford. Write what you know and all that.

The problem is, it's making me miss Oxford! Just today I was editing a chapter that has a long descriptive passage of one of my favorite spots in town, and suddenly I had a severe case of homesickness.

What to do? I won't be getting back to Oxford until April at the earliest. Perhaps missing it will help me write about it. Or maybe it will simply make writing about it torture.

The Oxford Ghost

In case you haven't noticed, this blog has been a bit sporadic lately. There's two reasons for this—my paid blogging gig at Gadling takes a lot of my online time and I've been in Oxford for the past six months. What does being in Oxford have to do with not blogging? Well, it's such a nice place I don't want to be on the computer if I'm not getting paid for it! But I'm going to try to blog a bit more often now that I'm leaving. I'm not saying that Missouri (where I'm going next) or Spain (where I'll be in five weeks) are boring, but Oxford is especially distracting. Too many beautiful buildings, green parks, and cozy pubs. I mean, I work at the building you see in the picture, do you really think I want to be on the computer any more than necessary?

Anyway, here I am on my last day. I saw Julian and Almudena off on the bus this morning. They're back in Spain now and I'm headed to Missouri tomorrow to research my next Civil War book. Oxford has been a great time for us. Julian became fully bilingual, Almudena did a lot of astronomy research, and we all met tons of cool people. It's weird to be here alone for this last day. It makes me feel like a ghost!

In the past six months we've seen three different Oxfords. When we got here in late March the university was still in term and the town was filled with students. That was fun because there were a lot of cultural events and talks at the university, and my local pub had a good open mike night. Soon the summer came and the students left, to be replaced by hordes of tourists. That made the city center busy and annoying, but didn't affect us too much in the residential area where we lived. Plus I could always hide in the library and write my books, with only the sounds of the larger and louder tour groups (usually Italian or American) filtering through the window to bother me.

Now as we come into autumn the tour groups have tapered off, and only a few early students have shown up. Oxford is a bit dead. I had a coffee at my favorite cafe looking out onto Radcliffe Square and had the place almost to myself. It's gotten cooler, the leaves are changing, and the ivy on the medieval colleges has turned red. I like Oxford at this time of year.

But now I'm off to a second dose of late summer in Missouri. I'll be visiting a great group of friends I haven't seen for too long and I'm planning a Jesse James roadtrip for Gadling. I'll be sure to announce it here when I write it up.

See you later. . .and I really will try to post more often. It's amazing I still have readers!


Photo courtesy Tom Murphy VII via Wikimedia Commons.

Eights Week in Oxford

We just celebrated Eights Week here in Oxford. This is a rowing race in which eight-person crews from all the colleges vie to bump their way to victory. Thirteen boats line the river in order of the finish from the previous race. To get further up in line for the next race, you have to bump the boats in front, thereby switching places. This stretch of the Thames, locally called the Isis, the very narrow and encourages lots of bumping. Occasionally one of the boats gets bumped so hard it sinks!
The boats eagerly await the starting cannon.

Silly hats are an important part of any English boat race.

The cannon blasts and they're off!
Here's a bump in the making, but the folks in green managed to slip away.

Not all boats on the Isis are up to the challenge.

Donnington Bridge affords a good view.

Hard at work on the oars.

My son and I were very disappointed that nobody sank. Maybe next year!

Settled in Oxford

We've been in Oxford for two months now and we've really settled down, meeting the neighbors and making friends. The problem with Oxford is that it's such a nice place with so much going on that it's hard to focus on work! We've both been trying the discipline ourselves to get enough work done each day, but as you can see from some of the posts in my other blog, I've had mixed success.

Julián has been loving Oxford. His English is much better. Back in Madrid I was the only person who regularly spoke to him in English, so while he understood everything, he didn't say much. Now he's rattling on in English, even when he's playing by himself, and he's even picking up a bit of an English accent!

The school we have him at is good too. It's a Montessori school, and that allows him to pursue his own interests, mostly things related to geography like maps and animal cards. He's also producing two or three drawings a day.

I like the diversity there too. Most of the kids are bilingual or even trilingual, and his best friend is a little Nepali guy who is so much like him I beginning to think they're twins separated at birth. His school back in Madrid is mostly Spanish kids, with only a few North Africans and South Americans, so I'm glad he's getting to interact with so many different kinds of people. The best part is that he doesn't notice the differences at all; they're just the kids he plays with! Growing up in a whites-only neighborhood and a whites-only school, I had to unlearn a few things. Hopefully he won't have to unlearn anything.

Policewomen In Wet T-Shirts

It's always nice to come back to England. This week my local paper The Oxford Times reported that the Thames Valley Police would be issued new uniforms. Officials said they wanted a more modern, comfortable, cool look. I must say the new uniforms do look better, especially since they're ditching the silly bowler hats, but about halfway through the article we come upon the real reason for the changes. The old-style white shirt became transparent when wet.

Now getting your shirt wet is a common enough thing here in Old Blighty, so I feel a bit cheated. Why did I never see a policewoman in a wet t-shirt? At the first hint of rain (i.e., every day) did the fair ladies of the Thames Valley Police all take a personal day? Did they not see the crime-fighting potential in all this? They could have had criminals, who are predominantly young males, running to them instead of away from them. They could have given lectures to youthful hoodlums and actually gotten them to listen, or at least stay put and stare. Why has the government missed yet another chance to solve this country's spiral into chaos?

And what will this post do to my google ads?

Settling Down In Oxford

Sorry I've been so silent this past week, but Almudena, Julián, and I just moved up to Oxford for a six-month research trip. I'm ensconced in the Bodleian Library researching two books while Almudena is working with the astronomy department. Julián is starting in a local school next week so I'll have much more time to post after that. Taking care of a three year-old all day is exhausting!

So far we've been exploring the two local parks, the local pub called The Fir Tree (serving a fine Sunday roast and guest ales) and getting in a bit of work. Today we took another look at an old pagan grove and Norman church in the village of Iffley that I blogged about last year. This weekend I'll be attending Oxfringe, a local literary festival. I'll be reporting on that next week. Busy, busy!

Snowy Oxford

We were up in Oxford last week doing some research and spent much of the time snowed in. At least we were snowed in some nice bookstores and pubs! We also managed to grab some nice photos. The one above is the famous tower of Magdalen College, taken from our hotel window.

Across the street from our hotel was Merton College.

I also nabbed this nice sunset behind Magdalen College. I can't wait to be living up there for six months!

Ethiopian Mead

Sorry for not posting for more than a week, but I had a busy trip to England that started with getting diverted to Bornmouth for three hours, getting practically snowed into our hotel in Oxford, and trying to travel around England in the snow and slush while writing an article for British Heritage.

Anyway, I got the article done, got some nice snowy shots of England that I'll post later, and then spent a couple of spare days in London researching my next book proposal and enjoying the city's nightlife.

One place I stopped with my friend/former housemate/drinking buddy Michael was Merkato Restaurant and Wine Bar on 196 Caledonian Rd. This is in the center of one of London's Ethiopian communities and is the best Ethiopian restaurant I've tried. The owner brews his own tej, an Ethiopian honey wine that's a bit different from European mead. It's cloudy, slightly sweeter, and has a bit of a different flavor thanks to some added spices. There's a detailed webpage about tej here, and there's even a Facebook group for tej fans. One wine bottle of tej is plenty for two people, even two seasoned veterans such as Michael and myself. If you get to London, try this restaurant, and try the tej!

Facebook Culture

As I said in my last post, I've joined Facebook. It's an interesting little world. I've already hooked up with a lot of my old Tucson crowd, now spread over several states and a couple of countries. I've even had a few of my blog readers request to be my friends! So it's fun.

One thing I've noticed though is that it's all very frivolous. "Well yeah," you say, "It's a social networking site, what did you expect?" OK, I expected it to be a bit light, but I didn't expect people to be spending real money to send their friends virtual balloons and birthday cakes. I mean come on.

But is it really so frivolous? In her excellent book Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, anthropologist Kate Fox says that all this social networking, texting, and twittering is important for its very frivolity. It replaces the day-to-day casual interaction our species got from millennia living in villages or wandering in tribes. Now we live in sprawling suburbs or impersonal cities, and we don't get the friendly "Hello, looks like we're in for rain" that we exchanged with the farmer two fields over, or the semi-concerned "Is your mother over her lumbago?" from the second-cousin-twice-removed at the village well.

Apparantly we need that, and it only took a generation without it before modern civilization found a way to replace it.

But I'm still not paying good money for virtual puppies.

History and Travel in Britain

The Christmas issue of Timetravel Britain is now up. This free webzine about historic British travel has been around for several years and is always fun to read. I've contributed several articles to it, although I don't have anything in this issue. Check it out.

And if you want to see some of my articles, you might want to read about the Imperial War Museum, Southwark Cathedral, and a tour of Roman London. You can find more from yours truly in the site's index.

Armistice/Remembrance Day

Ninety years ago today, on the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, World War One ended. Today in London three of the remaining veterans took part in memorial ceremonies at London's Cenotaph. They were Henry Allingham, 112, Royal Air Force; Harry Patch, 110, Army; and Bill Stone, 108, Royal Navy.

My grandfather was a WWI veteran and I've met many others. It's strange to see such an important event pass from living memory into history, but with all of the remaining veterans being well over 100, they won't be with us long.

Here in Madrid there's an exhibition titled "¡1914! The Avant-Garde and the Great War" exploring how World War One affected the art and ideas of Europe. I've blogged about it here.

Twenty million people died in the war, and it changed Western civilization in countless ways. Right now I'm reading Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, which is one of the best books I've seen on this subject. Highly recommended.


Photo courtesy Caroline Ford, from Wikimedia Commons, reproduced under GNU Free Documentation License.

Atheist Ad Campaign

A group of atheists backed by famous atheist writer Richard Dawkins are trying to raise money to put ads on London buses, according to an article in the Guardian. The ads will use the slogan, "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

I happen to agree with this statement, but there's a problem. They're saying there's probably no God, which means they admit the possibility, however slim, that there is a God. That makes them agnostics, not atheists. I've come across this confusion before among atheists, and I have to say it baffles me.

The campaign is in response to ads by a Christian group whose website says we're all going to burn in a lake of fire if we don't accept Jesus. In support of the atheist ads, Dawkins said, "This campaign to put alternative slogans on London buses will make people think--and thinking is anathema to religion."

Silly boy, thinking is anathema to fundamentalisms of all sorts, whether fundamentalist Christianity, fundamentalist Communism, or fundamentalist atheism. Intelligent, thinking people come to all sorts of different answers to life's questions, and fighting intolerance with intolerance isn't going to get us anywhere.

How about this for a slogan: "Consider agnosticism, because it's OK to say 'I don't know.'"

"I Want To Go To The Science Museum"

When you hear your 2 1/2 year-old son say this, you know you're doing something right. As I mentioned in a previous post, Julian has become obsessed with the Oxford Museum of Natural History. Now when he wakes up he asks to go there. He needs to see the Iguanodon and play with the microscope, after all.

Sad to say, I'm now in Missouri and he and his mother are back in Madrid. Apparently he really liked being home for a couple of days, then started getting upset because he couldn't do all his favorite Oxford activities.

I know what you mean, kid, American microbrews are nothing compared to good, honest English real ales.

Well, at least we'll be back in Oxford for six months next year.

These past two weeks have been interesting from a parenting point of view. Julian has always been an active and observant kid, but being in a different country, and being in a small town instead of in the center of Madrid, really opened his eyes. He got to feed ducks for the first time, climb trees, play by the river, all the stuff country kids take for granted. He was amazingly energetic, ate hugely, slept like a log, and learned a bunch of English. Hopefully we'll be able to schedule some regular periods of fresh air from now on.

A Pagan Grove and Norman Church in Iffley

We have a new favorite walk from Oxford. Just a couple of miles up the Isis (the local name for the Thames), and past a nice riverside pub, is the little village of Iffley. Its main claim to fame is a fine Norman church built in the late 11th century that's is almost perfectly preserved. Early on, it changed hands from the local lord to an estate further away, and while the absentee owners paid for its upkeep, they didn't do much to change it, making it one of the most pristine Norman churches in the country.

The front is very Romanesque, and the door is decorated with an unusual partial zodiac, which I'll post on later with more pictures. There's also an atmospheric old cemetery and a 1,500 year-old yew tree. The local priest thinks it was part of a sacred pagan grove and that under the church there's probably an old Saxon church from the 5th or 6th century. Since early church builders liked to build in sacred groves, I'm thinking the Saxons cut down the center tree of the grove, which was probably as old then as this one is now, and built the church on top of it. You see this sort of behavior with mosques, churches, and synagogues in the Middle East depending on who won the latest war.

The surviving tree was probably little more than a sapling then, young when its religion was old, and escaped the notice of the Christians. Perhaps cutting down the central, most sacred tree in the grove was all that needed to be done to destroy it as a place of religious significance. I remember reading in some early Christian accounts where they destroyed sacred groves, and they usually only destroyed the main tree. The sole surviving sacred yew can be seen on the righthand side of both the photos of the church here.

Oxford: A Great Book Town!

Oxford is my favorite small city. Not only is it beautiful with its gardens, parks, medieval architecture, and river, but it's filled with books! I've been doing research in the Bodleian Library for a book proposal on early firearms, and I've been prowling the bookstores as well. My favorite store for new books is Blackwell, where I took advantage of their "3 for 2" deal to get three critically acclaimed contemporary novels for the price of two.

As a writer I read a lot, but I have a bit of a blind spot for contemporary literature, so I decided to correct that by picking up The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, Children of the Revolution by Dinaw Mengestu, and The Road Home by Rose Tremain. The Kite Runner needs no introduction, being an international bestseller. Children of the Revolution is by an Ethiopian author and is about Ethiopia and the expat community in the US. Since we're planning a trip to Ethiopia, Almudena and I are both interested in this one. It won the Guardian First Book Award. The Road Home is this year's Orange Prize winner, and is currently at number six on the fiction charts here in the UK. I'm going to start with that one, because I have never actually read a bestseller while it was on the list. Shows my predeliction for older and obscure works, doesn't it?

Cameron Gets His Bike Stolen

The British press has been having a good giggle over Conservative leader David Cameron getting his bike stolen. Cameron has been trying to show himself as the new, greener, kinder face of the Tory party by cycling to work, but having his official car follow him with his briefcase and suit kind of undermines his green credentials.

Still, becoming a victim of petty crime does make him more like one of us. I guess. The fact that he didn't lock it properly shows he doesn't think like one of us.

I'm still sore because when I was writing my guidebook to London, a nun on the Tube said I looked like him.

I most certainly do not!!!!

Wait, Am I In A Different Country?

The irony of doing a blog partly dedicated to travel is you have less time to do it when you're on the road. I got to England last week and stayed a couple of days in London before heading up to Oxford. On my first full day I went to Bloomsbury to check out the bookshops and get a pint at the Museum Tavern, my favorite pub in the area.

Wandering down Museum Street I discovered an obituary in the window of the Ulysses Bookshop. Peter Jolliffe, a well-known local bookdealer and proprietor of the shop, had died last December. You can read about his interesting life here. The notice said he had left some money for local book dealers and buyers to have a wake at The Plough, a pub just down the road. I was a few months late for the wake, but in honor of Peter I decided to head on down and have a pint in his memory. I never knew the guy, because his shop specializes in modern first editions and I collect in different areas, but part of having a community is to show respect, and he earned plenty of that.

As I was drinking in the Plough, I thought, "I'd forgotten how nice this pub is, I should come here more often."

Then it struck me--I can't come here more often. It's in a different country! I'd been in England for almost 24 hours and it hadn't really sunk in that I'd actually crossed a border. I come to London so frequently that I've begun to think of it as an extension of Madrid. Weird. That's never happened to me before. Does coming to England count as traveling anymore?

Well, Peter, it's probably not the kind of thought you were expecting at your wake, but I'll certainly remember you for it.

Where Have All The English Gone?

I was researching in the British Library last week and went into the cafeteria to get some lunch. The special that day was Cottage Pie. Having spent way too long staring at obscure tomes and not nearly enough talking to actual, live people, I tried to be witty by asking the two women behind the counter, "Is the Cottage Pie made with real cottages?"

They looked at each other in wide-eyed panic. Uh-oh, had I made some English faux pas?

"I'll get the chef," one of them replied in a Polish accent, running off.

"Um, I was just kidding," I said.

"Don't worry, he'll know," the other said in a Caribbean accent.

The chef came out and asked in an English accent, "What would you like to know, sir?"

Too embarrassed to repeat a lame joke twice, I feigned like I didn't know what Cottage Pie was and he patiently told me in his most polite explaining-to-the-clueless-Yank voice that it's made of minced beef and vegetables. Well, yeah.

A couple of days later the wife and I got a taxi to London Bridge station. The Arab taxi driver didn't know how to get there and I had to give directions! OK, I've written a guidebook to London, so it's not a problem, but this guy's a taxi driver!

I don't have anything against immigrants--how could I? I've been an immigrant twice, and so has Almudena--but it is a bit strange to spend a week in London and have the majority of my interactions be with people who aren't English. Even most of my London friends are from elsewhere. Does London even count as an English city anymore?

(I hear a chorus of English voices from the counties shouting "NO!")

A Tour of Roman London

One of my favorite free online magazines, Timetravel-Britain, has just published an article I wrote that gives A Tour of Roman London. It was a fun article to write. The City, which is the heart of London's financial district, stands directly atop the old Roman city of Londinium. Sections of the old city wall and even the temple of Mithras can still be seen today. I've always been fascinated by bits of the past sticking out in the modern world.

Sadly, Madrid is a relatively new city. It didn't become capital until Philip II made it so in 1561. Before that it wasn't much of anything, but successive kings built palaces and churches and made it an important city. Later kings tried to imitate Paris, and tore down a lot of the older buildings to make way for wide avenues and parks, so there's not much left of those early centuries. Ah well, I can always go to London for Roman remains, or Segovia, which is much closer!