Saturday, December 3, 2022
Spotted dick is a traditional British pudding made from mutton fat mixed with other ingredients, such as baking soda, flour, molasses, corn syrup, or nutmeg. You add raisins or other bits of dried fruit to this dough and you have “spots.” The dish is steamed, boiled, or, as in the recipe below, baked, and served […]
When can you let down your guard when you travel? In your hotel room? On public transport? At passport control? When you’re in a group? Never? The tea was hot, the cream seemed fresh as I shared my digestives with Alec, the terrorist. I’d been waiting for him in the Dover tea shop for twenty […]
These 40 essays, lists, recipes, poems, and songs cover my eleven trips to the United Kingdom and Ireland over 43 years. Perhaps I’ll go again, perhaps not, but I wanted to record what I could remember and while I had a quieter, less-traveled few years to write. My first trip as a recent college graduate […]
A sculpture of three women stands outside a home in a small village on the edge of western England’s Haworth moor. Diane Lawrenson’s life-size bronze sculpture group portrays the Brontë sisters, Anne, Charlotte, and Emily, occupants of that surprisingly creative family parsonage. According to the Brontë Society1 web site (bronte.org.uk), Haworth back in the 1800s […]
N Nazis. Going to Guernsey Northern Ireland. Is Ulster the same as Northern Ireland? in Appendices novels. All that walking! and Literacy through Mills & Boon O oasis. The bee-loud glade, Cream tea in Bettys Tearooms, and Scone by jammy scone occupation, Nazi. Going to Guernsey onion gravy. Dressing, among other things, the English “chip” […]
Listed alphabetically by subject, then essay or item title where found A Adventures of Peter Rabbit, The. Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Beatrix Albion Beatnik Café. Jack Kerouac and Jack Mormons at the Beatnik Café Algren, Nelson. Jack Kerouac and Jack Mormons at the Beatnik Café archaeology. Heart attacks at Sutton Hoo and A Jane Austen […]
Wednesday, October 5, 2022
My recently completed writing collection THE SCONE DIARIES is made up of 40 essays, lists, songs, glossaries, dictionaries, and chronologies based on my eleven (so far) trips to the United Kingdom and Ireland from 1971 through 2014. I will start publishing this collection here starting in December 2022. A index (though without page numbers) will […]
Perhaps a country shows its true colors through its bank notes. In 1928, the US Treasury Department reviewed the portraits on bank notes and concluded that “portraits of Presidents of the United States have a more permanent familiarity in the minds of the public than any others.” Exceptions were made for Alexander Hamilton, Salmon Chase, […]
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It seemed to all be going on at Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon. Perhaps its most famous going-on is that it is where Anne and William Shakespeare are buried. I paid a “Concession” (old-age) price of one pound to get up to the front of the church with the tourist crowd to see […]
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Anne Hathaway’s cottage lies amid gardens and fields of roses, rushes, lavender, and delphiniums, in Shottery, about a mile outside Stratford-upon-Avon’s city center. Lovely willow trellises line the walks of the cottage (actually a rather substantial farmhouse), covered with all manner of winding tendrils of vine and vegetable. And a fine tearoom across the street […]
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