Deluge

It has been the sunniest spring since 1910, the warmest spring since records began, and the driest spring in a century.  London has received about half an inch over the past three months, when the average is 5.5 inches!  In fact, we've been in a drought since October.

Needless to say, nobody has been complaining, except for me.  I've had to go to the allotment every day to water the vegetables.  Fortunately they have taps; unfortunately they are on the other side of the allotment...and I need 12 watering can-fulls!  (And that's for a small allotment!)

This morning, the heavens opened and a great deluge came down.  (In fact, they are calling for more rain over the next four days than we've had in the last three months!)  And into this storm I had to go the DVLA -- the equivalent of the DMV -- to renew my car registration.

They were supposed to send me a 'reminder' so I could do it online, but with the move I never got it.  I also could have used my registration certificate (the 'pink slip'), but I couldn't find that after the move, either, and to get a new one required proof of insurance, except mine expired May 4, and my renewal was mailed to the wrong address!  It finally arrived this morning, 26 days after my plates expired, and three days after I found a large yellow "UNTAXED VEHICLE" sticker attached to my car, with instructions on how to get the car unclamped.  Amazingly, they didn't actually clamp the car; nor did they glue the sticker to my window, they just tucked it under the wiper in an oddly considerate way.  So perhaps it was meant as a warning, in which case it worked.  I was absolutely paranoid for three days waiting for the stupid insurance certificate.

So the minute the postman delivered it, I made the 20-minute drive to the DVLA office in the pouring rain.  And you may be happy to know that government bureaucracy is a universal constant.  Despite having nearly 30 desks, only four were manned, but they had three employees in the waiting area asking "are you okay?"  Other than having to wait 45 minutes, I was fine, and was much relieved to get my shiny new tax disc.

In the evening, we went to the Chelsea flower show and miraculously the rain -- which had been coming down in buckets all day, including some fierce hail -- let up just as we arrived, and it was a beautiful evening.  We strolled around for 3 hours and had a really fantastic time.  I hope the photos do it justice.

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Chelsea flower show

Barack Obama missed the Royal Wedding but arrived during the Chelsea flower show.  Coincidence?  I think not.

The Royal Horticultural Society was established in 1804, and began hosting 'floral fetes' in the 1820s.  In 1913, it began an annual spring 'flower show' at the Royal Hospital at Chelsea.  (The Royal Hospital also has its own history -- founded in 1682 by King Charles II, and built by Sir Christopher Wren, it was one of the first retirement homes specifically for veterans.  The 'Chelsea pensioners' wear bright scarlet uniform when performing civic functions, or giving tours of the historic buildings.)  The Queen has only missed one show in the past 60 years.  (And no, I don't know why.)

The flower show only lasts four days, and brings together international garden designers, with 17 'show gardens' and 600 exhibitors.  The show gardens are not in miniature, but full-size yards, and this year features a 'Monacco roof garden' complete with swimming pool!  B&Q, the local DIY warehouse chain, has created what they call a "vertical allotment," a 30-foot high living wall of edible plants, including tomatoes, peppers, herbs, mulberry trees, and edible flowers. The wall is self-sustaining, using solar, heat and wind energy, plus waterbutts, to feed itself.

The show is only open to members for the first two days, and the public for the last two days.  An award show recognizes Best Show Garden, Best Urban Garden, Best Courtyard Garden, and the 'People's Choice.'  Keep in mind that although designers have been planning these gardens for a year (or longer), they have to plant months in advance, transport everything to the show, and get everything to flower at exactly the right time.  Hampton Court Palace bills its flower show in July as "World's largest," but Chelsea is to the horticultural world what Crufts is to dog shows.  You should be able to see a short video of this year's Best Show Garden here.

At noon on the final day, a bell indicates selling may begin, and a frenzy ensues as the public snap up everything they can, from rare flowers to new hybrids, furniture, sculpture, and the displays themselves.  Very little is left to clean up afterwards.

The reluctant atheist

I may have mentioned, I'm attending a weekly Judaism class with an eye towards converting.

It's not a journey I ever expected to take.  Raised in the Anglican/Episcopalian church, I dismissed religion early on as just so much voodoo.  None of it seemed relevant to my life, and after looking into a few alternative religions, I finally declared myself an atheist.

But I was always a reluctant atheist, because I recognized there were whole dimensions of religious life I was missing: the association, the ritual, the history; all the reasons that religion had developed in the first place.  I had, as it were, thrown the baby out with the bathwater.  

I didn't even like associating with other atheists, because most of them could not see that rejection of religion was, in its way, its own religion.  It isn't a 'truth,' it's just a belief in a particular view to the exclusion of all other views.  That atheists somehow find superiority in what is, essentially, a limited imagination and a lack of interest in the bigger picture astounds me.

Jess wasn't the first Jew I ever met, of course, but she was the first one that embraced it as a culture rather than a religion, which intrigued me.  The local Reform synagogue ran a weekly 'Gateway' program discussing Jewish history and values and I decided to attend, not entirely sure what I would find.

The first thing I found is that 'reform Judaism' doesn't mean 'Judaism light.'  In fact, in many ways it is just the opposite.  Just as Christianity had its Protestant movement, rejecting the dogma of the Catholic church, so too did Judaism, replacing the rituals of the 'Orthodox' synagogues with a personal relationship to the text.  That meant instead of learning a few rituals, you had to learn the text, the history, the interpretations, the underlying reasons, its societal context, *and* the rituals, and then figure out what made sense to you.  That's a lot of information, and the conversion process takes at least a year, and often longer.

I should mention the US 'reform' movement is slightly different than the UK reform movement, in that it uses English rather than Hebrew, and rejects some of the historical concepts such as matrilineal descent (that Judaism descends from the mother). While the UK requires "study in Jewish theology, rituals, history, culture and customs, and to begin incorporating Jewish practices into their lives," the US permits conversion "without any initiatory rite, ceremony, or observance whatever." (In practice, though, most US converts go through a short program and may go before a beit din [3-judge panel] before being accepted.)

So for the past 8 months I have been attending 3 hours every Wednesday -- one hour of Hebrew and two hours with the rabbi -- plus (irregular) weekly services. And I find it fascinating, engaging, and oddly satisfying.  I do find comfort in the rituals, and appreciate how religion serves to separate the mundane, and marks the passages of time.  I have to admit, though, that part of the reason I find it so relevant is that because my rabbi doesn't believe in God.

As way of explanation, I'll take an example from last week, when we were discussing the rules around keeping kosher.  An Orthodox Jew would simply be expected to follow the Talmudic interpretations, such as having two sets of dishes.  A Reform Jew would be expected to be aware of the difference between the Biblical instructions and the Orthodox interpretation, and decide for themselves where they are on that spectrum. A Liberal Jew would be expected to not eat pork.  My Reform rabbi, however, decided to keep a kosher kitchen, not because he believed that's what God wanted him to do, but because by doing so he acknowledged the importance of food, recognized a 2,000-year-old tradition, and enabled Orthodox Jews to eat at his home.  In one step, he both rejected the mysticism I had such a problem with, and affirmed the things that matter -- the history, the people, and the rituals.  Brilliant.

I don't know that I could ever get the same level of satisfaction from Christianity, because of course the first thing Saint Peter did when establishing the new Church was to reject everything that had gone before, and replacing it with a spiritual paradigm that doesn't resonate with me at all.  I was also never comfortable with the Eastern religions because they are very much a product of their culture, and I am not part of that culture.  Sure, Westerners have been picking and choosing from the religious smorgasbord, but when was the last time you were satisfied by a buffet meal?

Come and gone

Hard to believe we've been in the house a month already, although in many ways it feels like we've been here forever.  Last week the builder came back from holiday to finish the last little bits--you know, painting, tiling, bricklaying, plastering, carpentry, etc.

He was here for three days.

The most embarrassing bit was the plaster in the living room.  When we were planning the house, we talked about moving the TV to the other side of the room, but the electrician "didn't touch TV cables." (!)  Instead he referred me to someone who, like most of the people we've met on this project, came to the house to give me a quote, and then disappeared.  By the time I chased him down, the builders had already put down the flooring and it was too late to do anything, so the TV was stuck.  Of course, I could drill a hole on the other side of the bay window and reroute the cables myself, but that was crazy and in any case I didn't have the tools.

Then the builder went on holiday and left his tools here, including a heavy duty hammer drill and collection of long masonry bits.

To my credit, I did spend quite a bit of time figuring out the best way to route the cables.  However, at no point did I question whether I should do it at all.  In addition, I drilled from the outside, and if you've ever seen a bullet exit wound, you can imagine what that hammer drill did to the new plaster.

I did clean up but apparently I missed some dust on the sofa, and when Jess got home it didn't take her long to track it back to the large hole hidden behind a giraffe and covered up by a piece of paper that read, "Sorry, will fix soon."  Well, the builders fixed it and it looks just fine.  However, Jess doesn't like the TV on this side of the room and wants to move it back.

Ireland

I've commented on this before--Ireland is just 100 miles off the coast of England, but it may as well not even exist for all the attention it gets.  The weather teams just show it as a featureless brown spot in the ocean.  It only makes the news if something terrible happens, like the government collapses or it has to file for bankruptcy (both of which have happened in the last six months).  And the last time the monarch visited Ireland was 1911!

It's hard for me to understand how two countries that are so close have such strained relations, until I thought of Cuba.  Can you image the President visiting Cuba? Actually, that's probably a bad analogy, because the Cubans would welcome Americans.  The Irish clearly had mixed feelings when the Queen went to visit yesterday.

Although there were protests, they weren't very large, and were pretty civil.  It's easy to understand the protests given the history between the two countries.  England has invaded, conquered, and then neglected the Emerald Isles several times over the past thousand years.  Henry VIII, in particular, invaded again in 1536, and then as part of the English Reformation he disenfranchised all Catholics, which represented 85% of the population!  Catholics were prevented from owning land, leasing land, voting, holding political office, living in or near a town, obtaining education, and entering a profession!  He seized lands of the Church and Catholics and gave them to Protestant settlers or to "absentee landlords."  For the next 200 years, rebellions by Irish Catholics were put down brutally.

Although the laws were repealed by 1800, the effects were devastating, with people "on the verge of starvation, three-quarters of her labourers unemployed, housing conditions appalling and the standard of living unbelievably low."  Land holdings were so small that only potatoes would suffice to feed a family. In 1845, the British government reported that poverty was so widespread that one-third of all Irish small holdings could not support their families.

Then in 1844 potato blight came to Ireland, probably from Peru, and decimated the crop. Of the 8 million inhabitants,1 million died from starvation and another 1 million emigrated.  Queen Victoria sent £2000 (equivalent of £160,000 today), but the bigger problem was that England refused to close the ports, so the absentee landlords continued to ship produce from Ireland to England.  As one writer put it, "The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine."  (He was promptly charged with sedition and sentenced to 14 years transportation to Bermuda.)

As is so often the case, the English then sowed the seeds for their own undoing when they began forced conscription of Irish soldiers during World War I.  The trained and armed Irish, upon returning home, launched a guerrilla war for independence in 1919.  However, the Protestant elite and Catholic majority could not come to terms, and Britain (as is so often the case) made matters worse by dividing the country in two, leading to a civil war. In 1922, the "Irish Free State" (later the Republic of Ireland) became independent, while Northern Ireland stayed part of the United Kingdom.

For the next 75 years, all of the sectarian violence has been over the 6 counties of Northern Ireland.  In 1998, the Good Friday accord offered a measure of self-rule to Northern Ireland, allowing unionists and nationalists to share government, greatly diminishing the level of violence.  (Recently, however, a splinter group of the Irish Republican Army has been planting bombs under police cars, killing a young policeman just a few months ago.)

So it is onto this stage that Queen Elizabeth has stepped, being the first English monarch to visit Ireland in 100 years.  The estimated cost for security for the four day visit is £26 million (US $42 million), with up to 8,000 security officers attending.  In addition, she is visiting some of the most poignant national symbols of Ireland, including laying a wreath for soldiers who died fighting for independence, and Croke Park stadium.where, in 1920, British forces fired into the crowd, killing 14 spectators and players.

Personally, I find it inspiring, not for the historic overtones, the conciliatory gestures, or the idea that two countries can overcome their past and forge a new relationship.  I find it inspiring that an 85-year-old woman would put herself in harm's way for the sake of her country.  As a symbol, as a representative, and as an ambassador for Great Britain and the world, I think she ranks up there with the finest statesmen in history.  Long may she reign.

Mr Brains faggots

I snapped this picture just because it said 'now with even more sausage!' It was only later I noticed the photo also included 'toad in the hole.'* Add some spotted dick and you have a three course meal!

* It's just sausages in batter, like Yorkshire pudding. They aren't real toads.

Dead man walking

Jess is going to kill me. In cold blood. And it is fully justified.

I've never been able to handle clutter.  (Not even mental or emotional.) That isn't to say I don't create clutter; only that it grates away at me, and I can only ignore for a very short period before I have to deal with it. That doesn't mean hide it, I mean taking care of it, putting it away, getting rid of it, whatever needs to be done. (If you really want to drive me nuts, put stuff away where it doesn't belong and watch what happens.)

So we moved a week ago, and Jess and I were pretty good about going through the boxes and putting everything away – there were only a few boxes left, and those were primarily books as we don't have any bookshelves yet. But then last Friday, I cleared out the storage unit. This is where all of my stuff has been sitting for the past seven months, plus quite a bit of Jess' stuff she had squirreled away. It all got put into the third bedroom where it was completely out of the way, and you could close the door and not even see it.

Except I knew it was there, and when Jess left for a three-day work conference, I waited all of 15 minutes before I emptied all of the boxes.

Imagine how much stuff was in a 150 cubic foot storage locker. Now imagine it spread from one end of the house to the other. If I thought a room full of boxes was bad, obviously I hadn't considered the alternative. But I went through it, all of it, and put what I thought was worthwhile away, and put the rest back in boxes (albeit organized boxes) for Jess to review.

The problem is, most of it was Jessica's, and she doesn't like me touching any of her stuff. I touched all of it. I moved it around. And I even made judgment calls on what should be kept and what should be gotten rid of (although obviously I didn't get rid of anything).

So I know I'm a dead man, but that's actually quite comforting.  It means I won't be there when she finds the giant hole I made in the living room wall.