A Last US Transmission ?

 

One of the quiet pleasures of my time here is walking around Easton pond - really a lake - and the residential streets of this part of Newport. And since for exercise I walk everywhere I reasonably can, I've seen quite a lot of it. My place is just outside (by one block) of the borders of 'old Newport' which means that most of the houses are late Victorian or early 20th Century. The roads look unremarkable, but pleasant - especially now that the leaves are out. I was intrigued to spot a massive Tulip tree, with different bark from the one on our front lawn and much older but the same leaves and flowers. It was huge, towering over the house behind- a warning of what ours will be like in 50 years I suppose.

            Local streets often don't have pavements, so look quite countrified. What makes it interesting is that  up this posh end of Gibbs Avenue the houses are all attractive and each completely different from its neighbour. The great majority are timber-framed and weather-boarded,  if on a spacious scale. The older ones in historic Newport are usually much smaller, closer together and with very small 'yards' (gardens). What they specialise in, though, are porches on which the owners can sit in their rocking chairs, with their mint julips (a truly disgusting drink) watch the flapping of their Stars and Stripes  and observe the passing world. It always reminds me of Cherry since she was forever urging me to think about adding just such a porch to our various houses, jokingly I think, but was never entirely sure.....

            If I wasn't so fixated on old English houses I might be persuaded to go for a modern wood-framed one. In fact, when we moved Burleigh Close near East Grinstead that was one of the options we considered before ending up at an old wood framed house at Meopham, which our tame builder once described as 'just a big garden shed.'  I quite clearly remember our acquaintance, Mike,  who had an association with the company making them on the southeast fringes of London, saying we should specify where we wanted the boards put in that we would need to hang pictures !  For that reason on my regular walks around Easton's pond I have been watching the very fast building of one of these houses, overlooking what is in effect a large lake. I'm sure in the end it will look good. [My house, by the way is in the tree line about an inch from the far end !]

I suppose this method of construction is one reason why US houses are still cheaper than British ones, though generally much bigger. Since probably  three quarters of the houses on my regular patrols are wood framed and they are all different  there's a lot to keep an eye on. This very modern one is one of my favourites !

            

One of my set routines is a kind of cream tea with my friend John at the weekend. Normally 4 raisin scones from the June Love English Bakery  is $6. I was surprised that this week its $8. They were very apologetic. the price of everything has gone up so much/ there's a lot of talk over here at the hike in the price of petrol (gas). It's more or less $5 per gallon now. I was wryly amused by a sign that showed just how reluctant the were to crossing that line by a sign that said $4/99 and 9 tenths of one cent ! If my maths is correct that's more or less  5 dollars (£ 4.10) for 4.5 Litres. Sounds to me like I should try bringing some back on the plane.

            This weekend is both Father's Day and what's becoming known as the Juneteenth Federal holiday. This is an invention of the Biden administration to commemorate the emancipation of the slaves and also propitiate the Black Lives Matter movement I suspect. The only thing is that this year it falls on a Sunday hence the strange name. Anyway the result is a three day weekend which I am using to really get stuck into a big sorting -out session preparatory to my departure from the land of the free at the end of the month. I have to do this early as the last few days are packed with distractions.  I have been cheered on my way by the arrival of two large tubs of very nice soup from the family for father's Day. How did they know I like soup I ask myself. It came with a spectacular ladle and special spoon for a 'souper Dad' ! It will keep me going for most of the rest of the week I think.

            I also celebrated by going for a hike in the sun around  Chusett Point reserve. It was fairly quiet as most people were roasting on the beach. The sea as calm and  all very restful. The birds as usual displayed that magic ability to flit off into the undergrowth just as one has them in focus, but one American Pipit was so concentrated on finishing its song that it delayed its departure too long. Getting back to the Information Centre I was ruefully aware of having provided evidence of my wanting to get away from people. the car was parked as far away from the others as it was possible to get !   

            

            Otherwise this coming week is fairly quiet - I think. I have a couple of academic commitments to finish off and some meetings, but the main imponderable is the arrival of a PhD student who's ex-Army and seems to know me really well from somewhere, but frankly I have absolutely no idea where from and all the usual tricks of the trade to elicit some clues have so far failed.  The pits one digs for oneself into by just generally trying to be nice and helpful to other toilers in the vineyard ! The fact that I've just realised he's come from an evangelical on-line University I have never heard of before fills me with foreboding, though he does come with recommendations from a trusted colleague of mine at Annapolis....

            Otherwise in my leisure moments I am plugging on with the Black Death and the 14th Century for the family history and have reached 1369 when Philippa of Hainault passed away. Edward III's Queen, she was famous for her fabulously rich life style, literate, stable, politically astute and well grounded. She  brought glamour and chivalry to the English court. Very adventurous, at one point captured by the French. Her dying wish was for her debts to foreign merchants to be paid 'A great companion to her husband and a dutiful mother to their many children.' Edward III was distraught at her loss.  I mention this as Philippa was named after her, one hot summer in English France.   

            Still the future back in the UK beckons. I have also just received an invitation to join the Belgian Navy in big do in London in July visit came out of the blue and suggests that life back in the UK will have some surprises still. And there's a church visit my first weekend back, which I have booked into .  I must remember to re-insure the car, start the milk and papers too. So much to think of. I suppose it's a good thing ?  

A Tale of Two Flags and an Anchor

 

As a good loyalist in this rebellious land, of course I put out the flag. The Americans are much addicted to flying their colours and 'Second Street' that I drive along every morning on the way to work is particularly  bedecked with the Stars and Stripes, both the modern version and the original flag of the 13 colonies which has 13 stars in a circle in the top left-hand corner. These days there are quite few Ukrainian ones around as well. At 336 Gibbs Avenue there's a rather sumptuous house that has both the stars and stripes and the Union flag (technically not 'Jack' as a jack is a specifically naval flag !). So I thought I would put out ours and for this trip brought it along, just in case, using the Jubilee as an excuse. My parents bought it for the coronation in 1953, and we've flown it a few times on such special occasions both at Woodfalls and Wansdyke. So it's having a rare airing.

Obviously American houses are usually fitted up with flag holders, but I didn't feel I could use ours as it's directly in front of next door's window and they might have objected (although to judge by their reaction when they saw it, I don't think they would have). Not using the proper support I had to improvise. I found a long broken off branch on one of my hikes and so fixed it up on the stick wedged between a drain pipe and the wall with some judicious bits of string I picked up on  the beach !

The other flag I walk past most mornings (usually scurrying actually in order to avoid being caught out in the open by 0800 'colours') is the one in the college. It's been flying at half mast a lot recently. and has much more sombre connotations. Initially this was to mark the fact that the US has now officially reached the dreaded total of one million deaths from Covid.  More recently it was flown to mark the latest gun massacre, the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, when two teachers and nineteen young kids were killed.

In a horrible way, it's been fascinating to watch the debate about this. In fact, though, there hasn't been much debate, more a kind of despairing resignation. The Republicans and the National Rifle Association swung into action immediately, blaming the massacre on (a) an inefficient police response and (b) deficiencies in the treatment of people with mental health problems, while recommending extra security at schools and even the arming of teachers. The media, much of which is mainly Democrat in persuasion (National Public Radio, Washington Post, New York Times) have focussed on what very mild controls on the acquisition of guns are politically feasible. One option now much discussed are so-called 'Red Flag Orders', the idea that friends and family  be given the legal right to request that the authorities temporarily take away the guns of people suspected of being interested in planning such attacks. It's hard for an outsider to understand how something so anaemic could  cause so much fuss. Hard-line Republicans are against even this limitation on the civil rights of the individual concerned under the Constitution's 2nd Amendment. Other ideas like banning automatic weapons or magazines with large numbers of bullets haven't a hope of acceptance. The fact that the US has the highest private gun-ownership in the world, followed, a long way behind, by Yemen which has been in the grips of a civil war for ten years, is hardly mentioned. And in fact, ten days into the Uvalde discussion, interest in the issue is dropping off fast, and I suspect it won't be long before the flag is at the top of the pole again if it isn't already.

Otherwise things are progressing and I am beginning to make preparations for my return at the end of the month. One of them of course, is to take extra precautions against getting  Covid, which would be particularly difficult for me since my lease is up on June 30th. Infection rates are now slowly dropping, and Newport County has gone down to medium rather than high risk, although there are still masks around, even outdoors.  All the same I was dismayed to find that a colleague at college has it quite badly at home at the moment, so the risk is still real. I've been reminded a bit about this as I have been doing some off-work reading about the 14th Century (for the family history project) and it's hard not to keep coming across details of the Black Death all the time ! Not very cheerful reading but at least we know more about what the issues are ! Not the conjunction of Jupiter, Mars and Saturn in 1345which some experts of the time thought the original cause of the catastrophe. Mind you, when we remember some of the weird ideas knocking around during the worst phase of Covid, I'm not sure we've advanced all that much. 

Not much else to report, other than after two hectic weeks made even more grisly by totally unreliable WiFi at home (which now does seem to have been fixed), things are beginning to ease off a bit. As evidence of that,  I actually had time to stop when leaving to go home one day last week and watch an unusual event taking place outside our building and near the museum.  They were returning an anchor that had been refurbished off-site. It belonged, they think, to USS Constellation one of the sister ships of the USS Constellation,  so it was made in the early part of the 19th Century . Certainly a massive bit of ironwork !  The workmen were obviously taking no chances and everything was cordoned off, the roads closed and, this being America, the naval police were there in force. Just in case some disgruntled non-graduating student wanted to exercise his civil rights by coming along and shooting everyone.   (The site is on a slope - it's not my faulty camera work)

Next week will be busy though.     The final close of  the academic trimester/term is imminent. I have two graduation ceremonies to attend and an exhibition to mark the battle of Midway - otherwise it's a process of closing things down and sorting stuff out at home and in my two offices !  The awful copy-editing process  of the book has been done. This was an 'interesting' experience as the Publisher contracts this out to a company in India. The ladies I dealt with were charming and very helpful, but English wasn't their strong point, as I rather suspected when I received an apologies for the 'incontinence' of a changed deadline because at 900 pages mine was a long book. (In fact it's coming out at 300 which is pretty standard).  Add to that the need to use a specialised form of Adobe to do it on line - it all took much longer than anticipated, and involved a certain amount of stress.

I'm also keeping an eye out for my friend with the heart attack. He's making progress, and has been cleared for scones from June Love's English Bakery . This time I managed to get from another shop some 'Devon clotted cream'  with a Union flag on the lid. I was intrigued to note that it was actually made in Wiltshire, at Castle Combe, 15 miles away from Allington. It made me feel quite nostalgic - and to contemplate my prospective return with some pleasure. Some stuff from Shelagh's flat was dropped off into the garage last week and the pictures of the house and garden made it look rather good, so seeing that is something to look forwards to. But a certain amount of water has still to flow under the bridge between now and then, so cross fingers