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Tuesday, January 28, 2014

BOTTLED UP MEMORIES

It’s very refreshing, in many senses of the word, to see that the enormous Coca Cola Company (which, I’m told, owns the world’s largest share of bottling plants as well as huge tracts of property in Eastern Europe) continues to produce good old-fashioned cola in good old-fashioned glass bottles. And this is Coke.  Not Diet Coke, although that is also bottled; neither diet, caffeine-free Coke, which is simply a travesty of a drink.  No, this is Coke.  Straight.  And I like it.  I am aware that these days it contains the demonic high fructose corn syrup, but as I ordinarily drink one small bottle every blue moon I can hardly hear the funeral directors rubbing their hands with glee.  Yet.

And it is also a drink with gallons of personal nostalgia, for swallowing it (and I believe that the only way to drink Coke is from the bottle through a straw) I am transported back fifty years to the Snack Bar and Diner in the coastal village of Polzeath in the far south west of the old country.  For it was there, on rainy days, that our parents would take us for a treat. We got to sit on window stools, chrome frames and red leather tops in true U.S. fifties style, and drink Coca Cola.  From the bottle with a straw.  And even on those days when the cafĂ© windows were so steamed up that we couldn’t see out, and the condensing droplets ran down onto the narrow Formica shelf, we sat there sipping, listening to a juke box, and feeling hip, groovy and cool all at the same time.  And so grown up.

 Polzeath High Street with the Snack Bar on the corner (1950s)

The building now houses a bookshop and newsagents

Monday, January 13, 2014

One Thing Led To Another...




It was a sunny Monday morning, and taking advantage of a quiet start to the parish week I was sorting through the remainder of a hundred and more photographs of churches after my last foray into Worcestershire in May of 2013.  There remains much to catalogue and even more to write, and no doubt I will get around to at least some of it before I become part of the very history I am trying to gather together.

Early on I found three images of the delightful church of St Edburga in the hamlet of Leigh, some six miles to the north west of the city of Worcester.  Built by monks in the year 1100 it is revealed history in stone, but also contains much more information about the surrounding community.  That will certainly be one of my next essays – and will include a few words about the strange cult of Edburga, or Eadburh, of Winchester, a nun that somehow gripped the imagination of many in the late tenth century. But wandering as it usually does, especially on a Monday morning out of sight of coffee, my mind half-remembered another parish church, also near to Worcester of the same name.  One that I have only driven past many years ago, and generally ignored on account of it being Victorian in origin.  But perhaps I ought to pay it more respect on account of its previous history, and the stalwart efforts of one of its nineteenth century vicars.

The church of St Edburga in Abberton, to the south east of Worcester, was built in 1882 in the “Gothic revival” fashion.  (It does have a Norman font – surely worth a visit in itself.)  There was clearly an earlier church on the site but I have yet to unearth the ecclesiastical history.  With regard to the neighborhood:  At the time that the font was first used the community was listed in Domesday Book (1086) as, in the Manor of Pershore, having four point three households comprising twenty four villagers, eight smallholders and seven slaves.  And of course they all would have gone to church on Sunday. 

But what caught my eye in the Worcestershire census returns of 1851 was that Abberton retained a population of eighty souls, nineteen of whom were the children of the local vicar.  Definitely a subject to look into…

Monday, January 6, 2014

A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year. T.S. Eliot. “Journey of the Magi.”




I know that it’s unfair on the Feast of the Epiphany to mis-quote T.S.Eliot but it seemed an apt line to introduce what the American media are describing as a “Polar Vortex,” (CNN, NBC and Fox News) and a “Major Arctic Outbreak,” (The Weather Channel.) 

Yes, it’s going to be very cold for two days - although not as frigid on Long Island as it is going to be in parts of inland United States.  I’m not going to predict minus numbers (numbers in both senses of the word) because the smarter meteorologists are very good at doing that and getting very excited as computer animations swiftly turn blue on the screens behind them.  But I am going to suggest that if everybody is sensible and looks out for their neighbor then, guess what?  We are going to survive this temporary deep freeze.

Growing up in a large and rambling country vicarage in the 1960s English Midlands we knew all about low winter temperatures.  They announced their arrival in late December and stayed until early March. And even if the sun shone the dark passageways of the house never truly thawed out.  Because except in two rooms (maybe three) there was nothing to thaw them out. 

The two warmer spots were my father’s study, where a huge coal fire burned from dawn until dusk, and the kitchen.  And it was there that the family met, ate, read, did homework and generally lived during our waking hours, for the kitchen contained a wonderful coal-burning Rayburn – a stove that not only cooked food and warmed the whole room, but also heated water for washing and hot drinks.

And that, devotees of central heating, was that.  I mentioned a third room:  The living room did have a small, two bar electric fire in the closed-up fireplace.  But what good was that in a room that measured about four hundred square feet?  And the upstairs?  Heat upstairs?  Unthinkable, even when the ice formed on the inside of the bedroom windows and the blankets had to be properly aired or else they would also stiffen up in the cold.  We dressed for bed, and dressed some more in the morning. 

And even when temperatures dropped well below seasonal expectations – I really don’t recall it being a news story.