Sing Lullaby

I first heard "Sing Lullaby" by Herbert Howells on a radio broadcast of Nine Lessons and Carols a few years ago. It's still one of the most beautiful and poignant pieces of Christmas music I've ever heard. Enjoy!

A favorite passage

"As they entered the little street, it was so dark with the promise of snow that the shops were being lighted. They were all decked out with holly, mistletoe, tinsel, crackers, toys, oranges, model Christmas trees with tapers and glass balls, apples, sweets, sucking pigs, sides of beef, turkeys, geese, Christmas cakes and big plum puddings.

'I say, I do love Christmas,' Kay said."

--The Box of Delights by John Masefield, first published 1935

Hear My Prayer

It has been a while since I've shared any music, but today our Internet connection is actually working well enough that I can get on YouTube! ;-) Here is a very moving, short piece by Henry Purcell based on Psalm 102:1 -- "Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my crying come unto thee." In the video it is performed by the choir of Clare College, Cambridge.

Maudlin or Magdalen?

I ran across an interesting article today -- Maudlin or Magdalen?, which discusses the pronunciation of the word "Magdalen" in Oxford, where it isn't always clear which way you're supposed to say it! I'm always interested to learn more about British pronunciations (especially when they make no sense :-P) and this cleared up a point of confusion for me. Enjoy!

Elegy

St. Michael's Church, Bowness-on-Solway, Cumbria

"Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mold'ring heap,
Each in his narrow cell forever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep."

--Excerpt from "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray, c. 1742-1750

Tea and crumpets

Crumpets are one of my favorite teatime treats! You'll need crumpet rings (like these) to make them, but it's worth tracking some down in order to have fresh, homemade crumpets. I recommend the following recipe, which came to me by way of my friend Susan:

• 1 pkg. yeast (2-1/4 teaspoons)
  
• 1 teaspoon sugar
  
• 1/4 cup warm water (~110 degrees F)
  
• 1/3 cup milk at room temperature
  
• 1 egg
  
• ~4 tablespoons butter or margarine, melted
  
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
  
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Combine yeast, sugar, and water and let stand until bubbly. Blend in milk, egg, and 1 tbsp. of butter. Add flour and salt and beat smooth. Cover and let stand in a warm place until almost doubled (around 45 minutes). Brush insides of rings and surface of griddle with the melted butter. Heat rings and pan over low heat. Pour about 3 tbsp. of batter into each ring.


Bake until holes appear and tops are dry (around 7 minutes). Remove rings and turn crumpets to brown the other side lightly (around 2 minutes). Repeat with remaining batter.


Serve warm, or cool and toast before serving. Makes 7 to 8 crumpets.

(LAURA'S NOTE: I usually triple or quadruple the recipe. The amount you get will vary by the size of your crumpet rings and how heavy-handed you are when pouring batter.)

A favorite passage

"He accompanied her up the hill, explaining to her the details of his forthcoming tenure of the other farm. They spoke very little of their mutual feelings; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends. Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other's character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality. This good-fellowship -- camaraderie -- usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstance permits its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death -- that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as a steam."

--Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, first published 1874

Christmas at Bracebridge Hall

Another Christmas book recommendation: Christmas at Bracebridge Hall by Washington Irving. This book was written in 1822 and is Irving's charming portrait of an old English Christmas. Here's a funny excerpt from the church service on Christmas Day:

"The usual services of the choir were managed tolerably well, the vocal parts generally lagging a little behind the instrumental, and some loitering fiddler now and then making up for lost time by travelling over a passage with prodigious celerity, and clearing more bars than the keenest fox hunter to be in at the death. But the great trial was an anthem that had been prepared and arranged by Master Simon, and on which he had founded great expectation. Unluckily there was a blunder at the very outset -- the musicians became flurried; Master Simon was in a fever; everything went on lamely and irregularly until they came to a chorus beginning, "Now let us sing with one accord," which seemed to be a signal for parting company: all became discord and confusion; each shifted for himself, and got to the end as well, or, rather, as soon as he could; excepting one old chorister, in a pair of horn spectacles, bestriding and pinching a long sonorous nose; who, happening to stand a little apart, and being wrapped up in his own melody, kept on a quavering course, wriggling his head, ogling his book, and winding all up by a nasal solo of at least three bars' duration."

The Box of Delights

One of my favorite Christmas-y stories is The Box of Delights by John Masefield, the former Poet Laureate of Great Britain. My dad first introduced me to it as a girl, but I didn't much appreciate it until I was "grown up." (I had the same reaction to other well-known children's fantasy novels such as The Chronicles of Narnia or Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quartet -- ironically, now that I am older, I can more easily indulge in the willing suspension of disbelief!)

Kay Harker is on his way home to Seekings for his first school holidays when he meets an old Punch and Judy man, Cole Hawlings, who tells him that "the wolves are running." The "wolves" are arch-villain Abner Brown and his gang, who are posing as clergymen and who will stop at nothing to get the small, black box carried by Cole Hawlings. It is, of course, the Box of Delights, and it is full of magic. Cole entrusts the box to Kay to keep for him. Cole, Kay's guardian and friends, and local clergymen (including the Bishop!) are soon "scrobbled" [kidnapped] by Abner and his gang, and it's up to Kay to find a way to rescue them before Tatchester Cathedral's 1,000th Christmas service is canceled. Kay has marvelous adventures and meets some wonderful companions along the way! The book was written between the World Wars, and contains a strong flavor of an England which is now gone.

The Box of Delights is actually a sequel to The Midnight Folk, also by John Masefield, but it stands well enough on its own. And if you do decide to hunt down a copy, make sure it's unabridged! These books have been difficult to find in the U.S. in the past; however, I looked on Amazon for the purposes of this post and I found that there is a new hardcover edition being released this year, and from the page count I think it is probably unabridged.

The BBC made a film of The Box of Delights back in 1984, which I also highly recommend, if you are not bored by the outdated special effects and low-budget look of the first Chronicles of Narnia movies -- it is very similar in look and feel. Again, this is probably going to be hard to get ahold of it you live outside the UK, but try inter-library loan if you're interested!

Excerpt from my current reading

"The cottage was an old-fashioned, countrified place standing in a garden crammed with fruit trees, vegetables, flowers, and lavender bushes. Inside, it had none of the conveniences now considered essential to comfort. Water had to be drawn up with a long hooked pole from a well in the garden; paraffin lamps and candles lighted the hours of darkness, and the sanitation was primitive. There were red-tiled floors in the downstairs rooms, and the only fireplace besides the small oven grate in the kitchen was the parlour grate, of the high, bow-barred, basket-shaped kind under a high mantelpiece now seen only in old prints. But the unenlightened Finches found their house comfortable enough; indeed, they rather prided themselves upon living in one of the most commodious cottages in the village, with a parlour and three bedrooms, whereas most of their neighbours had but one room downstairs and two, at most, upstairs. The tiled floors were made warm and comfortable with home-made rugs and long strips of red and brown matting, and the low price of coals made it possible to keep up roaring great fires in cold weather. 'I'm going to make this house as warm and snug as a chaffinch's nest,' her mother had said one day, while spreading out on the floor a handsome new black-and-scarlet rug she had been making, and that idea had pleased her small daughter, for weren't they themselves Finches, and was not the cottage their nest? She liked the idea of a nest better than that of a castle, for a castle she had never seen, and there were nests in every hedgerow."

--Still Glides the Stream by Flora Thompson, published 1948

Excerpt from my current reading

After I finished off the latest Dickens tome, I wanted something fun and quick to read, so I picked up Strong Poison off my bookshelf and dived in. I've been reading with a perpetual smile plastered on my face because I love Dorothy Sayers's writing style so much! Here's a passage that had me cracking up:

[Lord Peter Wimsey has gone to a Bohemian party with his friend, Marjorie, in order to do some sleuthing. The room is small, hot, dark, and crowded, and a bushy-haired man is "playing something of a Czecho-Slovakian flavor" on the piano. Lord Peter gets pulled into a conversation with some of the party-goers...]

'...What do you think of Stanislas' tone-poem?' [said the cadaverous man.] 'Strong, modern, eh? The soul of rebellion in the crowd -- the clash, the revolt at the heart of the machinery. It gives the bourgeois something to think of, oh, yes!'

'Bah!' said a voice in Wimsey's ear, as the cadaverous man turned away, 'it is nothing. Bourgeois music. Programme music. Pretty! -- you should hear Vrilovitch's 'Ecstasy on the letter Z.' That is pure vibration with no antiquated pattern in it. Stanislas -- he thinks much of himself, but it is old as the hills -- you can sense the resolution at the back of all his discords. Mere harmony in camouflage. Nothing in it. But he takes them all in because he has red hair and reveals his bony structure.'

The speaker certainly did not err along these lines, for he was as bald and round as a billiard-ball. Wimsey replied soothingly:

'Well, what can you do with the wretched and antiquated instruments of our orchestra? A diatonic scale, bah! Thirteen miserable, bourgeois semi-tones, pooh! To express the infinite complexity of modern emotion, you need a scale of thirty-two notes to the octave.'

'But why cling to the octave?' said the fat man. 'Till you can cast away the octave and its sentimental associations, you walk in fetters of convention.'

'That's the spirit!' said Wimsey. 'I would dispense with all definite notes. After all, the cat does not need them for his midnight melodies, powerful and expressive as they are. The love-hunger of the stallion takes no account of octave or interval in giving forth the cry of passion. It is only man, trammelled by a stultifying convention -- Oh, hullo, Marjorie, sorry -- what is it?'"

--from Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers, published 1930

New music

Yesterday noon, Dad and I ordered some new music CDs from Amazon, which we are looking forward to receiving in the mail!

Your Favorite Hymns by the Liverpool Cathedral Choir. (This link will take you to a page on Amazon with sample music clips, but rest assured we did not pay anywhere close to $81 for our copy of this CD.) Some of my personal favorites are Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, Jerusalem, and For All the Saints.

Early One Morning by Edward Higginbottom and the Oxford Choir of New College. This recording first came to my attention through the lovely website, Lanier's Books. I've long wanted a recording of the folk lyrics to 'Greensleeves,' instead of the Christmas-y ones. :)

Victorian coinage in Britain

If, like me, you enjoy reading pre-WWII British literature, you may have come across financial terms that have puzzled you. For example, can you tell me...

1. How many pence in a shilling?
2. How many shillings in a pound?
3. What is a bob?
4. What is the difference between a guinea, a pound, and a sovereign?
5. How many shillings in a crown?
6. How many shillings in a half-crown?
7. What is a farthing worth?

If you are confounded by these questions, I recommend this web page on Victorian coinage, which I found a few years ago while searching for clarification on the pre-decimalized currency of England. The author gives a thorough explanation to all of the questions above. (One ommission is the definition of a quid, but I will tell you here and now that it's a slang term for a pound.) This article might require several re-reads if you are mathematically challenged like me, but in the long run it will afford you more understanding of old British lit.

Excerpt from my current reading

[From a humorous memoir of family hiking vacations in the Lake District in the 1930's...]

"Lobstone Band was a cleft, part mine spoil, part erosion, descending abruptly into Rosthwaite. From the top it looked like a stone and scree [loose rock debris] waterfall disappearing into a void, and Grandpa went over the edge with Rob, faithfully copying the heel and loose kneed method of descent, following after. The women were left to fend for themselves.

'Dig in your heels,' said Mother, 'and on no account run.' This was good advice if I could have followed it, but my smooth soled school shoes were like skis on the loose scree and in no time I was on a disaster course, finishing up sprawled against a boulder.

Aunt Meg followed more circumspectly but holding her stomach with an expression of agony. 'It's no good, I'll have to stop. My corselette's worked up.'

Aunt Meg wasn't exactly fat, but she wasn't exactly thin either and her corselette, a pink rubber tube, supposedly ironed out the bulges without the constriction of whalebone corsets. But, like squeezed toothpaste, the bulges had to go somewhere, and though the punched airholes in the rubber tube offered slight escape for some of it, giving her, when she removed the garment, an embossed look, like a pink blotter cover, most of it was shot up under her rib cage. This caused some distortion and danger to the lungs if the corselette lost its never secure anchorage and in working up put yet more pressure on the stomach. She was quite purple.

'Quick, behind that rock!' said Mother, and to me -- 'keep watch!'

This was my usual role at these delicate moments, but what Mother and Aunt Meg thought I could do to bar the path to a really determined band of walkers I never discovered.

When we finally picked our way to the bottom of that grim chimney my knee had bled into my sock, Aunt Meg, though a better colour, was tearful as Mother had threatened to burn her corselette, and Mother's hair was coming down again."

--A Lakeland Summer by Elizabeth Battrick, published 1979

Another snapshot from the Lake District

Here I am in the same graveyard as yesterday's post, looking toward the road. Did you ever see such daffodils?!

"Thou who has given me eyes to see,
And love this sight so fair,
Give me a heart to find out Thee
And read Thee everywhere."

--on the gateway to Orrest Head summit, near Lake Windermere

The Lake District

We finally watched Miss Potter tonight, so I was inspired to dig out some photos from one of my visits to the beautiful Lake District. This is my lovely friend Mare-Ona in April 2004, when she and I drove a loop through the north of England. Actually, I can't recall exactly where this graveyard is, but it's somewhere along the A592 road which runs through the Lake District National Park. Like that helps. :)

Here's an excerpt from my journal at the time:

April 2, 2004

Today Mare-Ona and I stopped for lunch by the lake called Ullswater. It was lovely to sit and eat and listen to the lapping water. There were lots of daffodils scattered about. We ate pizza, cous-cous, and garlic bread, then had tea and yogurt for dessert. This came back to haunt us as we drove through the WINDING hills getting to Beatrix Potter's house. We had to stop and take a break to eat some fruit and get over feeling sick.

Ha!

We didn't actually get to go inside Beatrix Potter's house -- due to some misinformation from the tourist info guide, we arrived the day before the house opened for the season. But we caught a glimpse from the gate!

Retread

Making the leap in Salisbury, England, 12 years ago:


And nine years later:

Excerpt from my current reading

"Perhaps no one is as vulnerable to the lure of England's many-layered past as a young American reader who has grown up under the wide empty skies of the Midwest. To me, the Midwest was almost featureless, compared, for instance, with New England, home of the House of the Seven Gables, or to the myth-ridden Far West. Nothing in Ames [Iowa] seemed historic or even very old. If a building did age, it was eventually renovated beyond recognition or else torn down. If I had known where to stand and how to listen, somewhere in Ames I might have been able to catch an echo from the past of the heavy rumble of wagon wheels on a prairie schooner heading west. But history seemed to have vanished from Iowa. In England, it was still alive."

--My Love Affair With England by Susan Allen Toth, published 1992

Recollections of Oxford

I am reading A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken -- hence these resurrected photos. I was unimpressed with the book until Chapter IV, "Encounter with Light." Aside from being emotionally moving, it brought back memories of the time my brother and I spent in Oxford three years ago.

Both photos were taken by my brother, standing near C. S. Lewis' grave.