Christmas for our family lasts a few days. Christmas eve, Christmas day, Christmas II, wherein we often end up getting things for ourselves on sale, and then Isaiah’s birthday. His claim is that we celebrate his birthday every year together because he’s the youngest, but the date is serendipitous. This year, my nieces were oldContinue reading “Happy Christmas holidays”
Tag Archives: United Kingdom
Hewn into the (non) living rock of Stonehenge
I’ll admit it: the mock documentary This is Spinal Tap made me want to visit Stonehenge. Specifically the line from the song “Stonehenge,” delivered with deadpan idiocy by Christopher Guest, “The Druids! Nobody knows who they were, or… what they were doing.” Who could resist such an enticing summary? This is actually somewhat accurate aboutContinue reading “Hewn into the (non) living rock of Stonehenge”
Salisbury and the Magna Carta
One of the first essays I ever wrote was, quite pompously, about what “abuses provoked men to demand the Magna Carta.” My research consisted of reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Magna Carta. I mean, hey, I was 12, and that seemed sufficient. I vaguely remember writing something about unfair taxation, loosely tied into myContinue reading “Salisbury and the Magna Carta”
Taking in Bath
If you’ve read Jane Austin, you’re familiar with how trendy it was during the Georgian period for parties of people and particularly sickly women to take the ancient waters at Bath; something that generally turned into a social/tourist outing in which young people would happily subject themselves to a variety of entertainment. Not entirely unlikeContinue reading “Taking in Bath”
Scenes from London
London was predictably gray (or more appropriately, grey) and I had to resort to taking timed self-portraits while balancing the camera haphazardly on a traffic cone.
1984
To be honest, I’d never heard of the Sikh riots, called genocide by many groups because widespread ethnic killings occurred, until I ran into several thousand Khalistan Sikhs marching in downtown London, to the bewilderment of onlookers, for a remembrance and freedom protest. Intrigued, I walked with them all the way to Parliament Square, whichContinue reading “1984”
Botkin Creative 