Today is St. David’s Day (Dydd Gŵyl Dewi in Welsh) and it is a hella big deal here in Wales. Dydd Gŵyl Dewi is quintessentially Welsh. The saint’s mother is purported to have been St. Non (or Nonita), a mystic Christian who is still associated with holy wells in Wales and Cornwall. The holy lady conceived… Read more St. David’s Day
My darling youngest child is 9 years old today. She wanted a dragon themed birthday, and since I cannot decorate cakes for shit, I got a bunch of edible dragon stickers and made her cake ‘dragon-y’. She is such a easy-going little girls that she acted like this was some kind of new, hella-great cake… Read more Happy 9th Birthday, Bubbles
One of the best things about the Yuletide in Britain is the opportunity to take your children to see a Christmas panto. We don’t have them in America, because attending a panto became a “Christmas Tradition” in Britain in the Regency era, when all things British were being spurned by Americans with jingoistic fever. Frankly,… Read more A Christmas Panto
New discoveries are regularly made about the human body, and a lot of those discoveries center on how important the microbiota – the bacteria, fungi, viruses and other tiny organisms – that live in our guts are for our health and wellbeing. The ability of those little guys to flourish and procreate is the key… Read more Of Mind and Microbiota
Today would be my friend Bethany’s 34th day, but she didn’t get to celebrate it. She died yesterday of cancer. God-forsaken, motherfucking cancer. Bethany – kind, generous, funny, loving, Bethany – is gone. As with Juliet, “death lies on her like an untimely frost upon the sweetest flower of all the field.” It is so… Read more Bethany, May Light Perpetual Shine Upon Her
Renate Schroeder (now Renate Dolphin) clearly considered SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh a friend. She knew him when he was in high school, and she signed a letter vouching for his moral turpitude in an attempt to counteract the accusations that Kavanaugh attempted to rape Dr Christine Blasey Ford (now a professor at Palo Alto University)… Read more Slut Shaming and Gaslighting
Has anyone else read Robert Harris’s trilogy about the fall of the Roman Republic? It’s a chronicle — told in the point of view of Cicero’s slave Tiro — of how Rome went from a very flawed (but at least trying) representational republic to a dictatorship in just a handful of years. It is excellent,… Read more The Fall of the Republic
Last weekend my husband and I took the girls on a trip to Cornwall, which is a breathtakingly beautiful county and a unique cultural area. It was a Brythonic kingdom, one of the Celtic nations during the the Atlantic Bronze Age, and retains a strong reginal identity to this day. It is surrounded by sea… Read more The Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall
This weekend my husband and I took our three daughters to the lovely county of Cornwall, one of the seven (or six; it’s under dispute) Celtic nations, to visit the Cornish Seal Sanctuary. Although all the girls love seals, our middle child, Buttercup, wants to be a marine biologist specializing in studying pinnipeds when she… Read more The Cornish Seal Sanctuary
Eliza Hancock was Jane Austen’s cousin and future sister-in-law, and many speculate she was also the model for some of Austen’s most vivacious characters, including my perpetual favorite — Mary Crawford. If so, it seems to indicate that Austen loved her cousin … yet was nonetheless jealous of the attention the sparkling Eliza could command… Read more Was Eliza Hancock the Model for Mary Crawford?