Hanging Close to Home in Staffordshire

After the Marathon di Italia, we decided to stay close to home this week. We were able to get a short field trip in on Thursday, that, though rushed, was educational and fun as well.

The kids and I took advantage of Mom’s endless grading during this late semester and headed to Stoke and then took the train southeast. Down in that end of Staffordshire (our home county), you find the seemingly unassuming village of Lichfield. There would not be much to it except that it was the home of two imposing figures in English history as well as one of the country’s most imposing cathedrals.

Allow me start with a quick background story. Last Christmas, we were down at my mom’s house and I was looking for something to read. In perusing the Great Books collection there, I seized upon the volume by an author by the name of Boswell. Now, at risk of exposing my ignorance, this name meant nothing to me, but if you share my cloudiness, let me tell you that Boswell is famous for pretty much inventing the idea of the Biography. He wrote a biography of his friend Dr. Samuel Johnson in the late 1700s, and this has endured the test of time as the primary example of biography in our time. Now, don’t think for a minute that I held onto this giant tome and read the gripping story of Dr. Johnson from beginning to end, in fact I shoved it back on the shelf and snatched up the most recent Newsweek. As I flipped through, I came to the Books section of the magazine, and found a story about some recent biographies that had come out for the Christmas season, in case you didn’t guess, the central theme of this article was all about Boswell’s work on Johnson. This was all within maybe a ten minute period.

So, when I started learning about the area where we would be living in England, I discovered that Lichfield was in our neighborhood, and that Samuel Johnson, who just kept turning up, was actually from Lichfield. In addition to this, so was Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of my boy Chuck, and that his work was an important influence on his grandson’s. So, thusly and therefore, we decided to knock out one day trip southeast before we packed up for home.

The train and lunch schedules conspired against us, however, and we ended up finishing lunch in Lichfield around two. The train was heading home at 3:36, so we had to hustle. We snapped some pictures outside the big Cathedral, but skipped a trip inside, first because of time, and second because after all the churches we’ve seen…anyway, we headed on to Erasmus’s house. We watched a video and learned about some of his inventions (independent carriage axles, handwriting copying device), his work as a physician, his time as the premier poet in England, and also his work in animal origins, including where he said that all animals are clearly related at some level – almost a hundred years before his grandson got on the HMS Beagle. It was completely fascinating, and very hands-on as you can see in the pics. But, we had to hurry on out, and as a result, could not even get over to Samuel Johnson’s house at all. This was not a tragedy for the kids, but I guess I’ll just have to figure out what the universe was trying to tell me some other way. We made it back to the station with moments to spare, but the bus hit rush hour and we got home just in time for Sawyer to head to Tae Kwon Do.

Now, over to the Sportsdesk…

On Saturday, a local Stoke City football fan that I met while watching the game at the pub, Andy, picked Sawyer and I up at the flat and we headed into Stoke proper. We stopped by the pub for a pre-match pint with some of the notorious Stoke fans -- the loudest in the country according to their tickets. If the pub was any indication, they were not exaggerating.

We took a double-decker shuttle from downtown to the nearby Brittania Stadium for the big showdown with Blackpool, which had only been promoted to the Premier League this season, but were proving pesky to several teams. Stoke, which has been back in the League since 2008, went into the game ranked 7^th of the 20 teams in the division, just a few points behind the big boys like Chelsea and Manchester United. Sawyer and I had tickets in the family section, which means that instead of sitting with foul-mouthed, drunken hooligans, you sit with foul-mouthed, drunken hooligans and their kids. (This was not a problem for us though, because we ride the city bus everywhere already and hear it every day, and fookin shyte isn’t even officially forbidden in our version of English or I obviously wouldn’t write the term here.) At any rate, we were in the second row looking across the goal box as the first half ended in the traditional 0-0 tie, as Stoke had a goal called off ridiculously by the officials about midway through. Blackpool stole a goal early in the second half, and despite the good guys outshooting them two to one throughout the game, absolutely NOTHING would go in for the Potters. We went home frustrated, but with a Premier League game under our belts, and a big goose egg on the board for all our sports efforts in this country.

Ryder Cup – Monstrous washout AND America loses… Scotland v. New Zealand rugby – hometown Scots drubbed 49-3… England 1, France 2 in Wembley… and now our hometown Stoke crumbles to Blackpool before our very eyes… I don’t know if it’s a curse or not, but I imagine the local clubs will be happy to get rid of our sorry Yank luck before the new year begins.

And, speaking of which, we have one week to go, so you might hear from us one more time, but otherwise, we’ll be seeing you soon!

THIS JUST IN!

As we were going to press (as in, as we were sitting in the flat on Sunday thinking about tromping through the cold to somewhere with wireless that we could update this blog), we flipped on the telly for a moment and saw that ‘Guinness World Records Smashed’ was on, so we turned it over there. On the screen was a guy doing a Rubik’s Cube blindfolded. We recognized his hair immediately, but we had to wait for the blindfold to come off… IT WAS THE GUY WE HAD FILMED ON THE TRAIN FROM BIRMINGHAM after we saw ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream!’ (See Nov. 10 entry). We jinxed him on this too, just as he was unable to approach his record time for us on the train, he fell way short of the world record for blindfolded cubing on TV. But hey! We know a semi-celebrity, so it’s all good. Talk about a small island!

CLICK HERE FOR PICS FROM LICHFIELD, THE STOKE GAME, AND THE RUBIK’S MASTER STOLEN FROM TV