The happy highways

[flemmings]

Let me say to have it said, I hate  waiting for people to call me back. I never did like it but in my current socially feral state, the thought of the phone suddenly ringing when I'm not prepared gives me the cold grues. I hope my doctor is on vacation, and I bet she is because it went immediately to voice mail. Don't care if my hernia is bulging (and anyway, half of that is fat because that's where those twenty pounds went on.) I don't want her calling me.

Anyway. Finished The Magician's Daughter which was excellent reading, and am now dithering between Raising Steam, which I have read once only and now I see why, and The Shepherd's Crown, which is good at the beginning but one must stop at the right place, and you don't know the right place u til you've passed it. So instead I'm time travelling via Peter Hunter Blair's Anglo-Saxon England, bought half a century ago in uni and now out of date.

But it's still essence of '72, the Brit.Mus and Sutton Hoo, Widsith and The Wanderer, even if also dry as dust. No matter. On he goes about the Icknield Way and off I go to google and the ancient and heavy god is it heavy out of date atlas, that gives me a detailed map of England so I can  find where the Chilterns are, and Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire and Wiltshire, and the fens and Hadrian's wall, all the bitsy pieces of English geography that I never got straight because lord there's so *much* of it. Amazes me that I can keep Japanese prefectures straighter than English counties. But that's probably because I don't have +/- 65 years of literary and historical associations with Tottori or Yamanashi. Whereas I saw  Shakespeare's history plays, Richard and the first three Henrys, at an impressionable age, so the names are familiar (oh saucy Worcestershire!) even if I haven't a clue where they are. I mean, from the looks of it, they're now mostly in the sprawl that is London. There's a reason I never had a mental image of the Home Counties, which are probably almost as depressing as Saitama and Kanagawa, the slop over of Tokyo. But still, but still: I wish I could go back once more and doubt I ever will.

Comments

[oursin]

The 'Home Counties' has always been a bit of a loose definition, but mostly had meant the counties bordering London: Middlesex, Hertfordshire, Essex, Kent, Surrey, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire. Middlesex is now entirely part of Greater London, in fact historically a lot of what we now think of as bits of London were in Middlesex for administrative purposes and this is still reflected - when I did my jury duty it was in Middlesex County Court, near the Houses of Parliament. Bits of Herts, Essex, Kent and Surrey have been ingested into Greater London.

[flemmings]

This may explain the lack of umm mythos about those counties, unlike Sussex or the further bits of Kent, say. Hertfordshire is where regiments come from in Jane Austen.