Howling Frog Books

 Unruly: A History of England's Kings and Queens, by David Mitchell You may be familiar with the UK comedy duo Mitchell and Webb?  They're probably best known in the US by this sketch .  The one who asks, "Are we the baddies?"  is David Mitchell, and besides being a very funny comedian, he is also a history nerd, and he wrote this comedic take on the kings and queens of England, at least up to the end of the Tudors.  It's quite long enough as it is, without bringing in modernity. Mitchell is interested in the questions that humans have been working out in real time for the past several thousand years -- how do we decide who's going to be in charge, and how do we transfer power?  What is a king anyway?  So while he's narrating, amusingly, the list of kings, he's bringing out how people thought of their kings and what they did about it.   For example.  Pre-Norman Conquest, the king's sons were all eligible for the crown, and the barons wo...

 While I was walking, I kept finding connections to Diana Wynne Jones books.  I was not expecting this, and I didn't get it into my daily journal posts.  But right from the first day, as we hiked up from Avebury along the herepath, I kept thinking of various DWJ stories.  That herepath looked just like the Shield of Oreth, except it wasn't hot -- but the rain was just the same, sweeping up the hillside in curtains.  Not that I managed to take a photo of what it really looked like! Of course, Dalemark's green roads are the same idea as old paths like the Ridgeway -- and they're often called green roads too.  At some point in the Dalemark books, someone explains that the green roads are out of the way because they are so old, and tend to go places that people don't live any more, which again is very close to the actual case. (As an aside, I felt a lot of sympathy for Moril too on that trip.  I very frequently felt much too hot indoors!  It was warm,...

 The Hard Way: Discovering the Women Who Walked Before Us, by Susannah Walker This book arrived for me while I was gone on the Ridgeway, and that's what it's about!  Sort of.  I was kind of confused about the title at first but eventually Walker moves from the Ridgeway to focus on the much less known Hard Way or Harrow Way, and it is not easy to trace.  Anyway, I helped to back the publishing of this book, pretty much on a whim, so I got a copy and my name in the back.  You can look me up. Walker seems to be about my age, and spent much of her 20s walking and even living on the Ridgeway, before settling down into marriage and a child and suddenly no more walking.  Or at least, it became far more difficult to get out to anyplace as inaccessible as the Ridgeway, which is not stroller-friendly and has hardly anyplace to park and leave the car, and she spent a lot of time thinking about how women get pulled into domesticity once they have kids, in a way that do...

We saw Kim off at the Tube station after a breakfast at Pret a Manger.  We'd decided to have a booky kind of day.  First, though, we decided to explore the Waitrose shopping complex we'd discovered the day before (because it houses Skoob Books, so we'd scoped it out on the way home).  Waitrose is awesome and we bought a lot of chocolate to take home, and a couple of croissants to make breakfast more exciting.  We went back to the hotel room to dump the chocolate and set out again, off to the British Library, which we thought opened at ten.  It's not far at all and we had a nice walk up to St Pancras station and the Library.  The doors were already open and we went in, but it turned out that the exhibits of library treasures didn't open until after lunch.  So we said hello to the King's Library, and went into the shop and bought more books than we intended to.  This turned out to be a theme of the day.... Will look familiar to Blake fans The heart ...

It was Sunday, and we thought we'd like to go to a church service.  It wasn't easy to choose a place, but eventually we settled on the 10am service at Westminster Abbey, which was a Matins service -- not a full one with Communion and a sermon, but about 40 minutes of music and scripture reading.  So that was lovely, and we got to sit quite close in.  They were clearly expecting many more people for the full service later on. We exited through the cloisters The Abbey is flying a Ukranian flag! A public library!  Is it still? Probably not still a public baths Then we walked, through showery weather, down to Tate Britain, one of the major art museums.  This was not the Tate Modern, but one that goes through British art history in chronological order, and also has a giant Turner collection.   We went through many rooms full of very famous paintings, but focused on a room of William Blake, some Hogarth, and two large rooms with lots of extremely famous pre...

On this day we needed to split up.   One of Kim's goals for this trip was to see Windsor Castle, and I'd never been there, but Mom had.  So she decided to stay home and explore the Russell Square neighborhood, which is crammed with history.  She visited the Charles Dickens museum, collected blue plaques*, and wound up in the British Museum. Kim and I ran off to Paddington, where we caught a train to Slough, where we transferred to a smaller train that simply goes back and forth between Slough and Windsor, ferrying tourists back and forth.  It was a very hot and sunny day in Windsor! I really like these trains The castle is massive, and is kept in good repair -- none of it is falling down, as has always been the case with every other castle I've visited.  It's the main residence of the royal family.  The part visitors see -- where no photography is allowed -- are the official State Rooms, which mostly Charles II put together.  So there are sitting ...