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Thursday Book Chat: Bernard Cornwell and the Warlord Chronicles
I first started reading Bernard Cornwell back around 2010. It was his novel Agincourt, which I had picked up in Waterstones at Picadilly, and was immediately hooked. I began to search him out and devour everything he wrote, catching up on all the Last Kingdom books especially. I just finished his trilogy on the Arthurian legend, The Warlord Chronicles, and it was a bit of a tough slog, to be honest. These are some very early Cornwell books, and I can see his development as an author through to the present day Uhtred books. He uses some of the same techniques to keep us interested – for example, ending paragraphs…
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Expat Life: The Confusing Search for Tarjetes de Animales…
There’s a lot I expected about life as an expat in a country where I didn’t speak the language. Moving to Spain, I knew I would have to adjust to new foods, new cultures, new words, all of that. But there’s one thing that I wasn’t expecting, and that’s just how out of sorts I always feel because nothing is exactly where I think it should be. Everyday things suddenly become huge challenges. Case In Point: The Search for Animales Cards. Last January, my kiddo started bringing home these animal stickers from school. She called them tarjetas de animales – animal cards. They had little facts about them, and each…
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Don’t rush into Christmas so that you miss Advent
Frederick Buechner said: In the silence of a midwinter dusk, there is a sound so faint that for all you can tell it may be only the sound of the silence itself. You hold your breath to listen. You are aware of the beating of your heart. The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment. This is the magical time of year when we go in, quietly meditating, watching and waiting for magic, for light, for the extraordinary. In my personal faith tradition, this is the time when Christians meditate on the…
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It’s okay to be comfortable
I’ve spent the past five years in varying states of discomfort. And I thought this was how things had to be. I thought that this was the only way to push through your self-imposed boundaries. Get uncomfortable! You don’t get anywhere sitting around in your comfort zone! Life begins at the end of your comfort zone! I took all the quotes and incorporated them into my life. I got seriously Uncomfortable. For example: I threw up before going on live radio (twice). I threw up when I published my first book. I threw up before Tudorcon (three times). I didn’t sleep at all the entire weekend of Tudorcon, actually, because…
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Not nuns but close…
I’ve often thought that the life of an average medieval woman would have been really awful. Legally being the property of first your father then your husband, no reliable birth control, dying in childbirth, and all the hard work in between. No thanks. But I recently came across a group of women who actually did have agency in their lives, and choices to marry or not. In his book “Edge of the World, a cultural history of the North Sea and the transformation of Europe,” Michael Pyle has a chapter devoted to the Beguines. Beguines lived in semi-monastic communities, but did not take any kind of religious vows. They promised…
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Stargazing: Cassiopeia
We live out in the countryside here in Spain, on the side of a hill that overlooks a long shallow valley. And we have a huge sky. I can easily see everything from west, to north, to east clearly. South gets a little bit obscured by the lights from town, but other than that, it’s all clear. And one of the things I’ve really fallen in love with the past few years is getting to know all of these stars who have been watching down on us for millennia. I often think about who else stood here where I am now, and looked up at those same stars, and wondered…
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Kickass Women I love: Lady Mary Wortley Montague
In 1716 a 20-something woman arrived in Turkey with her husband, who had just been appointed British ambassador to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire. For the next two years Mary Wortley Montague wrote letters home, the Letters from Turkey, that have been an inspiration to women travelers ever since. Mary had a precocious child who devoured books, and wrote in her diary, “I am going to write a history so uncommon” when she was still not ten years old. Women were not formally educated at this time – she would campaign for women’s education later in her life – and so she taught herself in her father’s library,…
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Slowing Down Time
The thing that I struggle with the most with getting older isn’t the gray hair (though that sucks, too), but just how quickly time is moving these days. Remember when you were a kid and December seemed soooo long? Summers would last forever. Now you blink and the holidays are over. I remember talking with my dad about this once when I was younger. How a year seems to take so long when you’re five, because at that point it’s 20% of your life. But by the time you’re 50, a year is just 2% of your life. Now that I am firmly in my mid-40’s, I am searching for…
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It’s time for a quiet November
I think after the week we’ve all been through, collectively, it’s time for a deep breath moment of calm, no? Man, the past seven days have been rough, haven’t they? No matter who you voted for, we’ve been through the ringer. Raise your hand if you spent the week consuming every news site available, hitting refresh like a hamster who gets a treat each time, and getting very little work done. It’s not just me, then? Didn’t think so. But hey, it’s a new week, right? And we’re deeply into autumn, and it feels soooo good. Stews, sweaters, apple spice candles, and Jim Brickman holiday piano music are all making…
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Old Music Monday: John Sheppard and Making Whole
If you had to pick one phrase for 2020, what would it be? The year that sucketh? 2020: F You? What about a Latin phrase: Media vita in morte sumus, which means, “in the midst of life, we are in death”? That’s the name of the monumental work of John Sheppard, who lived from 1515 to 1558, was a gentleman of the Chapel Royal, and sang at the funeral of Edward VI. And a new recording from the early music consort Alamire might just be the perfect soundtrack for periods of quiet contemplation as we near the finish line of this year. David Skinner, director of the Alamire consort (the…
