So, I've got this husband who likes to write. He writes scientific papers, cryptography papers and now, he's writing an essay for the AtoZ challenge. I'm allowing this because I like it when he washes dishes, which he did the last couple of days because I've been working. A bit of a reward to guest post (again!).
Tchuh. Who'm I kidding? I was happily going to publish C with a post on the Cathedral and the Castle in the County. And then I read SciMan's offering and determined it of better caliber for the day.
With SciMan's increased presence on the blog, maybe we can encourage him to resurrect his old, own blog. If you see BOLD type, that's me...because this is still my house and I'm a control freak like that.
Here we go....
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In 1865, famed raconteur Mark Twain published the first short story that put him on the literary map, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend you do so. It is one of the very best examples of how a short story can be written so that it takes a common or even mundane event and turn it into something riveting. I personally have been foremost a fan of Hemingway, but “Calaveras” is never low in my list of favorite short stories.
The story is told in the first person, and the reader never learns that person's name. That's OK, the first person only provides a narrative point of view, and isn't the main character anyway. The main character is a man named Simon Wheeler. The Narrator has been asked by a friend to find Simon Wheeler and inquire about an old acquaintance of the friend, a man named Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley. “That's the plot?” you might ask. “A guy with no name finds some other guy on behalf a third guy, who isn't even in the story, to ask about that one guy who fought the Persians?” Well, yes, almost. But you see, that's just the setting. From here, the story is off to the races.
It turns out Simon Wheeler doesn't know the Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, but lo-and-behold he does know a Jim Smiley. Much lo-ing and beholding follows, as Wheeler launches into anecdotes about Jim Smiley, and frogs and dogs and buckshot, and the stories are so far away from the original topic of old Leo Smiley that “tangential” doesn't fit and nor do any other words from geometry. By the end, the Narrator comes to believe he was set up; he believes his friend never knew a Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley. But the friend probably knew Simon Wheeler well enough that he knew it would take all of nothing to trap the Narrator in Wheeler's yarns. A fine jest there, yes yes, well done, old boy.
So for the next obvious question, why am I talking about Mark Twain's short story? It's because “Calaveras” has become a code word between Mollie and me.
For example:
There's the young barman who works at one of the classic pubs in the area. If he should catch you in his pub on your own, he'll feel the need to fill the silence. Oh, the pub could be full and loud, and it wont't matter if you're reading or writing or staring into space, he will decide that if you aren't talking to someone (or at least listening), then you really ought to be. I don't know his name, but I know a lot about him and his family. A lot of it is very personal, and I never understand why he tells me these things (or is talking to me at all). He has a knack for choosing conversation topics that I can't possibly contribute to, because they're all about parts of his life that I'm not involved in (e.g. paying him for beer). Mollie got the same treatment once and told me about it later. “Ah ha!” I said. “You've met Calaveras.”
We also have that one wonderful old neighbor who, once started, corners you with a chain of stories and there is no polite way to escape. His stories could begin anywhere. The starting subject could be horses, or architecture, or universities, or the history of the town and the history of his family. But no matter where they start, they always follow spiraling paths that invariably spend quite a while meandering on the topic of “the women of his past” (and their menstrual cycles). We don't know where the stories end, really. In Mollie's most recent encounter, she was caught outside bringing in the trashcans. For 20 minutes she stood outside without a jacket while he talked. Eventually she managed to send me a text asking me to please call her so she would have an excuse to go inside. From here on, each of us only needs to text “calaveras” to the other, and if we can, we call.
I'm wiling to bet that most people have similar experiences. Sometimes, you just can't figure out why people are talking to you, and why they won't stop (It's because I have that face that appears to be interested in the minutiae). I don't know that it happens more here in Northern England than in other places, but I'm more aware of it now than I was before moving here. It is certainly common that the general friendliness of people means a little more time is spent on small talk and niceties, but most of them will notice if you're working on a laptop, or reading, or on a phone call, and then stop talking to you after a few sentences. But then there are those that just want to talk, and if you have a modicum of grace then you're trapped, not in a conversation so much as in watching them talk to you. And that's when it's good to know how to make your phone sound like it's ringing on command.
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Pretty good, huh? Much much better than the drivel I was going to write. But I'll leave you with some pictures.
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| Durham Cathedral from King's Bridge |
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| The Knocker at Durham Cathedral |
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| The graveyard at Durham Cathedral |
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| Durham Cathedral |
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| Durham Cathedral |
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| Castle |
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| The Cathedral's Cloisters where they filmed Harry Potter |
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