Travel: October 2022 Archives
"Remember, remember the Fifth of November." Early November is bonfire season in England, commemorating the discovery and thwarting of Guy Fawkes' Gunpowder Plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Sussex and Surrey, south of London, host the biggest celebrations, which also commemorate the 36 Sussex Martyrs who were put to death for their adherence to the Protestant faith during the reign of Bloody Mary Tudor. The town of Lewes, Sussex, holds the biggest bonfire celebration, so big that town officials close the train station and the roads and strongly discourage outsiders from coming to town.
At a co-worker's suggestion, I attended the bonfire in Brockham, Surrey, in 2018. There was a mile-long torchlight parade down country lanes leading to the bonfire in the center of the village green. An effigy of Guy Fawkes was hoisted to the top of a three-story-high pile of kindling in the middle of the village green, and torchlight bearers thrust their torches into the pile to start the bonfire. Live music, beer and mulled wine, a hog roast, and fireworks, all around a massive bonfire, on a clear, crisp night on an English village green.
The Secret Life of Beatrix Potter | The New Yorker
Review of a new book about Beatrix Potter. In 2018, our family visited the gallery in the office of Potter's lawyer husband, in Hawkshead, Lancashire, in the Lake District.
"In early adulthood, Potter observed her pets closely, inventing narratives about them, and filling her letters to the children of friends with their adventures. Her dispatches are playful and alive, illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings of rabbits.... Potter sent the Moore children story after story in illustrated letters, until Noel's mother suggested that she try to turn them into books. (The children had saved their copies.) In 1901, Potter self-published the first edition of 'The Tale of Peter Rabbit,' which appeared almost exactly as she had written it to Noel, down to Peter's 'blue jacket with brass buttons, quite new.'... Potter believed that her first books found an audience because they were written for real children. 'It is much more satisfactory to address a real live child,' she wrote. 'I often think that that was the secret of the success of Peter Rabbit, it was written to a child--not made to order.'"
