26 Nov. 25

Here's what's been going on in these parts.

Nov. 15

Attended our first birthday party. Held in the party room at a rugby club. The club has a full bar which was staffed and while I stuck to tea I think I might have enjoyed myself more if I hadn't. There is generally wider availability of refreshment options in public spaces here and it makes life feel very civilized. The entertainment is a magician named Magic Philip who, bless him, Keeps.Things.Moving. Magic Philip has nailed that crucial element of entertaining a bunch of young children: making the kids feel like he is an imbecile and they are wily and cunning. We learn that Magic Philip used to be a pharmacist, and that he sustained a serious head injury in a recent bike accident. Hopefully it didn't damage his hearing because the joyful din when he lets someone kick him is deafening.

Later I take the kids to get haircuts. I am on the naughty list with our lady in Medford for missing an appointment so I was a little intimidated. The women here are implacable even when kids squirm and jerk away (BIG no-no with Miss Nancy). But all my growing confidence about understanding the Manchester accent is swept away by my defeat at the hands of the apex predator: a hair dresser talking to her colleague, who appears to be her twin sister, about a family member having a mental breakdown. I think I heard "she's off her antipsychotics" and "he can't be bringing her over our place, I WANT MY WINE". The stylist looked over at me and laughed every now and then like, can you believe this! and I hope I was going ha wow! in the appropriate places. Kids' verdict: Getting to watch YouTube yay, very lackluster selection of chalky candy nay. They looked great.

Nov. 16

They were not kidding about the Christmas season starting "After the last rocket goes off" on Bonfire Night. Today is the Christmas Fair PTA fundraiser at the kids' school. I went early to help set up, which involved many keys to access many sheds and closets. One of the sheds is transformed into a grotto where kids could meet Santa, who my older son clocked as the school's crossing guard by his voice and "small hands". The woman in charge of setting up the grotto had an elaborate system of codes, radios, and color-coded diagrams that look like football plays to orchestrate kids getting the most age and gender appropriate variation of pencil case with mini calculator. Later, I talked to another mom who worked the grotto and said she ended up ignoring 75% of the grotto protocols. Everything went smoothly though, so maybe it's true that plans are useless but planning is essential.

Fact of the day was learning what a tambola is: You cover a table with boxes of chocolates or bottles of wine, each labeled with a number. You do not have quite enough room on the tables unless you Tetris everything together for maximum density, so you tell yourself that hunting through the numbers will be part of the fun. A patron pays for the opportunity to pick a random token from a bag, and if the token is numbered then they take the item labeled with the corresponding number.

Nov. 20

I'm at the WI knitting night. "My brother lives outside of Bristol," someone says. "His children are," she closes her eyes and nods sadly, "afflicted." She is talking about their heavy Gloucestershire accents, which is the one where they kind of sound like a pirate. This prompts a discussion of microdialects and words, including a ginnell or an alley. Some snickering about signs that direct to a "back passage." The only other member under 65 tsks in mock horror. "Always someone who has to lower the tone!"

I met The Other American, a lawyer from Alaska. The fact that I had been hearing about The Other American, I'm told, is a testament to the fact that we're a relative novelty here and if we were in London people would be more likely to see us as a nuisance. "We also have two southerners!" someone observes.

Nov. 21

Cannot believe I had to go back and edit this post to add, how can I have forgotten this. We had dinner at a Thai restaurant where we've been a few times since we got here. When I met T, I found out that Thai diners have a different experience at Thai restaurants than the rest of us. That could take the form of a secret second menu written only in Thai, or being told that nothing on the menu is very good so you're better off having some of the food they've made for themselves, or being given access to the not-for-customers bathroom that requires cutting through the kitchen. This privileged status was relevant on this particular night, because it explains why we got a table without a reservation.

Halfway through our dinner, some big chippy desi guys came in and asked for a table. The owners' teenaged daughter at the hostess stand was immediately on alert. She asked if they had a reservation and they said they did not but wanted a table. Ignoring her reply that they were fully booked, the one with the gut said "I'm going to the toilet" and made for the bathroom door. She followed him and told him he had to leave. The taller one said they were being very rude and that went back and forth until the one with the gut came out. This is the moment when my older son asked me if we had a reservation. I nodded and made some noises which I hoped conveyed comfort and security but also "please be quiet". The dad came out from behind the counter. An altercation ensued. The mom came out brandishing her cleaver which got the interlopers out of there.

Everyone collected themselves and we continued eating. I asked T if he could overhear and understand what the family was saying to each other about what had happened. "I was focusing on whether our children were OK," he said with quiet horror at my callousness, but I can only be what I am.

Nov. 22

To Liverpool to see a friend from high school who moved here for her husband. Liverpool is 40 miles away and people sound completely different. In the article where Bill Simmons wrote about all the EPL teams he compared Liverpool to Boston which feels pretty spot on. On the coast- I realized it was the first time I'd heard a seagull since I left Shetland. Uneasy relationship with the rest of the country. Lots of people whose personality is being Irish.

We spent most of our time at the World Museum. They had a lot of mummies including some that were partially unwrapped and that was...something.

Hard to see with the glare, but this is a mannequin dressed as a Victorian astromer reclining on a chaise to look through a telescope. When I met T, this is what I imagined being a physicist entailed.

Against our better judgement we paid £6.95 each to go into this upside down house which made me feel a little bit sick even though at no point are you actually upside down.

Nov. 25

Monthly trip to the London office. After that I went to dinner at the home of a friend I met when I studied abroad. It was lovely to see her, I'd forgotten that she is one of my few friends who is taller than I am and it is so satisfying to really fling your arms around someone without stooping. It turns out that English parents, like Americans, do this thing where they realize that your kids are slightly younger than theirs and their eyes start to glitter when they think of all the clothing they can transfer from their house to your house. Luckily I packed my emergency shopping tote. Her boys are extremely cute and charming and when they meet my kids are going to be 100% obsessed with them. One of them tells me I look like I'm 32. He says it like he's not totally clear on 32 as a concept, but still. I make a mental note that they are appropriate companions for my children, who will hopefully pick up a few things.

19 Nov. 25

A theme of our family's life is going somewhere to visit women who had taken care of me or my children. Last week we went to York to see a woman who babysat me when I was about 9 and she was about to start college. In the intervening years she came here for work and settled in. These days there are only so many people who I could go thirty years without seeing and yet be up on all the major events of their lives because our moms are friendly, and I think we were both curious to compare the reports with reality. It was wonderful but also very disorienting to meet her as enough of a peer that my younger son asked how she could have been my babysitter when I'm the one with more gray hair. Love to see those critical thinking skills at work!

There was some track work between Manchester and York which required transfer to a shuttle for part of the trip. We were not quite aggressive enough in our crowd work to make it onto the waiting coach bus for which I felt a sense of personal failure. No worries, the windbreakered rail employee said, that double decker over there is ready for overflow. Is it really overflow if you know how many people are transferring from Wakefield to York, and that it's too many people for one bus, so maybe you could have just had them both ready? Never mind, the second bus is just over there, she'll get the driver.

The driver's been found but they've been talking for a while. The lady in the windbreaker is frowning at her clipboard. The bus makes a strangled sound. The battery is dead. There's another bus sitting there tantalizingly, but that's needed for all the people who will be getting off the next train which will be in by the time a new bus can be sent from either of the nearest depots (mini geography lesson!). There's another train to York leaving from the other train station in Wakefield, but sadly, Windbreaker Lady says, she's remembered this other train five minutes too late for any of us to make it there in time. She wishes she had remembered earlier! Everyone smiles resignedly at that. Eventually it gets to the point where the quickest way for any of us to get to York is to get on the bus due to take the people from the next train. There is some deliberation about whether we can get on early before that train arrives so there's no chance that any of us misses out on a seat and would be at the mercy of the replacement bus allegedly en route. It breaks our way so we settle in, and once the train arrives we leave, an hour late. The lesson is that it's always worth it to be pushy, or at least always make sure you're on the first bus. Plus side: we drove past a pub called the Hark to Mopsey. If you and your partner read that out loud in unison when you see it, then you know you're married to the right person.

When I studied abroad in Sussex I met a friend from York and we went to her parents' house over a break. I remember a train museum, the post-event bliss of her friend we bumped into who had just got back from Glastonbury, and I want to say we popped into the gallery of the court house and saw part of a trial for some kind of assault? Sadly, the branch of the Gap where I'd had to get replacements for forgotten pajamas is lost to the sands of time.

What is not lost to the sands of time is quite a bit of York's ancient infrastructure. York is very pretty in a way that reminded me of Salem. There was a dungeon "museum" that N tried to convince us to go, to just like he has tried to convince us to go to many witchy pseudo-educational things. The former babysitter (FB) suggested we go to the York Castle Museum, which confusingly is not the actual castle next door. My kids are getting to be extremely museumed out but this place was a WIN.

No way I was schlepping up there. When T waved to us I heard him say "There's Mama!" to my younger son, and the FB and I simultaneously yelled "Don't hold him up!!!!!".

There were a lot of exhibits about homes and everyday objects from various bygone eras, which I always enjoy. There was a jail cell, a school room, and a recreation of a whole Victorian street where you can go into stores and buy candy that your mom might later say is a choking hazard. We spent most of our time in a room of old animatronic machines that had puppet monkeys playing the maracas or told fortunes like the one in "Big". If it had been up to my kids we would have spent the whole day and their college fund in there.

We were a week too early for Christmas markets, and like Salem I could imagine the crowds getting to be kind of a lot if you were there at a peak time. We didn't to to The Shambles, a neighborhood of very picturesque narrow streets that are now awash with Harry Potter stuff, but I did pass a bachelorette party where the bride was in full Fleur de la Coeur cosplay. There is still a ton to do in York and I'm sure we will be back to see FB so I can hear the soothing tones of home. Meanwhile, as I find continually baffling, tourists are sleeping on Manchester! Watch 24 Hour Party People and tell me you don't want to go see the place where a plaque on an apartment building by the canal commemorates the site of a former warehouse/club/temple of early nineties rave culture!

13 Nov. 2025

Remembrance Day was a big deal. The Didsbury Village Women's Institute had been knitting and crocheting red poppies for weeks to make a wreath, and I'm sorry to say I contributed zero. They were on lapels and lampshades, the kids both made them in school. An 11am meeting on Tuesday started late so everyone could do their two minutes of silence.

As with Bonfire Night, the date falling midweek caused events to spread. I went to the Elizabeth Gaskell House on Sunday and they attributed lower than normal attendance to Remembrance Day events. Given that the EGH passed through a few hands, briefly serving as an international student dorm, before becoming a museum, it is in pretty good shape. You can even leaf through her books, although I was afraid to touch anything because my hand was covered with ointment after I burned myself trying to invert the Aeropress (why? It doesn't matter why, just don't do it). I took a picture of exactly one thing in the home of this literary icon, and it was of her closet. Specifically, her shawls.

I'll spare you the specifics but these shawls, particularly the white one on the left, brought out some deep textile geekery. My grandmother had acres of shawls accumulated over many trips to India, and as much as she was drawn to them she had zero occasion to use them. If she had been a pharoah we could have mummified her in them. When we were cleaning out her closet, my mom or I would shove one into my grandfather's hands so he could tell us the fiber content and he would say "Cotton silk blend" or "There's rayon in that, give away" or "Handwoven, can't get this today at any price!". Anyway, EG had a good eye. The black and white striped thing above the shawls was a bonnet, can you imagine the figure you would cut!

When I got to the house, I made it about six minutes into the welcoming spiel before asking if the monthly used book sale was still happening. Sadly canceled due to Christmas prep, but the baseline selection in their gift shop was pretty good. In the tea shop where I was eating my Bakewell tart there were two other patrons, apparently strangers. One of them was knitting and they were talking about yarn stores that have good parking. There were actually three if you count the knitter's teenaged daughter, who looked like her mom getting into conversations about looms with random people was a routine occurance to be tolerated. I think the museum should be exploiting the likelihood that the Venn diagram between Gaskellheads and yarnheads is basically a circle. My £9 ticket was good for a year so when that used book blowout happens I will be back.