My English Home

Greetings from Leicester, England! This is my new home! My bedroom couldn't fit in the picture; it is the third bay window to the right. The home is only a ten minute bus ride away to Leicester Uni, where I am beginning an MA in Victorian Studies. I lodge with a fantastic LDS family.

My "landlady" Cathy is on the right, pictured with her daughter Claire. Cathy is a fantastic cook and takes prodigious care of her large and beautifully decorated home. Claire works planning events and activities for a local company. 

A couple more snapshots of the home.

 

My bedroom. I love it. It has everything I need. I am most excited about the desk and bookshelf!

 

This is Cathy's back garden. A home with such a lovely, spacious garden (yard) is the minority. We hang our laundry out to dry. 

Bonding With My Ancestors

Long ago, from the genesis of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th Century, my ancestors were there, working in the cloth & woolen mills of Wiltshire, England. I now feel more akin to them. Cathy, Claire, and I went to the Wigston Knitting Museum. A remarkable place...it is an old Victorian home with an adjacent knitting factory. Socks and gloves were its specialty. Apparently in the 1950's, the owner turned the key and left everything, untouched. It was a real treasure for historians to come in and find everything in its decaying Victorian splendour. It is now a museum. I am sitting in the factory, being trained on how to use the knitting machines. It was quite involved, not as easy as I assumed it to be. It was such a creative contraption and involved a lot of coordination with many different steps to follow, just like a complex dance! The work required much more concentration and physical labour than I thought. The noise emitted from the machines was excruciating. I got a keen sense of how man could become physically, mentally, and spiritually numb, sitting at one for 14 hours a day, in all states of weather. Like a dancing partner, he needed to become part of the machine to make it work appropriately. He would have to fight not to become a machine himself.

Inside a Victorian home. Note the larder on the right. Food was kept surprisingly cool therein. 

Friends of the Museum created a Victorian Garden in the backyard. It was absolutely gorgeous. You can see the back of the home and factory. 

Caught sitting on the labourer's "long drop!"

 

London

I seek every opportunity I can to sneak down to London and visit with my dear friend, Ted. I was in London this weekend (13-15 October) attending a conference on Charles Dickens at the University of London (my excuse to sneak there) and Ted was my kind host for the weekend. This is my favourite picture of him--he's sporting the bush hat he wore during his WWII years in SouthEast Asia! Just think of all the things that hat has been through....

One of the highlights of this trip was the opportunity to visit with my cousin, David! He does open-source work for British Telephone Co. and finds himself in London several times a year. We ate dinner at an Italian Restoirante overlooking the Thames and Tower Bridge. It was lovely! 

Five others from the Victorian Studies Centre at UL attended the Dickens Conference. This is Wudi and Eriko (from China and Japan respectively) standing in front of the British Library, where they actually bring the books to you!