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In London today visiting ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pennypaperbrain, who fed me Quorn, sprouts and pizza, and is a dab hand with blending bananas, orange juice and mango and tomato coulis, which makes a re-energising smoothie. I also called on my sister, and I heard her latest genealogical report and saw photographs of churches in which our ancestors were baptized or married, or at least the present parish church buildings. Appropriatelly some of my coal-mining ancestors had the surname Coall. In the past two hundred years most of my ancestors haven't moved very far; my parents moved to Low Fell, Gateshead, the year before I was born, unaware that my maternal grandmother's maternal grandmother was born there and that it looks as though her youngest brother, my mother's great-great-uncle, was still alive and living in Low Fell for the whole time period that we lived there. Of my more geographically spread ancestors, long-cherished family speculation about the Irish origin of my Gratton ancestors in Carnarvonshire had been made less likely now that we know that, before a spell in the workhouse in the 1830s, the family name was more often than not written Gretton, perhaps suggesting a Northamptonshire or Gloucestershire origin for this Welsh-speaking clan who married Parrys and Hugheses.
I took the coach in and out which enabled me to read a good deal of A Dream of Wessex by Christopher Priest, one of those books I've always wanted to read, and picked up at this year's Oxonmoot. I think I'd been deterred earlier because although the idea was attractive my pedantic soul couldn't get past Priest's use of the term 'Wessex', which although drawing on the reader's awareness of Thomas Hardy and the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy, is futuristic and distinct, though it's also a comment on the wishes and assumptions of the members of the Wessex Foundation which although expressed as an imagined future, supposedly the result of the pooled knowledge of leading academic brains, are based upon ideas about society which, by the 1978 of the book's publication, and the near-future of the book's 'present', were already becoming dated. More when I put together the mammoth books-post I keep mentioning.
pennypaperbrain, who fed me Quorn, sprouts and pizza, and is a dab hand with blending bananas, orange juice and mango and tomato coulis, which makes a re-energising smoothie. I also called on my sister, and I heard her latest genealogical report and saw photographs of churches in which our ancestors were baptized or married, or at least the present parish church buildings. Appropriatelly some of my coal-mining ancestors had the surname Coall. In the past two hundred years most of my ancestors haven't moved very far; my parents moved to Low Fell, Gateshead, the year before I was born, unaware that my maternal grandmother's maternal grandmother was born there and that it looks as though her youngest brother, my mother's great-great-uncle, was still alive and living in Low Fell for the whole time period that we lived there. Of my more geographically spread ancestors, long-cherished family speculation about the Irish origin of my Gratton ancestors in Carnarvonshire had been made less likely now that we know that, before a spell in the workhouse in the 1830s, the family name was more often than not written Gretton, perhaps suggesting a Northamptonshire or Gloucestershire origin for this Welsh-speaking clan who married Parrys and Hugheses.I took the coach in and out which enabled me to read a good deal of A Dream of Wessex by Christopher Priest, one of those books I've always wanted to read, and picked up at this year's Oxonmoot. I think I'd been deterred earlier because although the idea was attractive my pedantic soul couldn't get past Priest's use of the term 'Wessex', which although drawing on the reader's awareness of Thomas Hardy and the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy, is futuristic and distinct, though it's also a comment on the wishes and assumptions of the members of the Wessex Foundation which although expressed as an imagined future, supposedly the result of the pooled knowledge of leading academic brains, are based upon ideas about society which, by the 1978 of the book's publication, and the near-future of the book's 'present', were already becoming dated. More when I put together the mammoth books-post I keep mentioning.
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