Peanuts PDFs; UK map; Midwestern wedding

All of the Peanuts strips, PDF format, $25. Offer ends in 12 days.

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My UK wall map – a Christmas gift from my father-in-law – has been framed at last in a heavy, wooden contraption from Goodwill. Karin, the handy one, did the framing. My idea is to hang the map next to the TV so that we can check it when we watch homicidal/​agricultural/​veterinary programs, e.g. our latest, The Highland Vet.

Current reading: François Mauriac, Genetrix; Sue Townsend, Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (the last book in the series). And lots of other books.

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I should describe the wedding we attended on Sunday. Samuel bore the rings with aplomb. The much younger flower girl lagged behind, so Samuel retraced his steps, grabbed some petals, and strewed them for her. All else went according to the script: the brief vowing ceremony; the post-vowing, pre-dining interlude for photos; the popcorn and donut tables; the soda and liquor booths; the dinner rolls, sweet corn, and mashed potatoes; the couple’s dance, the bride’s dance with her father, and the groom’s with his mother; and the Cha-Cha Slide. There was no removal of the garter with teeth – none we stayed for, anyway. When we left, I was dead-tired. I’d held squirmy Abel several hours. It was as wearying as if I’d spent the day moving house.

Samuel and Daniel loved the Cha-Cha Slide; their grandpa danced it with them. That ex-DJ was in his element. I’ve not met a more ardent ritual-relisher.

Royals

What with news of the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, it’s useful to have an updated Royal Family tree with birth years, titles, and succession indicators:

• article behind paywall (BBC)
• same article – gratis (Yahoo!)

For some readers this will be old hat. Not for me, alas. I’ve seen just one episode of The Crown.

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Current reading (books):

• W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (for the group)
• Agatha Christie, Evil Under the Sun
• Agatha Christie (writing as Mary Westmacott), Absent in the Spring
• E. W. Hornung, The Amateur Cracksman
• C. S. Lewis, Perelandra
• François Mauriac, The Holy Terror (a mini-book – for making up lost ground)
• John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat (ditto)
• Aristotle, Poetics (ditto)
• John Perry, A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality (ditto)
• Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (ditto; a re-read)
• books, as yet unfinished, mentioned in previous entries

I was going to say it’s pretty cupcake, but surveying the list, I see the authors include two Nobel winners (Mauriac and Steinbeck), two Great Books of the Western World contributors (Aristotle and Machiavelli), and two theological giants (Christie and Lewis). So, not too shabby after all. Mr. Quiring would approve. Maybe not of Christie. I shake my head whenever well-read people don’t bother with Christie, especially if they do read Chesterton and Sayers. (See the latter’s gem “Aristotle on Detective Fiction,” which I found in Anthony Kenny’s Oxford World’s Classics edition of the Poetics.)

Adrian Mole: The cappuccino years

At 10:00pm not-quite-four-year-old Daniel runs through the house like a madman, or a young cat. So he does most nights.

So Samuel used to do. But now he must rise for Kindergarten, and has conditioned himself to retire before eight o’clock.

Abel, at thirteen months, sleeps last. He has taken a turn toward ultraviolence.

Adrian Mole is in his fifth book. He is thirty years old. He has two sons. One of them, he recognizes as his son. The reader recognizes them both. Adrian isn’t the most self-aware diarist.

It’s the 1990s. Blair is the new Prime Minister. Adrian works as an offal chef at Hoi Polloi, a Tory restaurant. In his spare time he scripts an unsold radio serial, The Windsors, about the Royal Family. Princess Diana’s death scuttles Adrian’s plot. Adrian’s own life seems plotless, notwithstanding his acquisition of sons.

His parents also are chronic failures – after a livelier fashion (even what with Adrian’s father’s depression). The most impressive figure in this book is Adrian’s mother, who unexpectedly succeeds as a ghostwriter, spinkling pages with unsolicited references to Germaine Greer (author of The Female Eunuch).

“Philistines” always succeed where Adrian fails.

Adrian considers writing to be his vocation. Thus he wastes time agonizing over semicolons.

Pity. He is eloquent.

I sometimes wish I lived in pre-feminist times when if a man washed a teaspoon he was regarded as “a big Jessie.” It must have been great when women did all the work, and men just lolled about reading the paper.

I asked my father about those days when we were preparing the Brussels sprouts, the carrots and the potatoes, etc., etc. His eyes took on a faraway misty look. “It was a golden age,” he said, almost choking with emotion. “I’m only sorry that you never lived to see it as an adult man. I’d come home from work, my dinner would be on the table, my shirts ironed, my socks in balls. I didn’t know how to turn the stove on, let alone cook on the bleeding thing.” His eyes then narrowed, his voice became a hiss as he said, “That bloody Germaine Greer ruined my life. Your mother was never the same after reading that bleeding book.”

Bear in mind that Adrian is on the liberal end of the political spectrum.

I reflected on his feelings as I chopped vegetables for our “hobo’s stew.”

Body-text fonts, pt. 36: Gill Sans

A sans-serif typeface – rare in this series.

Designed by the wicked Eric Gill. Practically synonymous with Britain.

I don’t care for the regular weight, actually, but the lighter weight is very nice in certain settings, e.g. in this remarkable Lego-builders’ book that Samuel borrowed from the library. (I refer to the body text, not the heading.)

I made the caption easier to read:

(Echoes of Ian Fleming’s prose.)

Gill Sans Nova is a nice compromise, weight-wise.

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Ada and George, my little niece and nephew, visited today. They were eager to see their cousins but couldn’t keep their names straight.

Ada drew this card-brandishing soccer referee. Notice the microphone wrapped around his or her cheek.

Ascension Island

Congrats to Liga de Quito for winning the Copa Sudamericana, and especially to Alexander Domínguez for blocking three of Fortaleza’s penalty kicks. Domínguez also tended goal when Liga previously won this tournament, in 2009.

Stephen says this is Domínguez’s finest hour, but I still prefer the epic time-wasting of 2021.

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I have nothing much to relate – the weekend has been low-key (the best kind of weekend) – so here is an oldish video by Un mundo inmenso that I’d somehow never viewed until tonight. It’s about Ascension Island, an out-of-the-way, volcanic, Guernsey-sized British territory in the South Atlantic.

Plenty of weirdness here. Best thing – or worst, according to one point of view: Charles Darwin had the idea of importing non-native plants to moisten the air a bit. One of the mountains ended up turning green, but its ecosystem isn’t up to the ecological purists’ standards.

The U.S. has a military base on the island. Apparently, quite a few of the Britons are getting edged out. Which they resent. They’re only temporary residents, but some have been on Ascension for many years, and like their Northern Atlantic counterparts they feel connected to “their” land.

I looked up the island’s job board to see about moving my family there, but only one job was posted, in waste management, and it wasn’t ideal, requiring various special driver’s liscences as well as unmarriedness. Besides, the vacancy was closed.

I guess we’ll stay in South Bend.

Church outdoors and indoors

We went to parking-lot church again. The weather was cooler than last week, and Karin and Samuel and I were shaded under a canopy. This time, I was able to pay attention to the sermon.

Then, during the closing hymn, someone drove a truck into the parking lot and frighteningly charged and vroomed and skidded around the worshipers. Thankfully, it wasn’t an anti-religious terrorist. It was just one of the churchgoers’ relations, bringing her her purse.

There are some unique drawbacks to parking-lot church.

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Meanwhile, at home, we’ve been enjoying the video of the “UK Blessing.” It debuted a month ago, and it’s my favorite thing that has come out of the quarantining period. Samuel has heard it enough times now that when I sing it to him, he stops and looks at me, a little awestruck.

(I’m especially pleased to see Salvationists in the video.)

I can’t but be encouraged by the show of unity of these Christians of different ages and colors and credal flavors – and deeply saddened, as political and racial tensions run high again in the United States.

It would have been good if the quarantining had been an occasion for repentance and reconciliation. Alas, in this country, the opportunity seems to have been wasted.