"Well, you have never seen anyone quite so star-struck in your life. She proclaimed the family likeness and could not stop shaking Joel’s hand. All but scraped the floor. It was like the scene in the Sound of Music with the bowing and the curtseying." This was funny. But it also makes me sad to see how that kind of feudal reflex lives on in our blessed realm.
So that's what the Black Country is! All this while I thought it must be so named centuries back for its prodigious produce of witches and such. Also later of Black Sabbath. And of Tolkien's Angmar, Witch King of and all that. Now I realise the Tolkien connection is probably (if at all) with the area's bleak industrialisation that he so detested. Mordor indeed!
You kind of sort of know another Lord; me, the Lord of the Bantering. Self-proclaimed, of course, but widely acknowledged as such.
Hilarious, and so wild that the bow and scrape response is still a thing. David is from the Black Country, and he and his kin will tell you that its industrialised self is what Tolkien actually based Mordor on. I know he lived nearby, so it’s not beyond the realms, but I’m not sure there’s any proof. Either way, David has vague memories of the foundry roofs being opened up on an evening and the sky being lit up, like a false sunrise. He quite enjoys considering himself a Mordor native :)
(Agree about Wild Wales. Well past Borrow's prime. Beyond him, more chirpy [and also perhaps not the given author's best], but with so much packed in and so personal, do you know Jan Morris's Wales, epic views....)
The noble origins --that certain je ne sais quoi-- hanging about Joel, here, finally, revealed, while tripping along the motorways west ... What in the world will happen next?!
Oh, the bowing and scraping, it really made me laugh. And Joel's grumpy hunger and lack of caffeine. I am a Black Country girl, through and through. It is the land of my fathers - three hundred years of iron puddlers and furnace men. I love it dearly, even though I haven't live there for forty years.
P.S. It is not Birmingham. And Birmingham is not in the Black Country. Just sayin'
good call likening the black country to Mordor. That was a big thing for Tolkein too. When we lived in Birmingham, we went to Sarehole Mill (his childhood home). When he lived there it was in leafy Worcestershire, now it is Hall Green. Mordor was the creeping industrial landscape, the Shire was the idyllic countryside. When we were there, it was a hot day and there was some kind of event, we saw a lone ice-cream van surrounded by people in white pointy hats. From a distance, we thought we had stumbled on a white power rally, but were relieved to find they were cosplay Gandalfs!
"Well, you have never seen anyone quite so star-struck in your life. She proclaimed the family likeness and could not stop shaking Joel’s hand. All but scraped the floor. It was like the scene in the Sound of Music with the bowing and the curtseying." This was funny. But it also makes me sad to see how that kind of feudal reflex lives on in our blessed realm.
So that's what the Black Country is! All this while I thought it must be so named centuries back for its prodigious produce of witches and such. Also later of Black Sabbath. And of Tolkien's Angmar, Witch King of and all that. Now I realise the Tolkien connection is probably (if at all) with the area's bleak industrialisation that he so detested. Mordor indeed!
You kind of sort of know another Lord; me, the Lord of the Bantering. Self-proclaimed, of course, but widely acknowledged as such.
Hilarious, and so wild that the bow and scrape response is still a thing. David is from the Black Country, and he and his kin will tell you that its industrialised self is what Tolkien actually based Mordor on. I know he lived nearby, so it’s not beyond the realms, but I’m not sure there’s any proof. Either way, David has vague memories of the foundry roofs being opened up on an evening and the sky being lit up, like a false sunrise. He quite enjoys considering himself a Mordor native :)
The Black Country accent is something else!
Lord Joel - stalling in his village under the guise of hunger… ah, if only!
Thanks Jill.
I wonder if the last Lord gave it up also because he was never invited to sit at the cool Lords table.
(Agree about Wild Wales. Well past Borrow's prime. Beyond him, more chirpy [and also perhaps not the given author's best], but with so much packed in and so personal, do you know Jan Morris's Wales, epic views....)
The noble origins --that certain je ne sais quoi-- hanging about Joel, here, finally, revealed, while tripping along the motorways west ... What in the world will happen next?!
Oh, the bowing and scraping, it really made me laugh. And Joel's grumpy hunger and lack of caffeine. I am a Black Country girl, through and through. It is the land of my fathers - three hundred years of iron puddlers and furnace men. I love it dearly, even though I haven't live there for forty years.
P.S. It is not Birmingham. And Birmingham is not in the Black Country. Just sayin'
good call likening the black country to Mordor. That was a big thing for Tolkein too. When we lived in Birmingham, we went to Sarehole Mill (his childhood home). When he lived there it was in leafy Worcestershire, now it is Hall Green. Mordor was the creeping industrial landscape, the Shire was the idyllic countryside. When we were there, it was a hot day and there was some kind of event, we saw a lone ice-cream van surrounded by people in white pointy hats. From a distance, we thought we had stumbled on a white power rally, but were relieved to find they were cosplay Gandalfs!