A rather unusual episode this week! My girlfriend and I recently went on vacation to England, so we thought it’d be fun to sit down and tell you all about it, including how we got to play with the personal belongings of a literary giant, as well as have lunch with an Inkling’s grandson…
S2E24: God Save the Queen! (Download)
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Time Stamps
In case your podcast application has the ability to jump to certain time codes, here are the timestamps for the different parts of the episode.
01:50 – Quote of the week
03:01 – Drink of the week
11:18 – Meeting Owen Barfield
14:55 – The Wedding (Heckfield)
16:31 – Bath (Jane Austen Museum, Bath Abbey etc.)
22:26 – Oxford (Merton and Magdalen College, The Eagle and Child etc.)
45:01 – London (Hyde Park, Victoria & Albert Museum, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese)
Show Notes
• The quote-of-the-week was the section from Jack’s autobiography where he describes his first encounter with England:
“No Englishman will be able to understand my first impressions of England… I found myself in a world to which I reacted with immediate hatred. The flats of Lancashire in the early morning are in reality a dismal sight… The strange English accents with which I was surrounded seemed like the voices of demons. But what was worst was the English landscape from Fleetwood to Euston… The flatness! The interminableness! The miles and miles of featureless land, shutting one in from the sea, imprisoning, suffocating! Everything was wrong; wooden fences instead of stone walls and hedges, red brick farmhouses instead of white cottages, the fields too big, haystacks the wrong shape…
C.S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy
I have made up the quarrel since; but at that moment I conceived a hatred for England which took many years to heal.”
• The drink-of-the-week was Vat 69. At a conference a while ago, Andrew Lazo read me an email from Lewis’ secretary, Walter Hooper, who said that Lewis sent him out for a bottle of it.
This scotch was also chosen by Sir Ernest Shackleton for his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914 “for medicinal and celebratory purposes”. It’s also the favourite whisky of Captain Lewis Nixon of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, immortalised in the book and TV series Band of Brothers.
• We flew directly from San Diego to London via British Airways.
• My mother commissioned some cupcakes for our arrival:
• When talking about hearing the different English accents, I paraphrased George Bernard Shaw:
“[i]t is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.”
George Bernard Shaw
• The following day we visited The Rowbarge Pub to meet Owen, the grandson of the Inkling Owen Barfield:
The pub where we met was by a canal and we saw Tolkien nerds in their boat:
• We went to my cousin’s wedding:
• We went to Bath and visited The Jane Austen Museum and the Assembly Rooms.
We also ate a Sally Lunn Bun:
We prayed Evening Prayer in Bath Abbey:
• We visited Jane Austen country…
• We then caught the train to Oxford. We pretty much went straight to the Eagle and Child to toast Jack:
• We saw Lewis’ secretary, Walter Hooper. Here’s the back of his head:
• Fixed the ordering of The Chronicles of Narnia in the bookshop:
• The Deer Park in Magdalen was gorgeous!
• We got to have coffee with a listener in London:
