The Great Yorkshire Pudding Race

Well, it was bound to happen. Even I can’t maintain high dudgeon and moral righteousness endlessly. So when Susan sent me the email, I was secretly relieved. Enough Connecticut, enough gun control! Time to read about The Yorkshire Pudding Boat Race.

Which takes place in a little town of Brawby in North Yorkshire. Which has in turn a pub—well, wouldn’t it?—with a view of the village pond. And there, Simon Thackray in a questionable state of sobriety or ebriation (lump it, computer!), dreamed up the idea of a Yorkshire pudding race.

Well, if you have an idea like that, you gotta do it—anybody could see that. So he went off to the village baker, who put together five giant Yorkshire puddings—each with enormous quantities of eggs, flour, and milk (sorry for the lack of precision for which this blog is famed, but the damned Internet is screwing around again…).

Oh, and yacht varnish on the outside.

Now then, a nut with an idea is nothing exciting. What I love is the rest of the gang, which instantly goes along with the idea. The baker obligingly bakes the giant Yorkshire puddings. A poet friend composes a half-true, half-fictional saga, which he declaims around town. The little kids don their life jackets and set to paddle.

Does anybody at any point say, “hey, what the hell is this? Are you nuts? I’m not letting Billy sail in that damn thing! Get a job!”

Oh, by the way, the race has a beginning but no end.  

Well, things seem saner in Europe. Just look at the Spaniards! A Madrid advertising agency has just made Cecilia Giménez—you remember, the 80-year old grandmother who touched up that fresco of Jesus to such notable effect—its chief creative director.

Makes sense, when you think of it. She did catapult to the world stage, doña Cecilia, with that work of charity, which evil-minded people called Ecce Mono.

Well, she certainly can stir around a bit. She’s on Twitter! She has a Facebook page! And now she’s selling on eBay.  Here it is:

Not bad, hunh? Reminds me of a jigsaw puzzle, somehow. And it’s definitely true that landscape painting seems more her forte than portraiture. At any rate, it can be yours for around a thousand bucks, which the good doña Cecilia will donate to a Catholic charity.

Not too into giving a thousand bucks to the Catholic Church?

Right—skip it. Use the dough to go the next Yorkshire Pudding Boat Race….

Ooooops

OK—first a word of reassurance to the international audience of this blog, who must be anxiously waiting at their computer screens for word from the battered blogger.

Survived the storm!

What I didn’t do was, well…

…detect the storm.

It did rain hard for five minutes at about 4:30 PM yesterday. So I closed the window. And then? 

Well, Raf came home, we ate, it was warmish, we went to bed. Expecting to get up when the bashing began.

Slept through the night!

Storm apparently weakened and dropped south. Instead of 58 miles south of Ponce, it’s a couple hundred miles.

“Totally exaggerated,” claims a critic of the governor, speaking of the 96 million dollars per day lost in productivity by closing down the island these last two days.

Gentle Readers, welcome to the Caribbean, where even a storm can be politicized!

Let’s be fair. No one can predict these things. The waters of the Caribbean are hot—a perfect source of fuel for a hurricane. The National Hurricane Center was predicting intensification. It’s not the wind, it’s the water that kills. Forty-five percent of Puerto Ricans live in flood zones.

And it’s not over yet. The tail of a storm can do bad damage, and this is a wet storm.

But it’s cool and overcast today. The banana kwit is chirping across the street. Elvin, the guy from La Perla, is continuing his work next door. And I?

Comparing and contrasting—as they made me do those many years ago in high school.

The sober Norse have constructed a special psychiatric cell for the mas murderer, just in the event he gets declared insane tomorrow. Yup, cost a cool million bucks, but that’s not unusual. The cost of keeping highly weird guys away from society in Norway is routinely over a million dollars a year.

Has to be done, because they have rights!

Yeah?

It’s a little hard for me to get my head around this. I don’t think he should be put on the wrack and tortured—though I’m also not the father of any one of the victims. Might think differently if I were.

But a million bucks? When my cousin’s husband had to wait over a month in agonizing pain for a very much-needed surgery? 

Still, you have to respect the Norwegians, that good sober earnestness. Doing the right thing. Playing fair, even with a guy who very much did not. Refusing to give in to any base instinct.

Well, well, it’s all rather different in Spain! There, the nation is going crazy making jokes on a poor 80 year old lady who gave her time and talent to the church!

How can they!

Shame on them! It may be true that the results were less felicitous than hoped. Celia Giménez has asked pardon, but also points out that she wasn’t able to finish the work. And no, it’s not a masterpiece. The artist dashed it off in two hours a century ago. Here’s how it looked….

Well, and here’s the restoration!

And now, of course, the entire world is laughing at this poor dear! This lovely lady who went into the church and got right down to work! The press is dubbing the work—originally called Ecce Homo, behold the man—as Ecce Mono, behold the monkey.

That’s just not right!

All right, drop the ironic tone. Admit it, come clean. 

I couldn’t stop laughing. The storm brings many things—salchichas, beer, anxiety. No, I didn’t go as crazy as before. But the general hysteria works its way into you. And when it’s released?

I get punchy.  

Well, Jack wouldn’t think Ecce mono was funny at all. He’d have some sympathy for that good Spanish lady that all the world is laughing at. He’d run to her defense!

He was a better man than I.

I can’t stop laughing….