Author: Steve

A Norman castle.  Along the river Wye.  North of Bristol.

A train ride away.

We went there with Taylor.

…and explored every tower, nook, and cranny.

The castle was huge.  It was begun in the 1,000s and continuously upgraded, modified, and occupied for 600 years, until the Civil Wars of the 1600s when began its decline.

There were informational placards of course, but there was plenty of empty time and space to fill with our own imaginings of the hundreds of years that this place was bursting with life.  The comings and goings, and daily routines of stocking, providing, and defending.  The sights, sounds, and laughter of families.  Well-worn steps up dark wet narrow winding passages, wondering which way the kids went last.

It used to be taller.  It was built on stilts, but as the years went by, dumping, as we like to say in British, “the tipping of fly ash” raised the level of land around it, so now it’s really short!

Baked turkey, dressing, roasted potatoes, sausage, smothered in gravy, on a Yorkshire pudding, with cranberry sauce.

Way more than this person can eat at one sitting.

The reason we’re all here!

A train ride from Newport Wales back to the University of Reading in England.

A bus ride to campus on a double decker.  A quick walking tour of the ruins of Reading Abbey, right in the middle of town.  It was founded in the 1100s.

Shuttle bus rides on campus to get to different functions.

A campus that looks like this.

A ceremony in this hall.

With the pipe organ roaring.

Degree awarded, with distinction.

An award for best in class.

Happy graduate and family.

Becky and Brian, Judy and I, and David, got admission to the ceremony.  Limited number of admissions for each graduate because of the size of the hall.  Some of us watched remotely from another location on campus.

And in fact, the feed was watched live in Colorado and Arizona.

A celebratory dinner at the London Street Brasserie.

During which Judy was also honored for having achieved another birthday.

The crowd breaking up at the train station. 

Four different families headed to three different destinations on three different trains.  Mission accomplished; we were all home by midnight.

Who knew the country right next door to England, Wales, right on the same island, would have a different language?  But all of England is not a very big island, so it’s not going to be very different, right?  Maybe more like a dialect.  Wrong.  Completely wrong.  I looked up Welsh on Duolingo, the language program.  It’s crazy.  It seems mostly consonants, very stingy with the vowels, and a lot of two and three letter words.  My best description is that it brings to mind a Monty Python skit where they’re just making up silly words.

The street we live on is named Allt-Yr-Yn Crescent.  Prynhawn da means good morning.  Merch dw i  means I am a woman.  Bachgen a dyn, a boy and a man.  Noswaith dda, Good evening.  Nothing like English.  Why would they make up a language that is so different from the one that is right next door?

That’s because Welsh is more like the original languages here.  A completely different root.  English is a mishmash of the Latin, Germanic, Norwegian, and French languages of the waves of conquerors and invaders.  Welsh is the language that survived.  It all works out though, because even though all the street signs are in Welsh, everybody here just speaks English.