One attraction was an exhibition of Zimbabwean sculpture, by several artists.
This one is called "Too many burdens" and is perhaps a self-portrait, representing illness and pain. Visitors are encouraged to touch the sculptures.
I think this one is about sowing seeds, & that she holds a freshly-stripped corn cob in her left hand. The pain and concentration in her face were palpable: expressions that a blind as well as a sighted person could explore.
On the other side of the lawn is this herbaceous border. You can see the big house too.
The title of this was something like “Wishing to fly”.
I don’t remember the title of this. We called it “Mother and Daughter”.
I wish I could remember this one’s title. It wasn’t “women’s cricket”.
Never mind the titles, let’s make them up. This is “Madonna and Child”. The sculptor might not be confident in carving faces.
I want to call this “Dignity in grief”.
I do recall that this was called “The Conversation”.
This one (two views of the same) was called “Boy”.
This was “Blind Man”.
Another part of the garden.
And another.
One of the attractions at Waterperry is a museum of country life. We were impressed by the technology. The curator did not want us to miss various exhibits, such as goat and sheep boots, used for veterinary or ceremonial purposes. When the regimental mascot goes on parade, it must of course wear spotless boots. The shelf on the right shows an array of horse boots.
I hope for fox sake they let the wild animals go barefoot, as Nature intended.
The museum man invited us to use the 1922 mahogany cash register, previously owned by the comic actor Ronnie Barker, who also owned an antique shop. It operates like a manual typewriter. The cash drawer is on a powerful spring & contains old money. It’s not totally practical for today, as you cannot ring up any sum higher than 5/11 (that’s five shillings and eleven pence, about thirty cents today). It does farthings though. A farthing is a quarter of a penny.
10 comments:
It was a nice treat seeing this beautiful setting and the sculptures on a quiet afternoon. I haven't seen parade horses wearing boots in a long time.
Your mention of English currency at the end, reminds me of something that's always confused me. In reading old classics like Dickens, there's always mention of shillings, farthing, pence, pounds, and so on. I can never make heads or tails of how these inter-relate, or their values. The pound, I take it, is a paper currency, a good deal more valuable than our dollar, especially over a hundred years ago. The rest, I assume, are coins of some sort.
I'm always interested in this matter of foreign currency, as it seems that many novels in classic literature hinge on large sums of money. Piles of Francs turn up in Hugo and Dumas, and it's often pivotal to the story to appreciate the comparative value of this money beyond mere numbers. I find myself speculating about the actual buying power of the Franc in 1821.
The Rubles in Dostoevsky's Russia seem the closest in value to our dollar at present day. When Dimitry Karamazov squanders 3,000 Rubles in one night, I can easily understand why everyone is throwing a fit about it.
So I guess I'm asking for some sort of demystification of English currency. Not necessarily how they relate to the dollar, but rather how they relate to each other.
Twelve pence to the shilling.
Five shillings to the crown. In my childhood there was no crown, only a half-crown, worth two shillings and sixpence.
Twenty shillings to the pound.
Twenty-one shillings to the guinea. Guineas were rather more gentlemanly. The better men's suits or women's gowns were priced in guineas.
Four farthings to the penny.
The pound was also known as the sovereign - a gold coin.
But in my lifetime, sovereigns were no longer in circulation, and as you suggest, were replaced by paper notes, carrying the promise by the Bank of England to pay the bearer, on demand, the sum of one pound (in case the person refused to accept that paper could be real money).
When you wrote down this money it was like this:
£4/19/11 meant four pounds nineteen & eleven, i.e. £5 less a penny.
The first time I heard about dollars, I think the ratio was $5 to £1. But for most of my life it was $3 to £1.
But the coinage of my youth was something else. Farthing, ha'penny, penny (bronze coin more than an inch in diameter) threepenny bit (thick brass, 12 sided) sixpenny piece (silver alloy, size of a US cent), shilling, florin (=2 shillings), half-crown (silver alloy, even bigger than a penny), ten-shilling note (brown), pound note (green), five pound note (black ink white paper). We children regarded five pound notes with awe. Anyone flaunting one of those was a toff or a crook.
Susan, we'll take you there on your next visit to England!
Loved the sign, the sculptures and the gardens. Sometimes pictures of the Isles make it seem like such a magical place. But then mention of your monetary system makes me reel back and think "Are those people insane?"
Good Lord. I don't know if I could ever keep that straight. Our monetary system is downright metric by comparison. Do you guys really still use all that, or have you switched over to the euro?
We abandoned the old system, known as LSD (pounds shilling and pence) in 1971 or thereabouts. Schoolchildren may have cheered as it made their lives easier.
Now you are asking: why LSD? It's pretty straightforward! The letters stand for librae, solidi, denarii. See Wikipedia article £sd which has explains the great advantage of the system:
"The advantage of such a system was its use in mental arithmetic, as it afforded many factors and hence fractions of a pound such as tenths, eighths, sixths and even sevenths if the guinea of 21 shillings was used."
I never even noticed the switchover at the time. I was living in a commune and too interested in another kind of LSD to bemoan the demise of this one.
But now I grieve for its passing, and point out that America still has pounds, ounces, yards, feet, inches and so on.
As for the euro, I would like to make the sound of a spittoon being skilfully employed. Never! Over our collective dead bodies! there are many of us who squirm in acute discomfort at the affront, the compromise to sovereignty and national pride, of being thought part of a political entity called Europe. It's not as bad as a Palestinian having to live within the borders of Israel, of course. I'm talking about the imagination here, Don Quixote versus the windmills of his mind.
To clarify my last, we are actually members of the EU, European Union, some of whose members would like to think of themselves as parts of a federal system like states in the US. If we were in the Euro zone, we would have to cough up when they pass round the hat to keep Greece from going under.
I would never vote for the minority party called UKIP though (United Kingdom Independence Party). Deep in my atavistic soul, I don't happily embrace that concept called the "United Kingdom". Plain England was good enough for my ancestors.
Yes, Rev, some of us are by your definition insane. But they have to let us stay on the loose. No institution is big enough to hold us all.
I didn't realize the euro was held in such low regard. Hehe.
Of course, there are people over here that think it's a sign of the apocalypse, a forerunner of a one world government that the anti-christ will rule over. Seriously. I wish I was making that up.
I didn't know the Anti-Christ has to come before the final rapture of the favoured ones.
It's funny but though I grew up in the shadow of the Cold War & the H-bomb threat, those days seem to have been a peaceful golden age, compared with the apocalyptic threats they throw at us today.
You might call it Denial but I tend to think that whatever disasters don't happen within the horizon of my walking distance, aren't quite real. It doesn't stop me sending money (which is an imaginary substance held in the bank in my name) to those unreal charities which report unreal famines and so forth.
So any talk of the Anti-Christ, or even the Risen Christ, sounds super-unreal, till I meet someone at the church down the road, say, for whom it is super-real. then I will look into their eyes and for those moments of eye-contact and sincerity, it is real for me too.
But I've found a great new way to deal with evangelists, those who get their kicks that way. I tell them I don't believe in evangelism. Then they quote something to say that Jesus told them to evangelise. And I say I don't believe that either. Then they give up. It's clean & neat.
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