My decision to set aside a period of time
each day to read is going well. I finished Jeffrey Tambor's
autobiography the first day and yesterday finished Bill Bryson's "The Road
to Little Dribbling," which I started maybe as long as a year ago. I
don't know why I stopped reading it, but I probably got distracted by
something which looked more interesting. I do that a lot. My own
BADD, as you were (Book Attention Deficit Disorder!). I have so many
books I've started and intended to get back to when something else came
along. The other book I'm trying to read is Sally Henderson's "Silent
Footsteps," about a woman's years in Botswana observing elephants. I
don't have a "blood and guts" thriller in the lot at the moment, which is
rare for me.
Bryson's book is kind of a follow-up to his
"Notes from a Small Island," written in 1995. At the time he had lived
in England with his family for twenty years and was ready to re-locate back
to the U.S. and wanted to make one last trip around the country, traveling
only on public transportation or walking and reporting on the idiosyncrasies
of British life.
Walt and I found the book in a book store in
Cambridge when we were in the process of driving around many of the same
places Bryson visited and reading the book in conjunction with driving to
and being in many of those places just added another layer of enjoyment to
the trip.
In "Road to Little Dribbling," Bryson makes
the same trip 20 years later, this time by car, visiting many of the same
places and some other places. The author is older and grumpier and
grumbles a lot about modernization of the quaint places he loved before, but
it is still an enjoyable read (and does he ever find Little Dribbling
again?)
But one of the things I love about reading
Bryson's books is picking up little tidbits that are just fascinating.
Take Durham Cathedral, for example.
He toured this edifice with the in-house
architect and I learned that these old buildings (this one was built between
1093 and 1133) all have in-house architects because they are in constant
need of repair. But I just loved learning about how they are
constructed and in awe at the knowledge of the architects of the 11th
century. The walls of the building are constructed of two layers, one
layer outside and another inside with a space between them, which is filled
with mortar consisting of sticks, stones, and other rubble. This is
how Bryson explains it:
Durham Cathedral, like all great buildings of antiquity, is essentially just a giant pile of rubble held in place by two thin layers of dressed stone. But–-and here is the truly remarkable thing–-because that gloopy mortar was contained between two impermeable outer layers, air couldn’t get to it, so it took a very long time – 40 years to be precise – to dry out. As it dried, the whole structure gently settled, which meant that the cathedral masons had to build doorjambs, lintels, and the like at slightly acute angles so that they would ease over time into the correct alignments. And that’s exactly what happened. After 40 years of slow motion sagging the building settled into a position of impeccable horizontality, which it has maintained ever since.I find that fascinating, that these architects built these huge cathedrals knowing that there was a good chance they would never live to see the final product but knowing that it needed to be built in a manner that allowed for the building to settle into what it was designed to be.
I just love learning tidbits like that.
I had a call from Atria yesterday that my
mother was out of something. I could not understand what word the woman was
saying, but decided it must have been her Depends, which it was. I
bought two packages and restocked the larder.
My mother was in good spirits and told me
that she and a friend had taken a long walk that morning, all the way
downtown, and that she was tired when she got back. I did not point
out that she could not get out of the building and didn't know where
"downtown" is.
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