write me well

Tag: history

  • Lot 432

    I don’t really believe all things happen for a reason (I do). But when seemingly unrelated events/moments/ideas coincide, I’ll pick up that old tried-and-vaguely-true mantra and preach to anyone within ten feet of me that fate is a thing that really pulls life together (and apart). Like, for instance, when the two ideas I’ve been toying with writing about pair up neatly and I get the opportunity to knock them both out in one go. Such is my luck today, sitting down in front of the enormous clock in Waterloo Station, realizing my unintentional theme is time.

    We use time to boundary everything. It’s usually the first reason we can or can’t do something, tied with or just ahead of money. At work, it is without a doubt my most familiar adversary, and if not having enough time was a Buy Five, Get the Sixth Free punch card situation, I wouldn’t get through a week without a freebie (or five). When someone or something gets a sense of entitlement about just how high they should rank on your priority list, there’s that embodiment-of-an-eye-roll argument that we simply MAKE time. Like we’re wizards that are one agenda notebook or scheduling app away from adding three more hours to the day.

    Worse – and maybe I’m alone here – time seems to have two distinct versions. There’s how it feels on a day off, and there’s how it feels on a day on. One second you’ve got a handle on how to manage your time, but then you turn around and your Saturday has gone by in an impossible flash, and NOTHING has gotten done. Unless watching a season of Sons of Anarchy for the billionth time qualifies.

    So how do you pick? How do you know what matters and what doesn’t? When you eventually find a way to magic in a few minutes here and there, how do you know what to do with it?

    There’s no single answer, but I’m going to try and help anyway.

    I Knew Him, Horatio!

    Two weeks ago I was in the office at my store, having the wily kind of Tuesday where in the middle of editing Excel spreadsheet formulas you decide that despite your borderline illiteracy in the subject of Shakespeare, it’s time to get a tattoo of that one line from Hamlet that you quote all the time.

    I have this thing about famed literature, where it doesn’t stick with me in a big way, but I retain bizarre but specific details that then carve out a spot in my heart for said literature regardless. These details and the resultent pseudo-obsession have no respect for the fact that this will almost definitely manifest in me embarassing myself when I try and talk about books I haven’t touched in ten years, a la Bridget Jones and Chechnya. A prime example of this – the obsessive specificity, if not the Bridget Jones part – is that I couldn’t write you three sentences on what happens in Catcher in the Rye, but until I die I will be able to recite the completely under-valued line “LIBERATE YOURSELF FROM MY VICELIKE GRIP”, spoken by Holden Caulfield when, with the senseless surety unique to late-teenaged boys, he executes the decision to put his friend in a headlock while he’s trying to get ready for a date. Give me a few years and I’m sure I’ll find a reason to get that tattooed too.

    Where Shakespeare is concerned, you’ve got the course I took during my English Lit degree, where I relied entirely on my friend (and Drama major) Suzy to get me through, and then you have my more prominent memories of the abridged collection of Shakespeare plays my aunt bought me in seventh grade. Hamlet was the first play I read, and I don’t know why, but the only thing that really stuck in my bones was that line: “Alas, poor Yorick!” (Well, that, and the image of Ophelia’s dad hiding behind some curtains, which my twelve-year-old-self thought showed some pretty weak hide-and-seek game). Real talk, though? I didn’t ever bother to look up what the hell Hamlet is even talking about when he says the line until that two-weeks-ago moment in the office.

    But then I did, and I decided that in fact, the skull of the court jester from Hamlet’s youth WAS something that should definitely live on my arm forever. Because when Hamlet says “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio”, he’s not just musing at a skull, as you do. It’s a bit of an “Oh shit, I knew the person behind this skull, he was pretty funny, and here he is, dead. Wow, life’s short,” moment. Life IS short, Hamlet. So thanks, Will Shakespeare, for your keen wordsmithing, and for giving me essentially a hip and highfalutin version of my own YOLO tattoo. It’s no punch card, and Yorick hardly actively gets involved in helping me prioritize my life and manage my time better. There’s a large case to be made, though, for having a bit of a black comedy reminder that even should you make the WORST decision when prioritising your time, we’re all Yorick in the end.

    #empressmatilda Gets Involved

    Two nights ago, Yorick fresh on my wrist, I was participating in the universal tradition of needlessly scrolling through my newsfeed one last time before going to bed. I was on an old post of mine (#narcissist) and accidentally tapped on one of the tags I’d used – unsurprisingly, given the post’s content, the Empress Matilda hashtag. And while generally speaking there’s not much happening in that tag, on this particular evening, there was a post from Dix Noonan Webb, an auction house in Mayfair, advertising several lots of coins going up for auction.

    Two lots included coins minted in the name of Matilda during the Anarchy. (Brief history for those new here: Matilda never officially reigned as England’s queen, but she got pretty damn close, and controlled most of the West Country during the nearly twenty-year period of time known as the Anarchy in the 12th century. More importantly, I’m highkey obsessed with her). The day and time of the auction? THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, A TEN MINUTE WALK FROM MY WORK.

    The first coin was valued between £700- £900, which was quite obviously outside of my price range. The second was a mere £200-£300, so still out of my league, but I went to the auction in hopes that nobody would bid for it (the history world isn’t quite as obsessed with Norman Feminist Icons as me….YET) and that they’d kick it down to £100 or so. With my hopes thus raised, I took the train in for the twelve o’clock start time, signed up for a bidding paddle, and made my way to the Wellington Room of Dix Noonan Webb, 16 Bolton Street, ready to get my auction on.

    Upon entering I helped lower the mean age of the room by about thirty years, and I immediately grabbed a seat in the back row, a few chairs over from the only other woman present. She was around my age, maybe a little older, but was seated with such chilled composure that I was absolutely certain this was not her first Late-Anglo-Saxon through Plantagenet Coin rodeo. She became one of my favorite humans when she leaned over and said, “All the women in the back then, eh?” I liked her even more when later in the afternoon I heard her chatting with another bidder and she genuinely uttered the sentence “Oh, I haven’t seen Dennis in yonks!”

    The auction started with Lot 299. I was interested in Lot 432. So I observed a fair amount of bidding while waiting out my Matilda coins, watching a few valued from £200- £300 go for closer to £1,000, while others – namely the most expensive coin of the day, one from 975 – went for a cool £8,000. (Who are these people and how do I become them). A handful of technical difficulties later, we made it through to the Norman coins, and finally, at 1:20pm, my time came. The Matilda coins went up, and I didn’t even get a chance to raise my paddle, because those motherfuckers went FOR £1,200 AND £4,300. I watched it happen, grinning like an idiot from my seat in the back row, because even though I clearly wasn’t going home with those coins, Matilda’s popularity, long-overdue, was clearly on the rise.

    Yorick was very fresh when I attended this auction, still encased in Dermalize and looking rather worse for the wear as the ink and plasma gooped a bit beneath the bandage (you’re welcome for that visual). He sat with me, not judging the fact that I didn’t have that kind of money to drop on medieval coinage, but more importantly, justifying my decision to sit in the Wellington Room in the first place. Because as much as I’ve just spent a lot of your time trying to convince you that we all die in the end, so do what you want with your time, sitting in that auction room gave me an amazing flip side. That this collection of coins – gathered by countless people with page-long provenances, if anyone had kept a record of their entire existence – showed that even if after we’re all dead and buried, humans are such that even a smashed up penny from the pocket of a noble in 1139 has value, almost a thousand years after its owner was dead an buried. After the monarch printed on it, who actually never even reigned but fought like hell for the right to, was forgotten by most of the world.

    & Waterloo Station

    When I saw down to write today, I picked a new writing spot. I was sneaking in a writing session before a closing shift, something I don’t do often because my writing sessions are almost exclusively the territory of days off. The past 48 hours had me filled with words, though, so I plonked down at a coffee shop at Waterloo Station, surrounded by hundreds of summery Londoners, and stared at the giant clock suspended from the ceiling.

    It doesn’t matter what you do with your time, but in the best possible way. All of that pressure that you feel is absolutely temporary. You can look at it from the perspective of YOLO Yorick, or of some nine-hundred year old coins. Yorick, the jester, being dead, when once he was funny and jovial and very much alive. Those coins, with Matilda’s seal stamped into them, surviving hundreds of years, into a world Matilda herself could not have imagined, being in a small auction room in Mayfair, where some mysterious bidder dropped over four grand on them.

    Time is ceaseless. It’s there whether you do the thing or you don’t. Whether your priorities are always the same or change every day. Whether it’s 2019 or 1139. Whether you’re cracking jokes or impossibly sad. It just keeps going on. It’s a little terrifying, but at the same time, strangely comforting. There’s not a lot in life you can bet on never changing, but the passage of time is one of them. And like Achilles says in the 2005 cinematic masterpiece, Troy, “Take it, IT’S YOURS!”

    Sure, he’s actually talking about immortality, but his aggressive demand is one I’d encourage everyone to echo. Your time IS yours, and you should spend it how you want.

    And if you’re waiting for the right moment for some change, think of Yorick. This might just be it.

  • History

    Last night Drunk Me did Future Me a favor and spontaneously booked an overdue trip to Oxford for the following morning. (There are worse drunk decisions to make, I’m sure.) The forecast said light rain from 10am through the evening; the reality was a luminous fall day that alternated between broken clouds, bright sunlight, and scattered downpours. In short, your ideal wandering-through-a-thousand-year-old-city fall weather.

    Oxford formed the completion of, shall we call it, the Empress Matilda list. The Empress Matilda list started to form when I first visited the Tower of London back in April and the reality of how close I was to the history I’ve admired from afar for years truly sank in.

    Arundel was the first stop, where Matilda took up the invitation of her friend Adeliza, her step-mother and the former Queen Consort of England, to “come visit” (read: to kick off her bid for the throne in a period of English history that would come to be known as the Anarchy). It was a drizzly, wet spring day, and I narrowly avoided a solid soaking on my way back to the train station that evening. Standing in Arundel Castle was my first experience of sharing steps with one of my historical idols. It dun fucked me up and I LOVED IT. So the Empress Matilda list grew, and Wallingford was next.

    Wallingford Castle was the stronghold of Brian Fitz Count, one of Matilda’s most fast supporters, who ruined himself for no apparent reason other than his passion for her cause (insert courtly romance projections here). Wallingford oversaw the whole of the Thames Valley, bolstered by its vital river crossing, and throughout the Anarchy it remained, through Brian’s zeal, a pro-Empress battlefront. All that’s left today (I’m looking at you, Civil War) is a few scraps of wall and the rolling earthworks upon which the Norman castle originally sat. When I visited Wallingford, it was a high summer day – zero clouds, a thousand rays of sun, and market stalls and ice cream trucks spread from the town square to the riverfront. I stood on a small bridge between the castle meadows and the remnants of the motte and took a 360-degree video, sweating in my shorts and t-shirt and surrounded by the buzz of summer fauna, wondering at the sensation of breathing in the same space as Matilda, as Brian.

    Winchester was next.

    Matilda came close – SO close – to being England’s first ruling queen. Winchester was her moment. It was before she made it to London and the mob chased her out – and it was after her cousin Stephen, the king, had been captured at the epic Battle of Lincoln. Welcomed by Stephen’s own brother, the exceptionally oily Bishop Henry of Winchester, she processed down Winchester Cathedral and was named Lady of the English. She didn’t know that within six months Stephen would be back on the throne and the war would have returned to a bloody stalemate, so I imagine it felt like the first step in finally winning. At least, that’s what I imagined when I was sitting in the same cathedral.

    After Matilda was driven from London, Winchester became the scene of one of her many narrow escapes. Surrounded by the enemy (Bishop Henry’s men – see, oily!), her half-brother Robert of Gloucester held off attack and was captured so she could escape alone with none other than Brian of Wallingford, alone on horseback, riding astride like a man to the point of exhaustion until they reached the safety of Devizes Castle. And after seeing what she had escaped in Winchester, I had to see what she escaped in Oxford.

    That brings us to today – or, last night, when I decided I’d left off the last trip in my journey of major Matilda destinations for long enough. So I caught a train from Marylebone Station at 9:00am this morning and made my way to Oxford Castle. I arrived just in time for the 10:30am castle tour and walked up the same stairs Matilda did, while under siege, wondering how she could possibly escape what seemed in every way to be a full-proof trap. Most people would have given up, surrounded by an enemy army with no hope of reprieve (Stephen had famously let Matilda leave Arundel Castle unmolested back in 1139 under the excuse that she was simply going to go visit her brother Robert, a decision that historians still wonder at and I’m sure Stephen himself largely regretted for the rest of his life). But not Matilda. A freezing night in December, three months into the siege, she and three of her knights wore white cloaks and were lowered out of the castle onto the frozen Thames with knotted bed sheets, where they escaped by walking directly through Stephen’s encamped army under cover of snow, darkness, and luck.

    All of these adventures, all of these moments, are true stories taken from the exceptional life of an exceptional woman – and they are only a handful in the grand scheme of what she endured. Prior to the Anarchy she had already been sent to Germany to marry the Holy Roman Emperor – twenty years her senior – where she then traveled much of Europe with her husband and was by all accounts an appropriately involved and loved imperial consort. When her husband died she was pulled back to Normandy and forced to remarry, only this time to a cocky little shit (the fourteen year old son of an Angevin count) who, upon their marriage, hated her as avidly as she hated him. Their tumultuous marriage eventually produced the first Plantagenet King, Henry II, but not before she attempted to leave Geoffrey and her father forced a reconciliation while she hid in Rouen for over a year.

    Matilda should have been remembered as England’s first ruling queen, but instead she’s unknown to most, and in the ultimate irony, was honored even in death by an epitaph that couched her importance entirely in her relationship with men: “Here lies the daughter, wife, and mother of Henry. Great by birth, greater by marriage, greatest in her offspring.”

    So if you’ve ever wondered why I wax poetic about this woman, or why I’m so fascinated by her story, or why I got an enormous portrait tattoo of her, that is why. Every person that asks me is one more person that gets to find out she was so much more than a daughter, wife, and mother. She was a passionate woman desperate to be accorded the respect that men and kings had purely by virtue of their sex. And I can’t get over the fact that not only are women still facing those problems 900 years later, but that her story is so little known to them.

    The struggle isn’t new – but we can sure as hell be inspired by those who fought it before us. Matilda was certainly one of them.

  • Driving Forces

    (Aside: Up until about twenty minutes ago I had developed a new love for the simplicity of using Notepad to write with. I was 90% done with this blog post when my computer decided to die before I’d hit save.

    So, suffice it to say, one serious rage session later, I’ve ditched simplicity and am now back on Word. WHERE THEY HAVE DOCUMENT RECOVERY.)

    Summer has a tendency to inspire promise: impending adventures, previously unfulfilled personal sojourns imminently poised to become life’s Next Big Thing. Every year it’s like hearing Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten for the first time all over again and I always feel like I can take over the world. This year, I settled for kicking June off with my first trip to Spain.

    Three days in Madrid saw me reunited with Jaime and Edu, who along with helping me begin a life-long obsession with jamón, showed me first-hand all of the corners of the city that made them fall in love with Spain in the first place. I even snagged a true local Madrid experience when Edu’s family was gracious enough to host me for the duration of my stay. (In fact, if I can avoid hotels for the majority of my European adventures, all the better. Nothing beats a local neighborhood experience.) The Luchena Ruizs put on a stunning spread of Spanish food all three nights I stayed there, we ventured into the city and drank cheap delicious wine and ate free fabulous tapas late into the warm Spanish evenings, and I spoke a lot of terrible, terrible Spanish (I exaggerate. Mostly I just said “gracias” very poorly). What more can you ask of an early summer Spanish vacation?

    If you said “see the Mediterranean Sea for the first time” then you are SPOT on, my friends. So after saying farewell to the Luchena Ruiz clan, I hopped onto a train to the beautiful seaside city of Valencia, and it did not disappoint.

    My friend Suzy met me in there, and after spending our first evening exploring downtown and enjoying the tapas and wine (and gelato and bats) there included, the following three days were filled with sunshine-y, sunscreen-y bliss, parked on the beach watching utterly comfortable Spaniards lazing around La Malvarosa and diving into the Mediterranean.

    I had a moment back when I visited Arundel and stood in the same rooms as Empress Matilda, a moment of that sort of knowing and feeling that Natasha Bedingfield so shamelessly inspires. I had another one when I visited the Tower of London and stood in the same rooms where Stephen, Henry, Eleanor, and Richard had, in turn, stood.

    Standing waist-deep in the Mediterranean was another one of those moments.

    This was the same sea that the Ancient Greeks sailed. That the Normans sailed. That Empress Matilda looked out over before she ever returned to England. That Eleanor of Aquitaine covered when she joined her husband on crusade.

    I like to think that all ancient places and landscapes have their own energy, invariably thrumming at their own frequency. The Pacific Ocean is somehow fiery; it’s confident, endless, and always crashing. This sea was calm. It lacked the kinetic, impressive, white-capped waves that crashed along the entire breadth of the California coastline, the kind of waves I’d grown up with my entire life. And this water’s energy was different, less obvious, and buried deep. It was huge and capable of much but burned itself out over thousands of years, happy now, for the most part, to sit and be admired until it saw otherwise necessary.

    While swimming in that calm, feeling that thrum, I had the moment. I knew that my next adventure had to be in Italy.

    About a week ago, I was doing some casual online research on the Normans. (Any time spent substantiating my strange Norman obsession is time well spent. Obviously.) Now, most people have heard of the Norman Conquest of England. William the Conqueror was fairly effective and kind of changed the entire course of English history so, I mean, it makes sense. But something that’s less talked about (she writes, as if you generally run into people discussing the Norman Conquest whenever you’re grabbing coffee at Starbucks) is the Norman conquest of southern Italy, and the eventual Kingdom of Sicily that they then ruled for a decent chunk of medieval history.

    If you grab a map and take a look at the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, you’d see that it included all of Calabria. Also known as the region of Italy from which my great grandfather immigrated in 1912, from whom I, one hundred years later, claimed my dual citizenship so I could move back here. When I saw that, I thought to myself, “I’m not going to jump to any conclusions here, but MAYBE, SOMEWHERE, way back in my Italian ancestry, I MIGHT BE NORMAN!”

    And I am fully aware that that is useless, irrelevant, ridiculous information that changes absolutely nothing about who I am as a person and in no way effects the present. But the romantic half of me – which wields a hefty amount of power these days – can’t get past it. It’s that part of me that walked into the Mediterranean, looked out across the ancient water and thought, “Y’know what? Italy, you’re next.”

    History is just so astounding.

    There’s one more uniquely Kathy moment that happened in Valencia, and I’m quite sure I’ll have this one in my list of all-time favorites for years to come.

    Suzy and I stayed at an Airbnb in historic old town Valencia, in a 1930’s era apartment decorated by an exceptionally hipster pair of local Valencian guys that respectively moonlighted as a DJ and a photographer. One of the reasons I picked the place was that it had a tiny balcony that opened onto Carrer de Sant Vincent Martir (on which, I pictured, Suzy and I would drink black coffee and eat breakfast each morning before heading out to the beach. On which, unsurprisingly, we never did.)

    The last night we were in the city, Suzy fell asleep the second her head hit the pillow. I couldn’t sleep so I went out to the main room, threw the balcony shutters open, and listened to this late-night, outdoor concert that happened to be going on in the street below. It was a local high school band and after a few songs and a bit of nostalgia, I decided to pop in my headphones and watch an episode of Vikings until I got sleepy.

    My headphones were such that even with the open shutters, I couldn’t hear the concert over Ivar the Boneless being obnoxious and horrifying.. That was, until, during a quiet moment of the show, when I thought I heard something familiar coming from the street below.

    I threw down my head phones, ran outside, and sure enough, the band was playing a song I hadn’t heard in years. But the years hadn’t changed how blood-stirring it was, nor how impossibly strong the memories attached to it were. It was the opening overture from the (notoriously hammy and complete classic) 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. And it immediately took me back to being a kid, watching it with my sisters, seeing the camera pan across the Bayeux Tapestry, having never heard of the Bayeux Tapestry or having any concept of what the Norman Conquest was.

    It was a moment of pure magic. Nearly midnight, in the balmy streets of Valencia, in the house of total strangers, twenty-nine years old and still a shamelessly believer in life-changing epiphanies, feeling my heart thrum when the French horns kicked in. There’s not a feeling like it.

    Usually coming home from vacation is a struggle, but I left Spain feeling almost impossibly fulfilled. Toss in some very exciting work things on the horizon – which I’ll share more about if and when they come to pass – and this June has been everything I’ve come to expect from summer.

    (Considering the season doesn’t really even start for two more days, I’m feeling pretty good about it.)