Cotswolder

Bath is one of my favorite places in the world, and this summer it is going to be even better than usual. Starting on May 19 there will 100 pig statues, life size and individually decorated, all over Bath - King Bladud’s Pigs in Bath. In October the pigs will be sold at auction.

There have been similar projects in other towns. The Cow Parade has been done in many cities. In Germany they did Storks on the Danube (Flickr). The Trail of Painted Ponies started in Santa Fe in 2001.

Pigs were chosen for Bath because of the legend of King Bladud and his pigs who discovered the natural hot springs in Bath.

Kaffe Fassett is one of the artists making a pig. Fassett is an American, from Big Sur in California, who moved to England decades ago and “revolutionized” needlepoint and knitting in the 80s. His family owns the wonderful Nepenthe restaurant in Big Sur. This is a great place to stop for lunch when doing the California coast drive. They also run the Phoenix shop beside the restaurant which sells many Kaffe Fassett things. They used to have a couch that he had covered in needlepoint, but it was not there the last time we visited.

The money raised by the Pig Project goes to the Two Tunnels Project which I had not heard of until today. This is a project to restore a four mile path - involving an old railway track, a viaduct and two tunnels - to connect the center of Bath with the Sustrans path NCN 24 (Sustainable Transport - National Cycle Network route 24) south of Bath near Milford. From there you connect to many biking and hiking trails. The route will be for bicyclists and walkers. One of the tunnels is one mile long and goes beneath Combe Down (high area south of Bath). See a detailed map.

Currently you can walk from the Center of Bath to Milford, but the path is longer and more difficult. With the Two Tunnels Project the path will be shorter and level.

I found out about this event when I was writing about Knitting Socks for my Views from the Slow Lane blog. I was reading Kaffe Fassett’s website to find out about his sock wool, and there was the information about the Pigs in Bath!

I am not an expert on politics in England, but thought I would post a summary of the results from Thursday’s local election and some links to articles with more information. 

The Labour Party, headed by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, are currently in power (and do not have to have an election until 2010), but the local elections put Labour in 3rd place with 24% of the vote, after the Conservatives (44%) and the Liberal Democrats (25%). This is Labour’s worst local election results in 40 years and may signal a change in English politics.

Tony Blair brought the Labour Party into power in 1997. Gordon Brown took over the leadership in June last year. David Cameron is the leader of the Conservatives.

Read more on BBC News - Cameron hails Tory ‘big moment’

London gets a new Mayor

Boris Johnson (Conservative) beat the incumbent Mayor Ken Livingston (Labour) by just over 50% of the votes (of over 2 million total votes). Livingston, called “Red Ken”, was mayor since May 2000. This is going to be interesting to watch because Johnson is quite a controversial figure in England. I love that floppy hair!

Autolycus, who lives in London, posted his comments: Cripes!

Read more on BBC News - Johnson wins London mayoral race
Read more on BBC News - The Boris Johnson story 
Read more on BBC News - BNP wins seat in London Assembly
Read more on the New York Times - Colorful Tory Beats Laborite to Become Mayor of London

Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 - Podcast

The Friday Night Comedy show on Radio 4 broadcasts with “The Now Show” or ”The News Quiz”. Both are very funny shows with local comedians discussing the week’s news. The News Quiz, which we get on our iPod as a Podcast, is my current favorite thing on the radio (for now it has slightly beat out my devotion to Michael Feldman’s What do you Know? on NPR). Yesterday’s broadcast had some funny bits about the election.

The Friday Night Comedy is best appreciated if you listen to the daily BBC news - then you get all the jokes!

Old Bailey Online - The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913. A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.

Want to find an interesting branch of your family tree? Try searching on this new database of criminal records. Anyone involved with trials at the Old Bailey in London (England) between 1674 and 1913 is on this data base. The Old Bailey Online was launched this month and is already swamped with visitors (so the site may be slow). We heard about it on the BBC radio news.

I don’t know enough of my family tree to do any searching but I would love to hear from anyone who finds a relative in the database. They have a nice feature on the home page, “On this day in …”, where you can start diving into this interesting database, but each time I click it, nothing appears. We all need to wait a few weeks until they get their servers up to speed for all of us who will be searching.

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-1865) wrote the novel “Cranford” (published in 1853), a comic picture of life in an English village in the mid 1800s. She wrote her novels just after Jane Austen (1775 - 1817) novels were written.

The first season of Cranford comes to PBS in North America in May (airing May 4, 11, and 18) in three episodes. From the PBS site: “Welcome to Cranford, circa 1840…a rural English town where etiquette rules, undergirded by a healthy amount of gossip. ” Staring: Judi Dench, Philip Glenister, Francesca Annis, Michael Gambon. Read more on the PBS site.

Cranford was filmed in the historic Wiltshire village Lacock, just north of Bath.
We visited Lacock a few years ago.

The novel Cranford was adapted for TV by the BBC and shown in five parts at the end of last year in England. Read more on the BBC site. A second season will be shown on the BBC for Christmas 2009.

If you can’t wait, it is already on DVD - Cranford on DVD.

» Read the rest of this entry

We are working on creating our Cotswolder website, a travel guide for the Cotswolds in England. We plan to launch the site in June.

I will be posting weekly to this Cotswolder blog with posts about England, travel to England, the Cotswolds, or experience England when you are not there.

I moved my Views from the Slow Lane blog from slowtrav.com (my old website) to sloweurope.com (my new website). This blog focuses on European travel and European vacation rentals. Come and see us there: Views from the Slow Lane.