It varies. Lots of terminals. Some are out of this world, some are generic and meh, and some are in between. Best part is that it isn't that far away from Central London (even though a cab is quite expensive, there is an express train to Paddington that isn't expensive and gets you into Central London very quickly).
This. Better than Charles De Gaulle and Frankfurt, but that’s the soft bigotry of low expectations. Budapest’s airport is small but sleek and efficient. Istanbul and Warsaw are the top European and Euro adjacent airports, in my experience. I love flying to Rome since they opened an Eataly there.
Give me my small American airports (Wichita, Chattanooga) where I can park my car right in front of the arrivals door for 30 minutes at a time, maybe more if I have my blinkers on.
And baked beans on toast for breakfast is a luxury.
(Edit: at Reagan in DC I saw a cop threaten to arrest a cab driver for lingering too long in front of the arrivals door. In Wichita the cop would make the news and be denounced as a Gestapo/Stasi agent.)
Although cars can't linger in the drop-off lane, Indianapolis International is considered the best mid-sized airport in the country: compact, clean, and easy to use.
Apart from teenage trips to Spain and Mexico I've only ever flown domestically. The Tampa airport here is very well designed to handle the traffic it gets. There are several satellite terminals where the gates to the planes are located surrounding the main building where ticketing and baggage claim are located with shops and restaurants for those who come inside to pick up people. Each terminal has its own security; I've seldom had to wait more than 15 minutes in line and often I've cruised right through the TSA kabuki. The terminals are quite spacious so I've never fell crowded in like a sardine in a can.
It appears the Singapore Airport is beyond compare in this world, but I've never been there. I don't know on favorites, but yes, Budapest has all you could ask for - not crowded, no long walks, a near-free bus to take you there.
But I guess maybe any UK airport is my favorite because, well, I just like the way you talk!
quick edit: changed "they" to "you" because I saw the person I was replying to.
Milwaukee has the only airport in the country with a well-stocked Renaissance Book Store. In fact its now the only venue the store has, although originally it had a five story stock of books downtown also.
I'm at Heathrow departures 2 times a year at least. No soup for you if you want luxury. Not too different form the USA - but - You need a lounge pass for Heathrow. The general lounge is very crowded. There are lots of shops. I'm speaking of T3, normally the terminal for UK to USA. The other terminals are less crowded, but of course they don't have the 100-shop Duty Free shopping mall in an airport. American airport restaurants are often, not always, greasy spoons (Chilis). Heathrow's are not much better, though there is one of those "merry go round, pick your sushi off the belt" places, and there is a pub where you can get sausage.
And...I always have them hold the baked beans! Sausages are great in England. But the bacon - that's not bacon. It's ham!
We flew home from there last year. I am handicapped , use a walker when traveling, and cannot stand for more than a few minutes. My husband found me a seat far across from our gate and he hovered around walking back and forth for more than an hour. Everyone was polite but the crowding was worse than anything we’ve seen anywhere else. He is in the FBO private aviation business and flies all over the US.
You say, "I will never, ever, ever understand how it is that British people can eat baked beans for breakfast." Yes, but have you ever actually seen anyone eat them?
Yes. We shipped tons of Heinz vegetarian baked beans during the war; on toast it makes a perfect protein, and there must have been a pamphlet advising that as a cheap and nourishing meal. It caught on.
There used to be a W.H. Smith bookstore on the Rue de Rivoli with a tea room upstairs. I went up to see what it was all about and there they were, sticking their English beaks into beans on toast. In Paris!
Quick story, but I never ate pizza as a young boy until my grandfather showed me you could eat pizza with salty fish on it. Now I can eat most any pizza!
There is a local sandwich chain here that used to have 20 varieties of their feature sandwich, and on the menu their sardine one was touted as "Our 19th most popular!" Eventually a bigger outfit bought the chain and they got rid of it altogether, alas!
I've enjoyed many a Brit breakfast and I cleaned my plate each time. I am not the biggest bake beans fan, but the combo of foods on the tradBrit platter somehow work and are part of the experience. I look forward to doing it again.
Spoken like a soldier. But - all except the beans, man. Even a little of that horrid bean juice just wrecks what it touches. British bean juice is the worst! Boston baked beans have good juice, but what is that British stuff.
But, I have neglected to mention the great British sauce with breakfast. I speak, of course, of brown sauce! One must request it - it is known only to gourmets of British breakfast. One then puts it on the toast, and the horrid ham-like things they call bacon, on top of the toast, somehow taste good. In combo, as you say. And of course, there must be lashings of brown sauce on the sausage.
For beverage, it is the one meal in the world with which hot tea (milk and sugar) tastes good. British Breakfast Tea or Earl Grey.
And the mushrooms and tomatoes must be fried. I was once near-kicked-out of an Irish place -the Irish pretend the British breakfast is an Irish breakfast - well it was a pretend Irish place in the USA. This for saying I did not want my "Irish Breakfast" when they refused to fry the mushroom. A big raw mushroom. Argh.
Finally, wishing to try all things, I was in a Scottish B and B and was asked "Do you like kippers?". "Yes", I said, pretending to know. Big mistake!
Not long after marrying my Catholic wife I took up the challenge Douthat threw down in his NYT article A Guide to Finding Faith (the challenge being that if you go looking for the supernatural you will find it). It knocked down materialism and a couple of years later I converted
Nietzsche of all people wondered what if the philosophers were doing it wrong, and truth is like a woman?—the idea being that if you're closed off and rude and refuse to court the truth, then well, fine, it won't talk to you either. I also find that very connected to McGilchrist's thoughts on the importance of subjective disposition.
This is a bit cynical, but if the challenge is, 'If you go looking for the supernatural you will find it,' the integrity of the process is 50:50. Maybe you "found" what you wanted to find, not because it is there, but because you wanted to find it. I don't doubt you found much more over a couple of years. I'm content to drift -- yes, its there, no, I don't have a strong feel for it, but my life has definitely gone much better than I have any reason to expect from the random operation of a cold, indifferent universe. I could make a good argument I should have been homeless for the last twenty-five years. (Of course I haven't figured out why those who ARE homeless somehow deserved it, or deserved indifference to their fate).
I don't think I've ever actually eaten the baked beans for breakfast while in the UK, but I'm not that off put by it. Toast done on one side is more off-putting to me (even though my parents were Brits).
Breakfast foods tend to be very polarizing due to how different they are as between countries. England/Ireland and the Netherlands alike seem to have breakfasts that are most similar to the "traditional" sit-down American breakfast (that almost nobody eats anymore except on occasion), but elsewhere it's all over the map, from basically nothing, to a croissant, to the kind of thing I'm sure Rod has seen in hotels in Germany (a mixture of cold cuts, breads, muesli, yogurt and sof-boiled eggs) and Scandinavia (fish, mostly salted). Although, again, in those countries many people just grab something small on their way to work in a bakery or coffee shop (either sweet and sticky, or a small roll with cold cuts and butter). In Japan then have Japanese-style pickles and rice, traditionally.
The interesting thing about breakfast is that the gross-out factor seems quite high when it comes to other countries breakfast foods, at least the traditional ones. I expect that's because while the national forms of food from other meals are more widely known due to the growing availability of various cuisines in restaurants and the like, breakfast isn't included in that, generally, so people are more or less totally unexposed to diverse breakfast foods unlike they are for, say, dinner foods.
Are eggs pretty universally unobjectionable? My breakfast consists of what's basically a homemade egg-and-cheese McMuffin, along with a cup of Greek yogurt.
No , no...the English make only "friend eggs" and the yellow is supposed to run out all over your toast. Yum! They don't know the meaning of "Sunny side up" (literally an unrecognized term) because that is known to be the only way.
(OK, once they scrambled them, to my shock, but we won't talk about that.)
When I was seven, the owner and sold cook at an old fashioned British boarding house noticed I only ate the solid white of the eggs he cooks for breakfast, and asked my parents, "Do your children eat eggs?" He was able to accommodate what I would eat, which was, break up the yolk, fry both sides of the egg hard. I've never had any taste for runny foods. Even ice cream has to be frozen hard for me to eat it.
You'd think, but in practice it seems that eggs are polarizing because of the various ways to prepare them. You'll find soft boiled eggs (in special holders, with special tiny spoons) at German hotel breakfasts, but if you want eggs done differently you have to order them, because it just isn't really done there except for foreigners ... and many Americans are quite discombobulated at the thought of scooping out a soft boiled egg with a small spoon. I don't remember many breakfast eggs in my trips to Scandinavia ... perhaps some hard boiled egg slices.
You know the story about the young curate (CofE) who is invited to breakfast at his bishop's and is served a rotten egg? "Parts of it were excellent, your Lordship."
When, many years ago, I was investigating turning my PhD dissertation into a book through a university press - a project about which I was not, to put it mildly, overly enthused, one scholarly reviewer tried to let me down as gently as possible with the comment, “It’s a bit vicar’s eggy”!
I don’t know about that. Egg cups are not that difficult to find here. I adore eating them that way. I think maybe we just don’t want to wait that long for the water to boil and the subsequent 4 minutes once placing the eggs in the water. We’ve lost a lot of our eating trads in the past few decades.
Soft-boiled eggs in an egg cup (a dual-use thing with one side for a single egg in the shell, and the other for one or more eggs out of it) were a frequent feature of my childhood, provided by my Slovak grandmother.
I have a friend who won't eat any form of potato for breakfast -- not home fries, not hash browns, nothing. Perfectly happy to eat them with lunch and dinner though.
John says he’s enjoying your excellent book but wondering if he should skip the frightening bits. He also says, regarding baked beans in Old Blightie, as the bride is advised on her wedding night by Mother, “ Close your eyes and think by of England!”
With eyes wide open I think of England often, my favorite of all countries. Thanks for your humor today - God blessed us with the British. Skip the frightening bits, indeed. Ha!
One thing I've been thinking about that relates to the idea of Enchantment is the spirit of place. That's what Kingsnorth is after with his Holy Wells series, and I think it ties in with the idea of Christianity being an incarnate faith, so specific places matter.
Along these lines I was impressed by Rod posting about the Sword of St. Michael the other day, which is actually right out there in the woo-woo, being a New Age / neo-Pagan idea originally that has been taken over by some Christians. I don't know whether I actually believe it to be real, and would welcome careful mathematical analysis.
I've been writing occasional Substack posts, which can be seen as tourism itineraries or walking guides, but my aim is for them to be more like what Kingsnorth writes (I wish I could write like him, though!). My latest is very woo-woo at its heart, and as far as I can tell no one has picked up on this before: https://rombald.substack.com/p/a-cathedral-a-missionary-a-burial
A friend of mine is currently finishing a commentary on the Book of Hosea, and as an appendix it will have an essay on the importance of land/place in the O.T. I'm trying to get him to have it published as a standalone essay somewhere so that folks who might not be interested in the commentary can still read it.
I’m quite interested in what you are contemplating regarding place. I’m puzzled, however, by your comment regarding Rod’s article on the Sword of St Michael, “I don't know whether I actually believe it to be real, and would welcome careful mathematical analysis.” I would agree that we can’t just believe all claims we read by people on the internet (no disrespect Rod), but I can’t see how mathematical analysis will lead you closer to truth. Enchantment is living beyond what can be proven by our limited knowledge and resources. I suppose one would have to experience such a thing to “know”, but science won’t necessarily get us to what is ultimate.
There's a term I've heard called the "enshittification" of society, originally applied to the software industry but really can be applied to any area or service with declining quality. Air traffic control seems to be another victim.
I would blame DEI, but really it's just a general decline in quality, independent of the wokery and culture wars. Civilizational decline, people!
The quality decline has been going on for a long time. I think of it as the Walmartization of America: cheap prices über alles, in fact cheap prices are the only value.
When you cut the real wage level in various ways, people can only afford to think about how cheap the price is. It takes a certain level of discretionary spending to worry about qualify and source.
Yes, I'm afraid the sufferings of our host in the past 24 hours or so at Heathrow are not at all untypical for that place.
The sufferings of Frankfurt, however...those should be the 10th beatitude - Blessed are they who pass through Frankfurt, for they shall depart and arrive in a better place.
I know this time last year, DFW was doing lots of runway construction/expansion. It delayed my going to DEVOtional last year (a show that celebrates the music of DEVO in Cleveland, OH). Didn't get to go this year, but I have to imagine those projects are still going on.
I once spent hours on a plane at DFW unable to leave the gate due to a chain of storms that kept coming and coming. It was a 6 am flight. We didn't get airborne until noon.
My wife is English, and we make the Full English every Saturday when it’s not a fasting season, but I flatly refuse to eat the beans. When we visit the in-laws my father-in-law (who makes the best fry up) loves joking at my expense about not eating the beans.
I’ve learned over 20 years to just accept beans on toast as a snack or quick meal, but that’s as far as I’m going.
Quote: "I asked my editor there how it is that an Evangelical publishing powerhouse decided to publish [my book]. He told me that the Evangelical world has changed a lot in recent years."
I.e., Evangelicals have become much more tolerant than they used to be. In the past, they wouldn't have dared to publish works by say Catholics, because too many Evangelicals considered them non-Christian. That has changed. Though I'm sure a book on the virgin Mary would still have a hard time getting published. Funny thing is, I'm planning to write such a book. When I look for source material all I can find is Catholic works. I think that needs to change.
Back around 1990 I listened to a taped lecture series on The Ascension by Presbyterian theologian David Chilton, and in the introduction he said that he could only find one Protestant book on the subject at the time, and only a few Catholic ones. One hopes that such things have changed for the better in the past 35 years!
The Internet lets you find a LOT more these days. The Catholic church has written a lot on the subject. I've found numerous articles cited but have had a difficult time finding them online. Seems you have to go to their archives.
I am specifically interested in how everything God has done to redeem us, had to be done through Mary - and if you were God - how do you get her to cooperate with your plan? In this, she is the masterpiece of how God can allow free will and His sovereignty to coexist.
The bible talks about God being a potter who forms us into what he wants, and if we resist, then he forms us into something else. In my view, Mary is God's best work as a potter of our destinies. If we miss her, we miss how incredible God is as a potter.
How could anyone write a whole book on the Ascension? Do we really need much more than is already in the Bible? The more one writes, the more the author extrapolates, and it becomes a personal mind game rather than a revelation.
Quote: "...the problem had to do with air traffic control in both London and Dallas, and them unable to sort themselves over 'permissions' to land."
I have no idea what happened here, but it sure strikes me as one more way our government could coerce corporations (in this case the airline companies) to not let "certain" people to board. We won't give you permission to land if you let *that* guy on!
I was born-again into a new reality of Christianity in October of 1975. By 1990, I was dissatisfied with the anti-intellectual aspects of the Evangelical Church I had landed in. It took a clear-eyed commitment to the truth, regardless of the consequences to set me right again. I found in my investigations that Christianity is not true because it is Christianity but because it corresponds to reality when ALL the evidence is considered.
This search for the truth is not always easy and can be lonely at times. I still fight the anti-supernatural bias of the naturalistic world around me while I fight the other flank of anti-intellectual paradigms of some of the more flighty elements of Evangelicalism as I attempt to establish a rational faith in a rational God.
In the 49 years of my walk with God, I have not heard any spiritual directives from my Lord to leave the church I stumbled into in my desperation in 1975. Here I serve still in the hope I am influencing the people around me toward the God of their salvation. It is my honour and privilege to do so.
How does Heathrow compare to big American airports? I always imagined it to be sleek and luxurious.
It varies. Lots of terminals. Some are out of this world, some are generic and meh, and some are in between. Best part is that it isn't that far away from Central London (even though a cab is quite expensive, there is an express train to Paddington that isn't expensive and gets you into Central London very quickly).
This. Better than Charles De Gaulle and Frankfurt, but that’s the soft bigotry of low expectations. Budapest’s airport is small but sleek and efficient. Istanbul and Warsaw are the top European and Euro adjacent airports, in my experience. I love flying to Rome since they opened an Eataly there.
Give me my small American airports (Wichita, Chattanooga) where I can park my car right in front of the arrivals door for 30 minutes at a time, maybe more if I have my blinkers on.
And baked beans on toast for breakfast is a luxury.
(Edit: at Reagan in DC I saw a cop threaten to arrest a cab driver for lingering too long in front of the arrivals door. In Wichita the cop would make the news and be denounced as a Gestapo/Stasi agent.)
You can do that in, like, Reykjavik (Keflavik, more precisely).
What luxury? You open a can, heat them up, and pop some bread in the toaster.
Although cars can't linger in the drop-off lane, Indianapolis International is considered the best mid-sized airport in the country: compact, clean, and easy to use.
The best airports I've been are Schiphol and Seoul.
At Schiphol they have a branch of the national museum in the airport, with Rembrandts and so on on display. The chapel is really nice too.
Seoul was great when we had little kids. They have free classes with introductions to Korean arts and so on for children.
Apart from teenage trips to Spain and Mexico I've only ever flown domestically. The Tampa airport here is very well designed to handle the traffic it gets. There are several satellite terminals where the gates to the planes are located surrounding the main building where ticketing and baggage claim are located with shops and restaurants for those who come inside to pick up people. Each terminal has its own security; I've seldom had to wait more than 15 minutes in line and often I've cruised right through the TSA kabuki. The terminals are quite spacious so I've never fell crowded in like a sardine in a can.
Tampa actually works pretty well, I agree. Always efficient in and out of there, unlike some other Florida airports (looking at you, Miami).
It appears the Singapore Airport is beyond compare in this world, but I've never been there. I don't know on favorites, but yes, Budapest has all you could ask for - not crowded, no long walks, a near-free bus to take you there.
But I guess maybe any UK airport is my favorite because, well, I just like the way you talk!
quick edit: changed "they" to "you" because I saw the person I was replying to.
I've never been to Singapore either. Knowing the reputation of Singapore, it having a good airport doesn't surprise me!
Milwaukee has the only airport in the country with a well-stocked Renaissance Book Store. In fact its now the only venue the store has, although originally it had a five story stock of books downtown also.
It’s not!
I'm at Heathrow departures 2 times a year at least. No soup for you if you want luxury. Not too different form the USA - but - You need a lounge pass for Heathrow. The general lounge is very crowded. There are lots of shops. I'm speaking of T3, normally the terminal for UK to USA. The other terminals are less crowded, but of course they don't have the 100-shop Duty Free shopping mall in an airport. American airport restaurants are often, not always, greasy spoons (Chilis). Heathrow's are not much better, though there is one of those "merry go round, pick your sushi off the belt" places, and there is a pub where you can get sausage.
And...I always have them hold the baked beans! Sausages are great in England. But the bacon - that's not bacon. It's ham!
We flew home from there last year. I am handicapped , use a walker when traveling, and cannot stand for more than a few minutes. My husband found me a seat far across from our gate and he hovered around walking back and forth for more than an hour. Everyone was polite but the crowding was worse than anything we’ve seen anywhere else. He is in the FBO private aviation business and flies all over the US.
You say, "I will never, ever, ever understand how it is that British people can eat baked beans for breakfast." Yes, but have you ever actually seen anyone eat them?
I didn't think so.
It’s a WW2 thing, innit?
Yes. We shipped tons of Heinz vegetarian baked beans during the war; on toast it makes a perfect protein, and there must have been a pamphlet advising that as a cheap and nourishing meal. It caught on.
There used to be a W.H. Smith bookstore on the Rue de Rivoli with a tea room upstairs. I went up to see what it was all about and there they were, sticking their English beaks into beans on toast. In Paris!
I miss them, living in Japan!
Point taken, but for someone with British grandparents, bean on toast with bacon makes for a great breakfast!
I bet you don't see too many people eat sardines on toast, huh?
My father liked sardines. Kippers, too. It never rubbed off on me, though.
Is that like anchovies on a pizza?
Yes!
Quick story, but I never ate pizza as a young boy until my grandfather showed me you could eat pizza with salty fish on it. Now I can eat most any pizza!
No! -- sardines taste nothing like anchovies, and vice-versa. I like them both but would never confuse them!
The conceptual similarity, though.
Anchovies are great in a Caesar salad too, if you can find a place that does them that way.
Oh, that’s just a normal part of the idea, I thought. There’s already anchovy in the dressing at any rate.
There is a local sandwich chain here that used to have 20 varieties of their feature sandwich, and on the menu their sardine one was touted as "Our 19th most popular!" Eventually a bigger outfit bought the chain and they got rid of it altogether, alas!
My dad always liked tomatoes and mushrooms with his eggs, and his other fave breakfast was finnan haddie.
“I can clear this room” too: beans for breakfast? Nuh unh!
Taken at any meal baked beans are the gift that keeps on giving. Didn’t Mel Brooks take up that trope in “Blazing Saddles”?
Perhaps morning is a better time than a few hours before going to bed?
I've enjoyed many a Brit breakfast and I cleaned my plate each time. I am not the biggest bake beans fan, but the combo of foods on the tradBrit platter somehow work and are part of the experience. I look forward to doing it again.
Spoken like a soldier. But - all except the beans, man. Even a little of that horrid bean juice just wrecks what it touches. British bean juice is the worst! Boston baked beans have good juice, but what is that British stuff.
But, I have neglected to mention the great British sauce with breakfast. I speak, of course, of brown sauce! One must request it - it is known only to gourmets of British breakfast. One then puts it on the toast, and the horrid ham-like things they call bacon, on top of the toast, somehow taste good. In combo, as you say. And of course, there must be lashings of brown sauce on the sausage.
For beverage, it is the one meal in the world with which hot tea (milk and sugar) tastes good. British Breakfast Tea or Earl Grey.
And the mushrooms and tomatoes must be fried. I was once near-kicked-out of an Irish place -the Irish pretend the British breakfast is an Irish breakfast - well it was a pretend Irish place in the USA. This for saying I did not want my "Irish Breakfast" when they refused to fry the mushroom. A big raw mushroom. Argh.
Finally, wishing to try all things, I was in a Scottish B and B and was asked "Do you like kippers?". "Yes", I said, pretending to know. Big mistake!
Not long after marrying my Catholic wife I took up the challenge Douthat threw down in his NYT article A Guide to Finding Faith (the challenge being that if you go looking for the supernatural you will find it). It knocked down materialism and a couple of years later I converted
Nietzsche of all people wondered what if the philosophers were doing it wrong, and truth is like a woman?—the idea being that if you're closed off and rude and refuse to court the truth, then well, fine, it won't talk to you either. I also find that very connected to McGilchrist's thoughts on the importance of subjective disposition.
This is a bit cynical, but if the challenge is, 'If you go looking for the supernatural you will find it,' the integrity of the process is 50:50. Maybe you "found" what you wanted to find, not because it is there, but because you wanted to find it. I don't doubt you found much more over a couple of years. I'm content to drift -- yes, its there, no, I don't have a strong feel for it, but my life has definitely gone much better than I have any reason to expect from the random operation of a cold, indifferent universe. I could make a good argument I should have been homeless for the last twenty-five years. (Of course I haven't figured out why those who ARE homeless somehow deserved it, or deserved indifference to their fate).
I don't think I've ever actually eaten the baked beans for breakfast while in the UK, but I'm not that off put by it. Toast done on one side is more off-putting to me (even though my parents were Brits).
Breakfast foods tend to be very polarizing due to how different they are as between countries. England/Ireland and the Netherlands alike seem to have breakfasts that are most similar to the "traditional" sit-down American breakfast (that almost nobody eats anymore except on occasion), but elsewhere it's all over the map, from basically nothing, to a croissant, to the kind of thing I'm sure Rod has seen in hotels in Germany (a mixture of cold cuts, breads, muesli, yogurt and sof-boiled eggs) and Scandinavia (fish, mostly salted). Although, again, in those countries many people just grab something small on their way to work in a bakery or coffee shop (either sweet and sticky, or a small roll with cold cuts and butter). In Japan then have Japanese-style pickles and rice, traditionally.
The interesting thing about breakfast is that the gross-out factor seems quite high when it comes to other countries breakfast foods, at least the traditional ones. I expect that's because while the national forms of food from other meals are more widely known due to the growing availability of various cuisines in restaurants and the like, breakfast isn't included in that, generally, so people are more or less totally unexposed to diverse breakfast foods unlike they are for, say, dinner foods.
Are eggs pretty universally unobjectionable? My breakfast consists of what's basically a homemade egg-and-cheese McMuffin, along with a cup of Greek yogurt.
No , no...the English make only "friend eggs" and the yellow is supposed to run out all over your toast. Yum! They don't know the meaning of "Sunny side up" (literally an unrecognized term) because that is known to be the only way.
(OK, once they scrambled them, to my shock, but we won't talk about that.)
Oh, I just figured that they would have no point of reference for what it means for the sun to be up over there, with all the rain and all. . . .
Why, you hobbit-hating Numenor!
At least India reverse colonized them with curry.
Hush! Before Starmer jails you!
I remember a few sunny days in England. Over the course of a year.
When I was seven, the owner and sold cook at an old fashioned British boarding house noticed I only ate the solid white of the eggs he cooks for breakfast, and asked my parents, "Do your children eat eggs?" He was able to accommodate what I would eat, which was, break up the yolk, fry both sides of the egg hard. I've never had any taste for runny foods. Even ice cream has to be frozen hard for me to eat it.
You'd think, but in practice it seems that eggs are polarizing because of the various ways to prepare them. You'll find soft boiled eggs (in special holders, with special tiny spoons) at German hotel breakfasts, but if you want eggs done differently you have to order them, because it just isn't really done there except for foreigners ... and many Americans are quite discombobulated at the thought of scooping out a soft boiled egg with a small spoon. I don't remember many breakfast eggs in my trips to Scandinavia ... perhaps some hard boiled egg slices.
"many Americans are quite discombobulated"
There's definitely something about the thought that makes me think of Alice in Wonderland.
You know the story about the young curate (CofE) who is invited to breakfast at his bishop's and is served a rotten egg? "Parts of it were excellent, your Lordship."
When, many years ago, I was investigating turning my PhD dissertation into a book through a university press - a project about which I was not, to put it mildly, overly enthused, one scholarly reviewer tried to let me down as gently as possible with the comment, “It’s a bit vicar’s eggy”!
I don’t know about that. Egg cups are not that difficult to find here. I adore eating them that way. I think maybe we just don’t want to wait that long for the water to boil and the subsequent 4 minutes once placing the eggs in the water. We’ve lost a lot of our eating trads in the past few decades.
I own a German egg cooker, decorative egg cups, little spoons, the lot. Grew fond of them during my time 'zwischen Alpen und Meer'.
Never heard of one in Wisconsin. Of course a lot of people here are from Bavaria. Maybe its a Prussian thing.
Soft-boiled eggs in an egg cup (a dual-use thing with one side for a single egg in the shell, and the other for one or more eggs out of it) were a frequent feature of my childhood, provided by my Slovak grandmother.
The Dutch eat cold cuts for breakfast as well.
The common denominator in European breakfast buffets is Frosted Flakes ("Frosties"). They love 'em.
I have a friend who won't eat any form of potato for breakfast -- not home fries, not hash browns, nothing. Perfectly happy to eat them with lunch and dinner though.
If I say I like hard cooked crispy potatoes for breakfast, is there anything Bolshevik about that?
John says he’s enjoying your excellent book but wondering if he should skip the frightening bits. He also says, regarding baked beans in Old Blightie, as the bride is advised on her wedding night by Mother, “ Close your eyes and think by of England!”
With eyes wide open I think of England often, my favorite of all countries. Thanks for your humor today - God blessed us with the British. Skip the frightening bits, indeed. Ha!
One thing I've been thinking about that relates to the idea of Enchantment is the spirit of place. That's what Kingsnorth is after with his Holy Wells series, and I think it ties in with the idea of Christianity being an incarnate faith, so specific places matter.
Along these lines I was impressed by Rod posting about the Sword of St. Michael the other day, which is actually right out there in the woo-woo, being a New Age / neo-Pagan idea originally that has been taken over by some Christians. I don't know whether I actually believe it to be real, and would welcome careful mathematical analysis.
I've been writing occasional Substack posts, which can be seen as tourism itineraries or walking guides, but my aim is for them to be more like what Kingsnorth writes (I wish I could write like him, though!). My latest is very woo-woo at its heart, and as far as I can tell no one has picked up on this before: https://rombald.substack.com/p/a-cathedral-a-missionary-a-burial
A friend of mine is currently finishing a commentary on the Book of Hosea, and as an appendix it will have an essay on the importance of land/place in the O.T. I'm trying to get him to have it published as a standalone essay somewhere so that folks who might not be interested in the commentary can still read it.
I’m quite interested in what you are contemplating regarding place. I’m puzzled, however, by your comment regarding Rod’s article on the Sword of St Michael, “I don't know whether I actually believe it to be real, and would welcome careful mathematical analysis.” I would agree that we can’t just believe all claims we read by people on the internet (no disrespect Rod), but I can’t see how mathematical analysis will lead you closer to truth. Enchantment is living beyond what can be proven by our limited knowledge and resources. I suppose one would have to experience such a thing to “know”, but science won’t necessarily get us to what is ultimate.
Does anyone know what happened with air Traffic control? I’ve searched around and have not seen anything in the news.
There's a term I've heard called the "enshittification" of society, originally applied to the software industry but really can be applied to any area or service with declining quality. Air traffic control seems to be another victim.
I would blame DEI, but really it's just a general decline in quality, independent of the wokery and culture wars. Civilizational decline, people!
The quality decline has been going on for a long time. I think of it as the Walmartization of America: cheap prices über alles, in fact cheap prices are the only value.
I should've known!
Walmart wil be what collapses America!
When you cut the real wage level in various ways, people can only afford to think about how cheap the price is. It takes a certain level of discretionary spending to worry about qualify and source.
Decline is a choice. Or a great many choices amplifying and propagating like a perverse version of Adam Smith's 'invisible hand'.
Yes, I'm afraid the sufferings of our host in the past 24 hours or so at Heathrow are not at all untypical for that place.
The sufferings of Frankfurt, however...those should be the 10th beatitude - Blessed are they who pass through Frankfurt, for they shall depart and arrive in a better place.
I don’t know but saw this a few months ago. https://youtu.be/6byj8jfZYRA?si=yPwBKKGqyYf7n_RE
I know this time last year, DFW was doing lots of runway construction/expansion. It delayed my going to DEVOtional last year (a show that celebrates the music of DEVO in Cleveland, OH). Didn't get to go this year, but I have to imagine those projects are still going on.
I once spent hours on a plane at DFW unable to leave the gate due to a chain of storms that kept coming and coming. It was a 6 am flight. We didn't get airborne until noon.
I seriously worry that planes are going to start going down due to this phenomenon of incompetence we are now dealing with from airlines.
My wife is English, and we make the Full English every Saturday when it’s not a fasting season, but I flatly refuse to eat the beans. When we visit the in-laws my father-in-law (who makes the best fry up) loves joking at my expense about not eating the beans.
I’ve learned over 20 years to just accept beans on toast as a snack or quick meal, but that’s as far as I’m going.
Quote: "I asked my editor there how it is that an Evangelical publishing powerhouse decided to publish [my book]. He told me that the Evangelical world has changed a lot in recent years."
I.e., Evangelicals have become much more tolerant than they used to be. In the past, they wouldn't have dared to publish works by say Catholics, because too many Evangelicals considered them non-Christian. That has changed. Though I'm sure a book on the virgin Mary would still have a hard time getting published. Funny thing is, I'm planning to write such a book. When I look for source material all I can find is Catholic works. I think that needs to change.
Back around 1990 I listened to a taped lecture series on The Ascension by Presbyterian theologian David Chilton, and in the introduction he said that he could only find one Protestant book on the subject at the time, and only a few Catholic ones. One hopes that such things have changed for the better in the past 35 years!
The Internet lets you find a LOT more these days. The Catholic church has written a lot on the subject. I've found numerous articles cited but have had a difficult time finding them online. Seems you have to go to their archives.
I am specifically interested in how everything God has done to redeem us, had to be done through Mary - and if you were God - how do you get her to cooperate with your plan? In this, she is the masterpiece of how God can allow free will and His sovereignty to coexist.
The bible talks about God being a potter who forms us into what he wants, and if we resist, then he forms us into something else. In my view, Mary is God's best work as a potter of our destinies. If we miss her, we miss how incredible God is as a potter.
How could anyone write a whole book on the Ascension? Do we really need much more than is already in the Bible? The more one writes, the more the author extrapolates, and it becomes a personal mind game rather than a revelation.
Quote: "...the problem had to do with air traffic control in both London and Dallas, and them unable to sort themselves over 'permissions' to land."
I have no idea what happened here, but it sure strikes me as one more way our government could coerce corporations (in this case the airline companies) to not let "certain" people to board. We won't give you permission to land if you let *that* guy on!
I was born-again into a new reality of Christianity in October of 1975. By 1990, I was dissatisfied with the anti-intellectual aspects of the Evangelical Church I had landed in. It took a clear-eyed commitment to the truth, regardless of the consequences to set me right again. I found in my investigations that Christianity is not true because it is Christianity but because it corresponds to reality when ALL the evidence is considered.
This search for the truth is not always easy and can be lonely at times. I still fight the anti-supernatural bias of the naturalistic world around me while I fight the other flank of anti-intellectual paradigms of some of the more flighty elements of Evangelicalism as I attempt to establish a rational faith in a rational God.
In the 49 years of my walk with God, I have not heard any spiritual directives from my Lord to leave the church I stumbled into in my desperation in 1975. Here I serve still in the hope I am influencing the people around me toward the God of their salvation. It is my honour and privilege to do so.
So, Rod, although you grew up in Louisiana, you mock the Brits for enjoying beans on toast for breakfast.
As the old joke goes:
It is feared a new toxic invasive species has been detected in parts of the United States.
People in 49 states: "Gah! Yuck! Eww!"
People in Louisiana: "What it taste like fried?"
Douglas Adams said something like, there's a reason no language has the expression "as pretty as an airport"
Spam and eggs in Hawaii! That's a true breakfast.
If they had served that at the Nore, a lot of trouble could have been avoided.