Fruitcake tales
Who's who in the zoo
Still working, ineffectually, at establishing a habit.
Sometimes my Aunt D will come over. When she comes over the dog will bark at her and we will scold the dog until she comes in the door and the dog wags its tail and she rolls her eyes. D will stand at the dining table with her hands on the back of a chair, as if she might sit at any moment, which she never does. Sometimes there is fruitcake, or a cup of tea. Then they begin.
Do you remember Mary Wilson, they’ll say, and start spinning the web, this country town who’s who. Whose sister, which shop, whose classmate. Angela Taylor, they’ll say - oh, isn’t she a Morris? Over fruitcake they circle, prowling hunters, gradually closing in until they have it cornered, the name of the day skewered on its own context. In the end comes the actual story which is usually that D saw her at the IGA, or her uncle’s died.
I am reading about the Plantagenets. The Plantagenets are in the news because of a university administrator in Leicester who may or may not have rudely scoffed at a woman who claimed to know where Richard III was buried, and in the end did, at least on certain theories of knowledge, know where Richard II was buried. I read three and a half sentences about this in the news and am ready for Wikipedia, for the story of a woman’s research dismissed by a sneering establishment.
Instead I find the story of a woman who felt a psychic connection to the bones of the last Plantagenet, who became certain when, standing in a carpark, she looked down at her feet and saw a capital R painted on the pavement - R for Richard, in a psychically influenced sense; R for Reserved Parking, in the more prosaic, reading the letters left to right, sense. After they dug up the carpark and found the bones of Reserved Parking they reburied him, in Leicester Cathedral, and this woman attended, dressed head to toe in black.
Wikipedia tells me she is a Ricardian. This is a word that exists because there are enough people like this to warrant a word, people who feel deeply moved by Richard III and history’s unkindness to him. It is a type. The first Guy Fawkes Night I spent in England some gangly teenagers in black tie stood around the fire, toasting “death to traitors”, the survival of some noblemen and death of some others 400 years earlier somehow filling them with relief and pride.
This is why I am reading about the Plantagenets today. Once you are calling them the Plantagenets you are already badly in the rabbit hole, Lancasters, Tudors, whatever, cousins of cousins. Wikipedia tells me severely at some point that the HOUSE OF HANOVER was succeeded by the HOUSE OF SAXE-COBURG AND GOTHA, which sounds dramatic, and happened in 1901 which is, in my vague and impressionist understanding of history, a time when Things Were Happening -- but it turns out these are just surnames and this is just fruitcake gossip. Edward Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, oh, isn’t his mother a Hanover? No doubt their uncles died too just like the Morrises’ though probably none were ever seen in the IGA.