I recently rediscovered an old favorite – Robert Llewellyn’s blog is full of funny and interesting observations of life in the Cotswolds, where he keeps chickens and answers questions about whether there will ever be another episode of Red Dwarf, and browsing some of the entries makes me want to blog more (and better), and other entries make me want to travel more (and sooner). Most of the LlewBlog is about… life as you live it, especially if you’re interested in quiet country life in the Cotswolds, but occasionally have these other lives where you vacuum spaceships with groinal attachments, build things to compete in challenges, or drive people from one place to another while talking about things in general. So the blog covers a lot of topics, but much of it is grounded in Llewellyn’s love for his village

On our visits to the Cotswolds, we spend as much time as we can rambling along footpaths and stopping for lunch at village pubs. The first time we were there, we were met by a perfectly turned out older couple who looked like they stepped out of the pages of some posh magazine. Even their beagle was beautifully dressed for a Day Out. The way they exclaimed “Oh, but you’re Americans!?” made me think we weren’t supposed to be on a public footpath wearing hiking boots taking pictures of duckponds and . Um, well, we’re weird like that.

I took a picture of my husband as he drank his first cool cider ever, sitting in the outdoor garden of one of the big pubs in Bourton-on-the-Water. The look on his face was pure, happy contentment. I couldn’t understand why my compatriots stay in their tour buses, and miss the simple pleasures of a ramble on a warm day, with a cool drink and a good meal at the end of it.

On our second visit, we did more of the same, but it was around the time that the green activists left all the horseshit on Clarkson’s driveway, which made me laugh like stink (well, it would), and made me feel a little less of a foreigner in the Cotswolds. It just seems like a lovely place to call home, if you don’t have Clarkson as your next-door neighbor (he may be a solid chap, but he’s probably always tearing away in the early morning hours in a supercar).

I originally went looking for @bobbyllew’s blog because I ran across references to Seinfeld’s “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” show (AKA CinCgK, or “sink guck”). And after watching it, inevitably, I wondered whether Llewellyn’s “Car Pool” series was still being made or not, and found this recent post which concludes that Seinfeld’s show may well be derivative of his original idea for driving people around and talking with them on camera. But Llewellyn isn’t bothered, because he’s getting a lot of pageviews and downloads, and it’s made him think about making some new episodes to benefit from all the extra traffic he’s getting. He sees it as a “win-win,” which I think is very wise. I hope he does make some new ones, because I used to enjoy watching them where ever he happened to have them (some were on iTunes, some were uploaded to his site).

I’ve added The LlewBlog to my feed readers (lately I’ve been leaning ever more strongly in the direction of Feedly) and it’s on my blogroll.

The latest post is about his chickens, which had their first day out in the garden – which of course reminded me of Mom’s story of one of the aunts, who had an unfortunate encounter with the family chickens (it was either Sis or Florence – probably Sis, who was pretty insufferably prissy according to Mom). This was back… before the Depression, probably not long after the turn of the century. My aunt apparently ran in from the back yard, blubbing and wailing, and holding her mouth open because she’d eaten something nasty and couldn’t get rid of it. She was too prissy to spit it out, the way Mom told it. When she was asked what was the matter, she bawled out, “I shot it was a shockit drop, it was a shicken dobbie.”

Mom used to say it and make faces when she tasted something nasty, so it became a family joke that all the older cousins still get – she was the youngest in her family, and I’m the youngest in this generation, but I’m not sure this joke will make the leap to my nieces or great-nieces and nephews or not. Although, people ARE starting to keep chickens again, it’s kind of trendy. So maybe we’ll still pull it out at family gatherings – we’ve got one coming up in August where I’ll get to see some of the fam-damily in Idaho again. I’ll have to check the details with my sisters, since they heard the story long before I did.

So hey! a real blog post for a change. Just wait until I post the picture of the birdies in the nest on the front porch. Then I’ll be well and truly blogging again.