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Thomas Jones's avatar

thanks Ed I love these newsletters. That is indeed a terribly sad wiki page, I thought immediately of Waugh, as this phenomenon was to some extent his motivation for Brideshead, and he does feature. The loss of country houses was a regular theme of his, I remember one of his more playful novels there is someone rebuilding their country house in the modern style, with concrete.

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Roger Laville's avatar

Margot Beste-Chetwynde, I think, in Decline and Fall.

And then there's Boot Magna Hall in Scoop:

"The immense trees which encircled Boot Magna Hall, shaded its drives and rides, and stood (tastefully disposed at the whim of some forgotten, provincial predecessor of Repton), single and in groups about the park, had suffered, some from ivy, some from lightning, some from the various malignant disorders that vegetation is heir to, but all, principally, from old age. Some were supported with trusses and crutches of iron, some were filled with cement; some, even now, in June, could show only a handful of green leaves at their extremities. Sap ran thin and slow; a gusty night always brought down a litter of dead timber.

The lake was moved by strange tides. Sometimes, as at the present moment, it sank to a single, opaque pool in a wilderness of mud and rushes; sometimes it rose and inundated five acres of pasture. There had once been an old man in one of the lodges who understood the workings of the water system; there were sluice gates hidden among the reeds, and manholes, dotted about in places known only to him, furnished with taps and cocks; the man had been able to control an ornamental cascade and draw a lofty jet of water from the mouth of the dolphin on the South terrace. But he had been in his grave fifteen years and the secret had died with him."

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Neil C's avatar

Try to get to a High School Football game when you're in Texas

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Schwarzgeist's avatar

Ah darn most of those places are too far afield for me to meet up sadly. My friend is trying to get me to visit New York and I might take him up on it and schedule it to coincide with your trip but otherwise too far afield. Let me know if you end up in Illinois, Pennsylvania, or Ohio somehow.

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Ed West's avatar

Pennsylvania is not impossible I’ll message you

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Schwarzgeist's avatar

Haha OK but don't go out of your way or anything. Would be fun though!

I'll have to also make sure I'm more financially secure then as I'm between jobs now (massive project with biggest client just now wrapped up, so working on finding new ones). I'll keep you posted.

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Aidan Barrett's avatar

Yiddish also used to be widely spoken in New York City. One can still see old photographs of whole neighborhoods with ubiquitous signs featuring its distinctive script:

https://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/galleries/visualizing-jewish-new-york

The story of this once widespread language of Ashkenazi Jews is I think a really sad one. The heartland in Eastern Europe was devastated by genocide and among the Yiddish-speaking diaspora, it just gradually fell out of favour among the aspirational upper and middle classes in places like the United States and Britain.

I personally think Yiddish has real potential to actually be a lingua franca beyond its core Jewish population given how widespread it already was in big Anglosphere cities in the late 19th and early 20th Century and how influential Ashkenazis have been otherwise (entertainment, merchants, etc).

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Ian Keay's avatar

I am going to push back on "This week the government finalised the Chagos deal, which involves us handing over sovereign territory to an unfriendly power, and then paying them a huge amount for the use of it, in return for which we get… ????? soft power points?" If one confines ones sources of information to the news section (rather than the opinion section), my reading of the actual deal is that the UK, and by extension the Five Eyes, gets physical and military control of the Chagos (plus a 24 mile perimeter) for 99 years. One can quibble with the sausage-making that led to this deal, the optics, the betrayed promises, the payments etc., but in the end the UK gets total control of the Chagos for 99 years. That is not "soft power points", that is hard military power projection into China's back yard until our grandchildren are grandparents. I can live with that.

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Ed West's avatar

but we could have just had control forever by ignoring the judgement.

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Ian Keay's avatar

America is approaching the threshold when the Supreme Court will rule against the government and the government will attempt to have control forever by ignoring the judgement.

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Rob Henderson's avatar

When New York?

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Ed West's avatar

25 October - 2 November

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