So we had our first very welcome visitors last weekend. Not only do we get to see and/or meet Stephan’s cousin Alison and her friend Melissa, but we actually went out and did stuff. Like this:
Went to Warwick Castle, where there were peacocks and a birds of prey show and a wax figure of Queen Elizabeth, among others, and a ghost tour and a fake joust.
Stopped by Stratford-upon-Avon, where we saw the outside of the house in which Shakespeare was born and the outside of the building in which whatever is left of him is kept. Also a stretch SUV full of wee witches and wizards who alighted at the magic shop.
Drove up to the Lake Windermere, where most of us had cream scones and one of us had a hot buttered rum scone and almost knocked over a waitress with his or her elaborate arm gestures.
Continued driving to Keswick, where a very nice lady gave us her parking spot and her parking stub and we had a delicious vegetarian meal at a restaurant attached to a bike shop, in spite of them erasing their specials one by one from the specials board just as soon as we tried to order them.
Drove around Derwent Water, which was beautiful and made our Lake District trip totally worth it, though the jury is still out on the 1.5 hours of 10-mph creeping down the M6 when we got stuck behind all the people returning from their half-term holidays at Blackpool.
Took the tram into Birmingham for a delicious dinner, after which we missed the last tram that went all the way to our stop, requiring us to disembark sooner than planned and complete the trip by bus at midnight or so.
Of course it was not all fun and games. In a retrospectively foolish moment, we drove right past the Cumberland Pencil Museum in Keswick. Although our touristy brochure did indicate that a) the museum houses the world’s largest pencil, and b) the pencil was invented in or around Keswick, other pencil questions remained unanswered.
Did the first pencil actually contain lead? Or: does lead even transfer marks like the pencils of today?
Did the pencil inventor envision what a runaway success the humble utensil would be?
Did said inventor die of lead poisoning, not unlike Madame Curie succumbing to radiation?
Did he (it’s always a he) really invent the pencil, or had it secretly been invented thousands of years earlier in China and hushed up?
After several grueling minutes of Internet research, I discovered that, no, the first pencils were made with graphite from a large deposit discovered in Cumbria in the 1600s. Since it was before chemistry had really hit its stride, they just called it lead, and the locals used it to mark their sheep. When it was discovered that the graphite could be used to line cannonball molds, the deposit became the property of the crown, and the graphite had to be smuggled out for writing purposes. And it was the Italians who came up with the encasing it in wood part. So now you know, and you don’t have to go to the pencil museum after all.
And all of this reminds me of how Stephan told me that no one person could actually make a pencil. Someone cuts and shapes the wood, someone makes the lead, someone makes the glue, someone makes the paint, someone makes the little metal bit that holds the eraser on, someone harvests the latex and/or makes the rubber, and finally someone else puts it all together. And then there’s all of the business about manufacturing and maintaining all of the machines and vehicles involved in the manufacturing and transportation.
Pencils: they really make you think.
