Well, at 3:30 PM ET on 27 December, the BYU football team will face Georgia Tech in the 2025 Pop-Tarts Bowl, in Orlando, Florida. Given the name of the bowl game, it’s reasonable to assume that the half-time show will be headlined by the cast of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. And, after all, why not? They seem to be everywhere else these days. (See this, for example, from the New York Times via the Salt Lake Tribune: “Mormon women are taking over our screens: Across reality shows, social media and bestselling books, women raised in the church have increased its profile across pop culture.”). And, from Meridian Magazine, see this also: “When a Reality Show Becomes a Distorted Mirror: What “Mormon Wives” Reveals About Fame, Faith, and Misunderstanding”
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)
Are you looking for a unique and very memorable Christmas gift? Let me suggest one to you: “Church History And Great Britain With the Interpreter Foundation.” And here’s the really wonderful thing about it: Those in the tour group will be accompanied by Peter Fagg, a superb licensed English Latter-day Saint tour guide who knows British history — and, in particular, Latter-day Saint British history — like the back of his hand, and who knows how to make it come to life in a remarkable way. (We’ve traveled with him on numerous prior occasions and, if anything, he’s gotten better with the passage of time.)
(Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0)
I should, however, state upfront that our tour will not be visiting the Shetland islands. Absolutely not. My wife and I like to relax late at night, to distract ourselves from the day’s frenetic activity, with the occasional good British mystery video. And you can learn a lot from such shows that you might rather have not known.
Lately we’ve been lulling ourselves to sleep by binging on episodes of the British murder mystery Shetland, and I’ve concluded that the place is simply too dangerous to visit. The number of homicides there per capita — or perhaps better, per head of sheep — seems to be insanely high. We’re now adding the Shetlands to our list of places to avoid in Great Britain.
There are, it’s clear from our television viewing, some very, very dangerous places in Great Britain. We’ve already been acutely aware, for example, from reading and seeing stories about Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple that Miss Marple’s home village of St. Mary Mead — located in Downshire, which is later known as Radfordshire, and which, according to the BBC, is now called Middleshire — is an extraordinarily risky place to live. So we’ve checked St. Mary Mead off the list of possible places to stay.
And then there’s the county of Midsomer, which straddles part of Berkshire and the northern portion of Hampshire. We’ve watched many episodes of the ITV series Midsomer Murders, and we’ve become quite familiar with the bizarre crimes that frequently occur in the Midsomer county town of Causton and in the picturesque villages that surround it. Pretty, yes. But pretty deadly, too. No thanks.
And what about Oxford? I’ve always been fascinated by the two university towns of Oxford and Cambridge, and one of my serious lifetime regrets is the fact that I never studied at either school. Perhaps, though, it’s been for the best:
We’ve long been fans of the Inspector Morse detective series, and so, accordingly, we’ve also watched many episodes of its spin-offs, Lewis and Endeavour. Thus, we’ve been appalled to learn how violent and dangerous Oxford and Oxfordshire are. In particular, it’s now clear that the faculty of the University of Oxford are an especially adulterous, fraudulent, and homicidal lot.
Still, because it’s just so very, very interesting, we will take our tour group to Oxford (and to Cambridge, which, if anything, I like even better than Oxford). But we care about survival and self-preservation, too. So, right now, I’m considering safer, more serene places for future tours. Like Detroit. Or somewhere in the neighborhood of the University of Chicago, say, or near the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Places where we stand at least some chance of not being poisoned or ending up at the bottom of a medieval well.
At the moment, though, we’re in Southern California. I’m reminded of the words of Sir Walter Scott:
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.
Whenever I fly into Southern California these days, I find myself thinking that this is where the members of my nuclear family lived, died, and are buried. By far the majority of the people to whom I looked up as a child and as a young man are now gone. They, too, are mostly buried here. I think of all the life and experiences that I had here. I’ve never been overly nostalgic, but I think I’m becoming so. It’s been, as my friend Lou Midgley likes to say of his, a charmed life. So many memories.
Growing up here, I never thought of California as being especially green. Now, though, having lived in Utah for much of my life, with stays along the way in Jerusalem and Cairo and excursions in Anatolia and the Iranian Plateau and similar garden spots, it seems positively lush. And even the air is different. More humid. More dense (because closer to sea level). I feel it. I feel at home here.
I had my obligatory date milkshake today, at the Shake Shack at Crystal Cove, just off the Pacific Coast Highway. Back when the PCH was the major route from our place in the San Gabriel Valley down to see my father’s brother and sister and their families in the San Diego area, date shakes were a required stop along the way. I like them, but I have to admit that my major reason for stopping off there is, well, tradition.
Posted from Newport Beach, California
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In