Morning (Foreign) Bird Pic

[sleigh]

From France, we move to the UK, which I most recently visited over the New Year's break. This bird is on a sign, specifically over the Eagle and Child pub, where the Inklings gathered. The Inklings were an informal group of writers and academics, most famously including J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, which met at the Eagle and Child in the 1930s and 1940s. You can sit where they sat, drink a pint, and eat a meal -- though like so many of the UK pubs, this one is now owned by one of the "chain" pubs. Still, it's nice to imagine the Inkling's ghosts still haunting the place.

Can an eagle carry off a child? Could a swallow carry a coconut?

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Oh, hey: I had my first illegal half-pint of bitter in the Bird and Baby! Sort of a tribute to the ghosts of departed heroes: Tolkien had been dead no more than a year by then. (And yes, it used to be a better pub. Though of course it didn't do food; no pub did food in those days. I wholeheartedly approve of being able to eat in pubs - and yet. The rise in availability of food is kinda paralleled by the ever-increasing homogenisation and the slow vanishment of what made a great pub.)

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

I agree. The one thing I noticed in London especially is that the menus (both for food and drink) in all the pubs were nearly all the same -- because they were owned by chains.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Yup. And many of those that aren't corporate - especially the rural pubs in the affluent southern counties - survive by catering for serious foodies. Which yay, because survival, and because I am a serious foodie - but they're not really pubs any more, just restaurants under another name. I moved to America and grumbled muchly because there are no real pubs over here - but in honesty, there are precious few left in the UK. I'm glad I had my young-adulthood when I did. And settled in a northern city, where there were still at least a few survivors.