Search Results for: Knockbrex

Yesterday was the last day of our holiday in Tenby. We had our usual astoundingly sumptuous breakfast at The Townhouse (bless you forever, Huw!), got a slow start to the day, traipsed in to town where we looked in here and there, choosing after a while to enjoy chips and midday drinks while people-watching at a restau-pub, then returned to the Townhouse for a siesta, and — spontaneously — decided to take a last dip in the sea/channel/ocean (depending on how you define your bodies of water and their boundaries). Even I immersed myself, which says a lot, considering what a grumpus I am about beaches. On emerging from the billows, we asked a charming couple with small children to take photos of us and email them to me; alas, this has not worked successfully, so you and I will never know how absurd I look when soaking wet. (I haven’t been sea-swimming in years, maybe decades, bar just possibly having swum at Knockbrex, but not more than once at that).

This left us with a challenge regarding how we and our clothes would dry off, having neither beach towels nor proper bathing gear, but between patient bench-sitting in the sun (not ‘hot’ or even ‘warm’, really, but it took the edge off the breezy seasonable temperatures) and Margaret’s ingenious fan-drier MacGyvering, everything was dry and packable by the next morning. Cleaned and dried off, we celebrated with a last dinner in town, returned, and fell fast asleep. It turned out to be one of those wake-up-every-hour-to-be-sure-it-wasn’t-time-to-leave nights, but we had retired early enough that net hours of sleep was still good. I’d been sleeping like a hibernating bear most of the week, showing that when I don’t have a demanding timetable I am indeed capable of getting seven hours in — but yesterday was not one of those nights.

Today we woke at six o’clock, gathered our bags, trudged reluctantly to the rail station, bidding Tenby a very fond farewell, and from the 7:40 to Cardiff Central to alighting from the X1 back to Abingdon at about 20:30, we spent most of the day in seats on trains and buses, apart from rushing to change trains or to catch said bus. Moreover, the second half of the day involved the rail trip from Peterborough (where lives the only dog carers Margaret trusts with Minke and Flora) back to Abingdon. Minke and Flora are not good travellers; indeed, it would be unfair to tar Flora with the same brush as Minke since, by and large, Flora just prowls a bit and lets out an occasional single bark of frustration or discomfort. Minke, on the other hand, whimpered, moaned, yipped, jumped around, and otherwise made life uncomfortable for us and everyone else in the rail car for most of the journey.

By the time we got home we were knackered, hungry, groggy but not sleepy, and stiff. We snacked for a while, then sleep got the better of us and ended our day. Back to normal tomorrow, whee!

So, this morning Margaret took a walk east on the road past Knockbrex, arriving eventually at the tautologically-named Kirkandrews Kirk. She had a look-round, appreciated the Edwardian folly of building a miniature fortress church with an Arts and Crafts interior, and admired the quaint entry to the churchyard.

 

 

“A lychgate,” I noted. “What’s that?” she responded.

I explained the function of the lychgate as marking the separation of the churchyard from the profane world outside. “And what’s a lych?” Margaret followed up. I indicated that it was a corpse, adding that now it’s mostly known for its association with the undead. A lychgate, I joked, protects people from liches. (The best-known example probably appears in “Wrath of the Lich King”).

 

Margaret pursued the topic. When did the conventional usage of “lych” for “body” (dead or living) drift toward an exclusively dead, then undead, sense? Wikipedia narrates the transition, but without as much specificity as we would have liked. Who, precisely, first used “lich” for an undead villain? Was it a spontaneous change, or did some author inaugurate the usage? Inquiring minds wanted to know.

So we decided to look into the OED, to which I still have access through Glasgow University, provided that I perform the series of ritual incantations that assures the universe that I actually do deserve to consult the reference work and am not merely an unwashed outsider. After having undertaken these steps, having gained access to the sancta sanctorum, I discovered that the OED online doesn’t even acknowledge the undead usage of “lych.” Not only were we balked in finding its earliest usage, we could not have found out that such usage existed at all (though it admits that this entry hasn’t been fully updated).

One reference page oriented toward Dungeons and Dragons cited Gary Gygax’s explanation of why he adopted the term, but that takes us no earlier than 1974. Wikipedia speaks generally about Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, Gardner Fox, and Ambrose Bierce. We still don}t know what counts as first use, though, and we await with eagerness the revelation of the origin of this now-common sense for the term.

[Autocorrect kept correcting my typing of “lich” to “loch.”]