Unfortunate Progression of Wives

I’ve the emergency exit seats here.  The young lady came and gave me a rendering of my passenger obligations associated with sitting here.  I nodded.  She then repeated the entire litany in English.  I explained in Chinese that I’d understood the first bit.  I remember one of my stepson’s first flights in the U.S.  The brassy stewardess rolled up to him and ploughed into her spiel:  “In the event of an evacuation . . .  Do you agree to each of these?  Hello?  Do you?"  He was confused and before we could say another thing, she asserted that he’d have to move because he was not qualified to assist in an emergency.  Fine.  You find him another window seat then. 

I’m about half way through “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel.  I got this for Christmas two years back and its’ sat there on my shelf the whole time.  Winner of the Booker Prize it has been lauded from all quarters and friends have suggested it was wonderful.  I’m finding it all a bit spacious and pensive, frankly.  I keep waiting for it to take off.  A cardinal has met his fate.  Richard Cromwell gets a knock in the night.  I’ve gone and refreshed the memory of the unfortunate progression of wives, and of how the pivotal players like Thomas More, Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell all met their fate. 

I think I resist this period because it is the effective end of whatever was medieval in England. I don’t suppose there was much different about the peasants of 1381, and the peasants of 1530.  But Henry VIII does what many had dreamed of but certainly no English king had ever done, by breaking with Rome.  Once you do that, the power of church and the state both in the king’s hands, you’re in uncharted “modern” territory.  England becomes the “protestant” land we know today.  A horrible new era of bloodshed and schism has begun that will last to our own era when Elizabeth Windsor finally heads over and apologizes for things in Gaelic, there in Dublin.

I’ll dive back in in a moment.  We’ve been told to power off.  That’s why you have a book on a plane.  I’ll see if I can’t finish it off on this trip.  But it’s feeling like more of an early modern chore than the “astonishing” “masterful” excursion touted on the dust cover.  We’ve still a ways to go.