Southend U3A

Writing for Fun

August 2018

Chacun à˴son goût - Jeanette Rothwell

This is a French expression roughly translated "to each his own taste" but often translated as "there's no accounting for taste"

With regard to "Bucket Lists" some relatives of ours who are approaching retirement recently announced that their "Bucket List" was to visit every station on the London Underground. I refer you to the title of this piece. They look up the station on the Internet to see if there is anything of interest near the station, if there isn't they simply alight at the station, seek a cup of coffee and then carry on their journey. They proudly also announced that they had done the Piccadilly line! Being a Londoner, and specifically an Eastender, I find I cannot get excited about investigating such stations as Arnos Grove, Ealing Broadway, Theydon Bois, etc. but Chacun à˴son goût!

Ten years ago, we made a "Bucket List" and in that time have more of less finished it and are beginning to devise another one. We have ticked off Alaska, Portmeirion in Wales, this is a pretty Italianate village where the TV series "The Prisoner" was filmed, the Terracotta Warriors, Great Wall of China, Tiananmen Square, seen the Northern Lights, a ride on a Bullet train in Japan, seen Dubai (not very impressed, too soulless and modern for us), visited Mount Rushmore in South Dakota to see the four Presidents Heads carved into the mountain.

However, more impressively, 10 miles from there we saw "Crazy Horse". This is the world's largest Mountain Carving started by the Indians in 1948. It is not expected to be completed for another 20 years. The Indians are funding it themselves without State assistance. It is so large that you could put several Mount Rushmores into it. Currently it consists of a head with a feather headdress, and an arm 263 feet long, the hand pointing which is indicating the reply to a white man asking "Where are your lands now?" the reply being "My lands are where my dead lie buried" It will eventually show the Indian sitting on a horse but in order to sculpt this out of the mountain there is a lot of rock blasting to be done.

A family of Indians began this project and the subsequent generations of that family are carrying on the work. It really is very remarkable and something we knew nothing about until we visited South Dakota. The symbolism of the carving is very much the story of the ill-treatment of the Indians and there is a museum nearby where you can read the whole story.

The above is only an example of our first Bucket List and we have still to visit Iceland, revisit the Isle of Man to explore it more thoroughly, see a bit more of Ireland, etc. We have slowed down on the long-haul flights and the hassle of going abroad. Getting up at some ungodly hour to catch a flight is proving to be too tiring and we prefer to travel more comfortably, so we look at the journeys more carefully before we book either abroad or UK. We are, of course, optimistic that we are not planning to leave this mortal coil just yet.

My husband has an atlas book of the UK and his ambition is that he would like to see some highlighting of the roads we have covered, on every page of the book. Again, I refer you to the title of this piece: Chacun à˴son goût!