Exterminate!

This one has a little backstory on it, in more ways than one. The thing in the chair is a pretty good approximation of a Dalek, a sort of miniature tank villain that is completely familiar if you've ever watched Doctor Who, and probably utterly unknown if you haven't. The main functions of Daleks are to wheel around grating "Exterminate! Exterminate!" in a high-pitched robot voice while bedeviling the good Doctor and trying to take over the universe. Naturally the Taylors are all Doctor Who fans and Mike and Fiona built this cardboard and plastic Dalek for the boys at some point in the distant past. Which in the photo above is being operated by Daniel, to the amazement and possible consternation of London.


When London and I got to Oakleigh Farm House, the Dalek was sitting in a corner of the laundry room, much like the Dalek in Henry van Statten's underground bunker in the episode "Dalek" from the new but inaccurately named BBC Doctor Who Series 1 (with Christopher Eccleston as the 9th Doctor).

Now I need to take a minute and explain two of the Basic Facts of the Universe. I think it is pretty well universally known and agreed that (No. 1) Moms Are Not Into Fire. (No. 2) But Dads Are. And building piles of things to burn and then burning them--playing with fire, in other words--is therefore one of the secret bonding rituals between fathers and sons.

Now I am going to tell you why Fiona Taylor is a serious contender for the title of Coolest Mom Ever. When I went into the washroom for the first time, she apologized for the state of the Dalek and said that maybe the time had come to put it out in the back yard (well, okay, she said "garden"--I'm translating from British to English for the benefit of my American readers) and let the boys beat it to pieces with their lightsabers. I jokingly said, "Or you could burn it." Which was obviously a joke because of Basic Fact of the Universe No. 1 (see above). But Fiona's immediate, reflexive reaction was to blurt out, "COOL!!", at which point I suffered a minor stroke (fortunately it was a 24-hour stroke and I walked it off).

On our last morning in Ruardean the sun came out and it was Dalek burnin' time, which really ought to be one of the standard holidays if you ask me. In the photo above Fiona is setting up the video camera, the boys are hiding in the shed because, inevitably, it had started to rain just a little, and Mike is doing absolutely nothing. In his defense, his parental role of Fire Bringer had been usurped, so there wasn't much else to do.


About the chair. Originally the Dalek fire was going to be in the garden (back yard), but it was too windy, so Fiona moved the execution ground to the driveway, which is sheltered by the same stone fence that guarded King Eustace the Little-Known during his escape from the Seige of Tewkesbishopsford-Upon-Blatherpuddingcester in the late early middle ages. Okay, I made that last part up, but it seems like the kind of thing you should say about an old stone wall in England, and I don't know that it's not true. Anyway, the Taylors didn't want to char their driveway rocks so they put the Dalek up on an old garden (back yard) chair that was no longer safe to sit on. This turned out to be ironic, for reasons that will be revealed later.


And away she goes! The Dalek burned like the battlements of Braemar Castle during the Jacobite Uprising of 1689 (okay, that one is true).


Not only did the Dalek burn most satisfactorily, so did the chair. First it melted into a deformed shambles, and then into a burning puddle of goo that closely resembled flaming pancake batter and spread out over several square feet. Which I am certain made a much larger and more unsightly mess of the driveway than a few char marks and ashes would have done. But the point, for all you new parents and parents-to-be, is that the Taylors were cool enough to build their boys a Dalek, and then burn it for them.

Because this fire was at least partly for London's benefit, the Taylors christened it The Great Fire of London, which I thought was pretty great. Whose day are you going to make with a giant smoky carcinogenic driveway fire of a popular science fiction villain?

Tragically right after I took the last photo, above, my camera battery died and I had no working replacements. So ends the blaga (blog saga) of our English adventures. This week we're moving down to SoCal and next week we start our new jobs, so don't be surprised if the next update is some time in coming.