Diamond Jubilee Days

After a long hiatus, I’m back. I didn't manage to blog at all last semester, but I promise intend to be much better at it from now on. After finals week and a great trip to Eugene, I went back to the UK for a three-week visit. It so happened that my return coincided with the Diamond Jubilee – the 60^th anniversary of the Queen’s coronation. This is certainly a big summer for London, and the UK more generally, with both the Jubilee and the Olympics in late-July/early August, so it was therefore interesting to see the ways in which it prepared for and marked these big occasions.

While I’m obviously far from a royalist, it was nevertheless very cool to have this kind of national “big deal”, even if was essentially just a celebration that our unelected head of state was, well, still alive. All the same, I think I was still unprepared for the significant support for the monarchy that these events reflected. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised – the Royal Wedding in 2011 showed there was an appetite for this type of celebration, but since I and many other Brits I know have no particular love for the Queen, it was still kind of a shock to see this outpouring of support for the monarchy.

I went down to London for the thousand-boat flotilla on the River Thames, an event which took significant planning and which hadn’t been attempted for more than three-hundred years. While the screams from the crowd every time the Queen appeared on the riverbank jumbotrons were a little weird, it was very cool and tremendously busy. At both this event and a beacon-lighting ceremony in Milton Keynes the next day, the crowd broke out into a spontaneous rendition of ‘God Save the Queen.’ Very weird. As someone who spends a fair amount of time talking about the UK with Americans, I suppose I think more about notions of national identity and patriotism than I might otherwise. It was therefore really interesting to witness these displays of outward… nationalism(?) that are largely uncharacteristic of the place I call home. It was a fascinating trip, and since I’m not going to be around for the Olympics, I’m glad I was able to be there for this.

After a 37-hour journey involving a few hours in an Atlanta hotel room, a conversation with a Mennonite from somewhere near Rochester and an upgrade to First Class for my domestic flight, I arrived back in Laramie to move house and begin my internship for the summer. The highlight of the Laramie summer calendar is an event known, funnily enough, as Jubilee Days, a festival-like celebration of the Western way of life. Events include a jalapeño-eating contest, a “dog wash and show”(?!), a “bed race,” a Brewfest and small rodeo events. I recently learnt about one particular rodeo event known as “mutton busting,” where – I kid you not – a child wearing a helmet and kneepads is put on the back of a sheep, which (much like their larger bovine/equine equivalents) quickly tries to remove the child from their back by running around.

I’m now more than halfway through my internship, an oral history project on Laramie’s West Side. While it has taken some patience, it’s been an interesting project involving listening to the stories of some of the neighborhood’s older residents. As part of my preparation for the project, I listened to some interviews from Storycorps, a large-scale oral history project, involving people interviewing family members, and segments of which have been broadcast on NPR. You can listen to two particularly nice and touching stories here and here.

I hope to keep you all updated with more posts in the near future! I leave you with a picture of a horse in my friend's front yard at a recent party.

Oh, Wyoming.