The “real” Craggy Island, the one in the helicopter shots shown in the opening sequence, is Inisheer, the little one on the right.

The whole thing is tucked away in the Galway Bay:

That got me to thinking about the most outlying points of the British Isles, and sure enough, there’s a wikipedia page for that too. Did you know that the first person to visit each of the most outlying points of Scotland is also the only person to do so? He did that in 2007. He’s also the only person to sleep on all of them, a feat accomplished in 2009.

There’s also a list of the most extreme points of the United Kingdom. But when I was looking it over, I became confused. The points of the United Kingdom are listed…but so are points for Great Britain, and they’re different. And what are Crown dependencies?

Luckily Jey came to my rescue, sharing with me this video which was apparently making the rounds not too long ago. It explains in a very clear and concise manner the difference between Great Britain, the United Kingdom, the Crown and a whole mess of other titles of ownership I had no idea even existed. Enjoy!

What’s taking so long?
Most of the films we’re chosen are on the timeline because they’re great works of art, or tell a fascinating story. Others are there because they’re the only available option. This makes for some slow movie watching periods, because it’s hard to make time to sit and watch something we know we probably won’t enjoy all that much.

Where are you on the timeline now?
We’re currently eight films ahead of the blog, meaning we’ve just watched the film about St. Patrick, while I’ve only written up to Alexander (a gap of about 800 years). This is mostly because we’ve been settling into our new house, and I’m going to make an effort to catch up on writing before we get too much further along.

Where do you find copies of all the films?
Some of the movies we’ve chosen for the timeline are rare, from a small release, or aired on television many years ago, and frankly lots are nearly impossible to find. Our sources are, in descending order: Netflix discs and Netflix Instant (the American equivalent of Lovefilm), DVDs rented from the library, series posted to YouTube or other video-sharing sites, and torrents.

It’s frustrating when we can’t find copies of something (I wrote a bit about that here and so far that list includes the animated Y Mabinogi, Vercingétorix, the 1978 BBC series “Living in the Past” and a TV version of St. Patrick’s story narrated by Liam Neeson)…but most of the time it’s a fun little treasure hunt.

Do you watch everything in order/what do you do when a new film is released?
We watch everything in order, with some backtracking allowed where necessary (for example, we are waiting for the DVD release of The Eagle).

There have been some fantastic films about British history released recently, including Bright Star, The Young Victoria and The King’s Speech. We have watched none of them. (If you know about my passion for Romantic and Victorian literature, you’ll understand the level of my commitment to this project.)

Is the timeline complete?
I created the timeline with a lot of online research, but as we begin a new period I have another look and try to add things I missed the first time around. The History of Britain series by Simon Schama is one of the things I discovered after we’d finished with pre-history, but it’s proven very useful as a primer on the Saxons and Normans, and that’s only the first episode.

Also, I’m wondering if I should create a timeline with the films intermixed with significant events or artifacts like the Lindow Man. Thoughts?

How has it been so far?
We both agree that even though we are only just now getting into post-Roman Britain (with a side journey into Europe, for context) we’ve already learned a massive amount about Britain’s history. Britain is wonderful in that many of the artifacts of even these earliest periods still exist, from henges to the Roman roads and beyond.

Any other questions about how the project is run? Post a comment below.

And, I didn’t realize it was being released so soon. When I first heard about it (last year), 2011 seemed so far away… Guess I’d better get on with the book before the film arrives.

If you can’t see the embedded trailer below, visit the site to watch.

We’d been planning to go to England for the holidays for about six months, to surprise Jey’s parents. This meant six months of rigamarole as all the siblings concocted elaborate ruses about where they’d be, how to get presents to where, and so on. So by the time we’d forcibly fit all of our wrapped gifts into a single suitcase, we were already tired.

Little did we know that a stopover in Dallas to see my parents would turn into a much longer ordeal, and we would yearn for the relative relaxation of battling Christmas crowds full of children flying tiny wireless helicopters.

A map detailing every leg of our journey; click to view at a larger size

Note: we were flying on standby, which means you only get a seat if there’s space available, and generally other standbys are higher-ranked than us to boot.

Another note: this post gets lengthy, so if you can’t be bothered with the details, skip to the end for the TL;DR summary.

The snow hit Heathrow right when we were about to leave, so we were still hopeful that we’d be able to get on one of the two planes out of DFW International. But Heathrow shutting down meant planes weren’t returning to the US to be filled again, and flights-full of people were getting moved to the next plane over, or diverted via other cities. Several days’ worth of cancellations meant that literally every seat had a passenger. To discover this, we had to go to the airport, check in, wait at the gate for four and a half hours until the plane had departed, repeat for the next flight (usually waiting a bit less time), then going home again. Repeat for three days.

Eventually we decided to try flying out of New York City, as they had at least six flights going to Heathrow each day, plus connections to other European cities. The Eurorail was shut down, but we figured, there’s also land and sea.

In New York, we fared much better. We did spend the entire day in the airport, but we were pretty high up in the lists of standbys. There were a lot of people trying to get out of NYC, most of them crowded around the ticket desks at the departure gate — and when a British crowd receives bad news, they get hilarious. So that took some of the edge off.

Eventually, we were booked on a flight to Paris, and while at the gate the agent told us we’d have a much better chance of getting out of Brussels — if we could leg it to the complete opposite end of the terminal in time.

Number of airline employees who quite literally laughed at us, denied we would ever have a chance of flying out, and told us to enjoy our Christmas in New York: 4

Number of Jeys and Laus laughing in desperate, hysterical relief when we showed up red-faced and sweaty, and were allowed on the plane despite clearly being crazy people: 2

Once on the plane, we settled in for a restless sleep, having already messed up our west coast sleep patterns several days previous. When we woke as the plane was landing, we were surprised to hear that we had not arrived in Brussels, home of the Manneken Pis, but Dublin, home of the Men Who Can…well, you get my meaning.

As it turns out, the plane’s wing was leaking water, and had we tried to land in -14 degree Brussels, it would have frozen and made us crash. Fantastic! The Dublin airport had opened only two hours before we landed because of all the snow, and our flight attendant pal told us he’d never seen Ireland with any snow, much less completely covered.

The banks of snow were so high around the runways that the requisite emergency vehicles (“Standard procedure,” said our reassuring flight attendant friend) couldn’t even get to us. There were bunnies hopping around in it.

We sat on the runway for three or four hours as the ground crew tried to unfreeze the wheels of the portable stairs to get them close to the plane, so they could make repairs and coat it with a de-icing gel. Finally, we took off on our short hop to Brussels.

By this point, we were tired, jetlagged, smelly, dirty and frustrated. Our phones were dying. We’d missed our first (non-refundable) connecting flight out of Brussels due to the Dublin stopover, and had a few hours to wait before the next one, which would take us to Manchester. So we were pretty emotionally unprepared when we had to re-enter security, and they forced us to open every single one of our carefully wrapped Christmas presents and show them to a security agent.

Mostly it was books. Why could they not send them through the scanner a second time? The world will never know. We looked away when unwrapping the gifts we’d picked for each other. There may have been some tears shed. This was 100% the lowest point of the entire trip, so I’ll not dwell on it any longer.

Instead of partaking in a large pint at one of the many bars scattered around the airport, we found the gate for our Manchester flight, which was located in one of the remote add-on wings the airport built to accomodate short-distance planes. While it was technically a building, it was freezing cold, set on top of concrete and you could hear water running in the ceiling.

[Speaking of water, a fun fact about Belgium: they have the worst water in the world! (Seriously. "Sewage-laden.") We wondered why the tap water smelled strange. Further research revealed that not only do they have terrible quality water, they didn't actually make fixing the situation a priority until the 00s. Given this, you would be surprised at how scarce was bottled water for sale in the airport, how small and expensive the bottles. Maybe that's why all the beer?

What a revelation to learn how privileged we have been, to grow up in a place where water is not only abundant -- what you might normally imagine is the problem for deprived areas of the world -- but also considered a human right.]

Our flight to Manchester was on a discount airline, and the plane literally had propellers on it. We landed, got a hotel room, and woke up at 5 to catch the earliest possible train to London. We’d booked on a Virgin train and it was fantastic; it was quiet, and the entire British countryside was blanketed in white.

We spent a few hours in the city (and saw Love Never Dies). Relieved to finally be in the safe, comforting embrace of the homeland, where everything is polite and orderly, we boarded our train to Dorking.

Which was cancelled when 3/4ths of the signals at Waterloo Station went out.

TL;DR: After many cancelled and redirected flights, stopovers and train fails, we finally reached England, where things weren’t all that much better, but at least we were with family.

“After the death of his father King George V (Michael Gambon) and the scandalous abdication of King Edward VIII (Guy Pearce), Bertie (Colin Firth) who has suffered from a debilitating speech impediment all his life, is suddenly crowned King George VI of England.

With his country on the brink of war and in desperate need of a leader, his wife, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), the future Queen Mother, arranges for her husband to see an eccentric speech therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). After a rough start, the two delve into an unorthodox course of treatment and eventually form an unbreakable bond.

With the support of Logue, his family, his government and Winston Churchill (Timothy Spall), the King will overcome his stammer and deliver a radio-address that inspires his people and unites them in battle. Based on the true story of King George VI, THE KING’S SPEECH follows the Royal Monarch’s quest to find his voice.”

With this cast, it’s bound for success. It’s currently at 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and there’s already whispers of Oscar nominations.

In terms of watching, we’re just about to close out the “Roman Britain” period and enter into “Sub-Roman Britain (Saxons and Normans)”, which is a period that yielded plenty of fascinating stories. Since the film version of “Eagle of the Ninth” isn’t coming out until 2011, I’m reading the 1954 book to fill in some of the gaps between 117 AD, Gladiator (192 AD) and the story of St. Patrick (440s).

And finally, it’s a sad fact that this early in the timeline, relevant movies are sparse, and it’s always a bit painful to have to skip over something when we can’t get ahold of a copy. So I’m also quite pleased to have located a copy of the last film in the Sub-Roman segment, a 1976 BBC teleplay called “Penda’s Fen”.

Like many stories that deal with Britain’s mythological history, it blends contemporary and historical elements, the latter of which qualifies it to represent the 650s AD. If we’d had to skip, it would have been a jump from the 440s to the 800s with nothing in between, which I’m sure we can all agree would have been tragic indeed.

Today I heard a great interview on the radio today with the author of a new biography about Cleopatra that goes back to original sources.

Listen to the story here (if you’re in the US — not sure if it works in the UK). Just in case, I have uploaded the mp3 file here. Usually NPR will post interview transcripts within a few days, so keep an eye on it.

There is also an excerpt available here.

If the name is indelible, the image is blurry. Cleopatra may be one of the most recognizable figures in history but we have little idea of what she actually looked like. Only her coin portraits — issued in her lifetime, and which she likely approved — can be accepted as authentic. We remember her too for the wrong reasons. A capable, clear-eyed sovereign, she knew how to build a fleet, suppress an insurrection, control a currency, alleviate a famine. An eminent Roman general vouched for her grasp of military affairs. Even at a time when women rulers were no rarity she stood out, the sole female of the ancient world to rule alone and to play a role in Western affairs. She was incomparably richer than anyone else in the Mediterranean. And she enjoyed greater prestige than any other woman of her age, as an excitable rival king was reminded when he called, during her stay at his court, for her assassination. (In light of her stature, it could not be done.) Cleopatra descended from a long line of murderers and faithfully upheld the family tradition but was, for her time and place, remarkably well behaved. She nonetheless survives as a wanton temptress, not the last time a genuinely powerful woman has been transmuted into a shamelessly seductive one.

Fascinating, right? Based on the interview and the excerpt, I’m definitely going to buy this book. And you can too, right here at Amazon US or Amazon UK!

There has been some relevant media-related news trickling through, however.

The film version of Never Let Me Go is due out September 15, although it won’t go into wide release in the UK until January. (Why are they making movies of all the books that have made me cry? I’ve just seen the trailer for Norwegian Wood and I’m not sure my tear ducts are up to it.)

October will see Nowhere Boy, about John Lennon’s youth (also with that super-cute sloe-eyed little boy from Love, Actually as Paul McCartney).

And though it’s a long way off (August 2011), I’m very excited to read that Stephen Moffat’s Sherlock is getting a well-deserved second series.

Y Mabinogi, aka Otherworld, is an animated version of the Welsh mythological record Pedair Cainc y Mabinogi (the Four Branches of the Mabinogi).

Since it was an independent Welsh production with a limited run, we can’t easily get ahold of a copy of it in time for us to watch it in the right timeline order. Which is a shame, because it looks like something I’d enjoy (naked ladies portrayed above not withstanding), and it’s a famously complicated story to portray, with its four interwoven narratives. I hold out hope for future viewing though.

Another helpful internet stranger, Sara C, recommended that we week out the BBC documentary series “A History of Britain” with Simon Schama, which ran from 2000 to 2002. The series looks great, and even better, is available through Netflix (though it’s also on YouTube for those of you who are feeling impatient). Nobody does historical documentaries like the BBC does historical documentaries. A highly valuable new addition to the timeline.

And finally, I never would have found the 1983 version of King Lear without the advice of Phanx, who pointed out that this particular production adheres to the appropriate setting (Stonehenge) for the myth of Leir of Britain.

This project wouldn’t be possible without all the helpful advice and collaboration we’ve received. Cheers to all of those who have helped so far!