New School Kids, The Lord of Alderley and a visit

Met with Nicole Sauder and her friend Dave for lunch in Manchester.  Both are serious musicians, violin and piano respectively, and met traveling around in the world of music and musicians.  We had a nice chat about, well, all sorts of things.  It was great to see both of them again having met them for coffee in March in Manchester.  Fellow New School alum, Abigail Polin, is also in town and the two of them got together last night.  Abigail is here doing work with Andrea at the University and I imagine we (the girls and I) will see her several times before she heads back to Lancaster and NYU from there.
____________

Alderley Edge has a farmers' market.  It's called a farmers' market, but is really a food court as there aren't any farmers there.  There is a fruit and vegetable distributor and a butcher, but no farmers.  Well, I suppose the honey person harvests her own stuff, but still...

Anyway, the Lord of Alderley has emerged on the scene recently and he is waving an 800 year old charter in everyone's faces and claiming it gives him the sole right to have a farmers' market in town.  We'll forget for the moment that the two butcher shops and two markets in the village have the same connection to local farms as the farmers' market does.

I did a bit of research on the Lord.  He doesn't appear on a (super official looking) website which catalogues peers (I think that's what you call lords and dukes and all those folks who sit in the House of Lords.  There is a Lord Stanley of Alderley and I am assuming that this man is different from the Lord of Alderley.  They have different given names and the Lord Stanley fellow does not list ostrich farmer or porn star on his resume - things that some sources on the internet claim are part of the Lord of Alderley's CV.  Anyway, the guy seems like a jerk and he is all frustrated that folks have been having a market without his permission for the past 13 years.  So engaged in the community he rules over that he has not noticed the market for 13 years.  Perhaps he was busy living life under his other persona, Lord Lust, as he was known as a presenter on an X rated TV channel.

Maybe the Yank in me thinks the whole royalty/lord thing is bull, but I do know that it gets my goat when some jerk thinks he is better than everyone else and wants to throw some stupid title around.  In this case, the title may well have been purchased off of the internet.

I currently have emails out to the peerage department at Debreet's - the peerage people, and a man named Richard, the Seventh Earl of Bradford - the fake title opponent, to see what they know about this Lord of Alderley.

Hopefully I'll play St. George to his dragon.

________________
Finally, Andrea's Dad and Chris are arriving tomorrow.

Cheers!