Finding Anglia

I’ve written elsewhere about Anglian worms, but the word Anglian gets tacked onto all manner of things related to the region of Anglia. I tend to mistake Anglian on first reading as Anglican (Anglican worms is a nice concept, somehow), but that’s because I’ve had a lot of dealings with Anglicans in the last few years. So where is Anglia? I thought I’d better check it out as it’s obviously a word I need to know more about. Here’s a quote from the Anglian Region environment info page: The Anglian Region covers more than 27,000 square kilometres, from the Thames Estuary in the south to Humber Estuary in the North, and from the East Anglian Coast to Daventry in the West and the main urban areas are Norwich, Peterborough, Ipswich, Chelmsford, Cambridge Northampton and Lincoln. That’ll be why I’m always coming across it, as I’ve spent a lot of time in the Norfolk region recently. Anglian is also the name of a long-standing company that does home improvements. I won’t tell my wife: she might want to go and visit them, being a home improvement addict. Our house has been ‘improved’ umpteen times since we moved in nearly thirty years ago. Her brother (who actually lives in East Anglia) is much the same: completing something in a house is merely an excuse for starting some other improvement. And his daughter has inherited her father’s enthusiasm for improving things: she’s added a conservatory onto the kitchen area, a wonderful bright room that sits in the middle of the garden area. (Her cousin, on the other hand, has built on a conservatory in order to remove some of the garden!) None of this has anything to do with the arts, of course - it’s just another one of those posts that’s squeezed itself in surreptitiously. It’s only claim to connecting to the arts, is that the words, home improvement, are music to some people’s ears….