Mean Letters from (the) Bath

The Bus-ta-Move tour afforded sparse time for internet access, since all of our swanky hotels charged an exorbitant hook-up fee (like £15 an hour! that’s daylight robbery!—a little expression I picked up in Bath), and since I’ll be sending this from the airport, or even Island Park, it seems a wee bit moot. But I felt the need to sign off the summer in proper form, so to recap the highlights of the last week, which seems more like a million years… (I have to take out my tour cheat sheet to remember everything we saw and did in a phenomenally short period of time.)

We took off from lovely, Georgian Bath to Stratford, where Kris and I almost had a mental breakdown in the Shakespeare Birthplace bookstore over a card with cats on it and the Macbeth quote “When shall we three meet again?” That place and that line were so evocative of a summer too quickly past, but we laughed through the tears in the bookstore and enjoyed a lunch of pasties on Stratford’s touristy main drag. We only had a few hours before they whisked us off to Wales. In Llangollen (pronounced NOT as spelled, at all) we made up for Stratford by ditching the touristy main drag and hiking up a hill to Plas Newydd, the early nineteenth century home of two Irish women who ran away from convention and unhappy betrothals and spent their lives in one of the most beautiful places on earth, entertaining the literati. Huzzah, old school lesbians! Kris’ parents treated us to a lovely ride on one of the narrowboats on the canal, where we saw sheep and drank the ubiquitous g&t’s, and then headed to a pub for a Welsh specialty: lager and black (the black being blackcurrant cordial that made our beers pink). We slept the night in Chester, had a surprisingly good hotel meal, and spent the morning running about the magpie buildings and a very cool cathedral, not to mention the German salami we picked up for dinner in the market.

That evening brought us to Edinburgh, overflowing with visitors for two famous festivals—the International Festival and the Fringe. Literally, the population of the city tripled, and the streets were awash with tourists, but aside from the persistent Scottish mist and extra garbage at the end of the day, the tourists did not ruin the beauty of this enchanting city.

We started the damp morning off with a guided Globus tour that took us to Edinburgh castle and Holyrood Palace, one of the Queen’s residences. The tour took three hours but could probably have been condensed into 15 minutes, which was frustrating for me, and the crown jewels were nothing to write home about, especially after the diorama-rama that preceded them. It reminded me of the Oxford Story, but without the ride (read: without the availability of a nap). The most exciting bit was the storied “Stone of Scone,” the coronation stone of Scottish kings. It’s just a big slab of sandstone, but it’s got a pretty interesting back-story (which I would recount only after consulting Let’s Go!) and, most important of all, brings me into hysterics every time because 1) Scone is pronounced “scoon,” which 2) reminds me of Kris teaching herself Scottish in the stairwell of our dorm at Lincoln, and 3) teaching Scottish to Tim late one night—“Scoon” was the only thing he could get, despite her noble efforts with the later-trademark Scotch phrase: “Poot yer booooks away. Poot on yer pahnts.”

Anyway, when we finally freed ourselves from Tom of the Kilt and Blue Windbreaker, we tried to dodge raindrops on our own in the crowded capital. We took in a Warhol exhibit at the Royal Academy of Art, saw the High Kirk of St. Giles, made a pilgrimage to the statue of Bobby (a most loyal Skye Terrier), and rounded it all out at the oldest pub in Edinburgh. That night, Kris’ parents treated us again to an excursion called “Scottish Night,” where we had crappy hotel dinner but great music, dance, and hilariously campy schtick by the Scottish equivalent of a borscht-belt comic. They plied us with wine and haggis, which was pretty good (though I am still unresolved about a major haggis contradiction: the simultaneous insistence that everybody eats it and the use of the verb phrase “to drag out” whenever describing the haggis’ presentation, as in “then they drag out the haggis…”). Unwilling to give up on the opportunity to meet Scottish lads (those accents!), Kris and I headed out…not to a pub (surprise!) but to the theatre. It was the Fringe Festival and we were, after a summer of P2S, pros. Our choice? Apollo/Dionysus. It wasn’t because of the naked boy on the advert that we decided on that play. It was the description of intellectually stimulating philosophical dialogue. So we crammed into a tiny theatre (about 48 seats) where the stage consisted of sheets of butcher paper on the floor. There were two naked boys (brothers in real life, it turns out) lying on said butcher paper, and for the next hour, they proceeded to wrestle each other, drink wine and throw it around, talk about Greek mythology, and, essentially, not act. I would have been amused if I were not dying of heat stroke, so in this tiny theatre with naked people in front of me, I practically passed out, eyes half-open and melting out of my seat through the entire performance. Kris refused to look at me because she thought she would turn into a pillar of salt, so she had no way of realizing that I was on death’s door. We gave ourselves high-fives for participating fully in the Fringe experience, but it was really only the story—and the morning after—that was worth the price of admission. When we got on the bus, all of our fellow travelers were excited to know what we “crazy girls got up to last night.” When we passed around the flyer, people fell into hysterics. There was a girl in the play who wasn’t credited, but turned out to have been in the audience. They pulled her out of her seat and took off her clothes. Kris: “I said to myself, if this is going to be that kind of play, I’m outta here.”

All hilarity aside, it was a very productive day in Edinburgh, though I’d love to go back when it’s less crowded. The following morning’s excursion brought some ninth-grade nostalgia, as we visited Sir Walter Scott’s estate at Abbotsford (lovely), and then it was off to York, hometown to our bruiser of a driver, Jason, who had his name (J-A-S-E) tattooed on his knuckles. The town was a charming afternoon amble through some windy streets and past the York Minster, a huge church that makes Westminster Abbey look, as Kris said, “like Westminster Shabby.” Our evening meal was spiced up with a tasting of the traditional ales of Scotland (including Kelpie, made with barley grown in kelp beds. Or something.), and a failed attempt to plan our last days after Bus-ta-Move, frustrated by Ryan Air’s faulty website.

Anxiously, we proceeded on to Belvoir Castle in the morning (pronounced “beaver,” who the blimey hell knows why), and then back to London, where we, unfortunately, spent most of our evening trying to plan our travels. It was a frustrating process involving expensive internet, but we got it all together in the end and managed to get a good night’s rest at the Ramada before we turned into dirty backpackers.

We had the whole morning in London, so we finally headed for the inside of Westminster Shabby, totally inundated with tourists but also rewarding for its array of cool dead people, and then made a beeline for the National Gallery, which, if you don’t know, has some good pictures. Our afternoon was a bit of a grail quest, trucking up and down the Tube lines in search of a record store that carries a 7-inch by that elusive Adonis, Johnny Flynn. We first fell in love with him as the beautiful androgyne in Watermill’s all-male Shrew (he made a very pretty Widow) and when we found out he had a band, well, it was all over… In a record store, we tried in vain to find him, describing his music to the hipster behind the counter alternately as “a guy with a guitar” and a purveyor of “folk rock pop.” Needless to say, that was a fool’s errand, but it took us to two hip neighborhoods we would not have otherwise seen as tourists. We had to rush to the airport to get to Dublin and it was about six hours and as many forms of transport later that we finally arrived in Eire. It was rainy, late, and we were exhausted, so we sprung for a cab to the “exclusive” location of the Mount Herbert Hotel in Sandymount. A good decision, we realized later, because not knowing how to get from the AirCoach to the hotel might have killed us. Later on, though, our exclusive location (0.9 miles from nothing, contrary to the advertisement) turned out okay, as we realized that we were too old for Temple Bar and its hordes of Spanish tourists.

Our first day in Dublin started at the writer’s museum (dense!) and general sense of total disorientation. My first impressions of Dublin were not favorable—it’s not a pretty city, and the diesel buses make it less so. It’s very crowded, and full of dangerous drivers who speed up to hit you, not to mention that the airport (airports, actually, Gatwick and Dublin) seemed like the little mall that cried and its attendant teenage hoodlums. The pedestrian crossing lights do begin with a chirp and a disco beat, which is fun, and after a few hours, I felt more or less oriented and comfortable (less than normal, but no completely lost). Our walking tour, led by history grad student Malachy, helped with orientation but not with the need for a hip replacement, as he talked for 3 rather than the advertised 2 hours about every piece of Irish history from Cro-Magnon man to the Troubles in the 1960s. We needed a major respite afterwards, so we gathered at a Temple Bar pub and made a list of goals for our time in Dublin, including finally hitting that ubiquitous noodle chain, Wagamama. A very friendly bartender helped out, unsolicited, reassuring us that Temple Bar is overrated and giving three suggestions for pubs he likes (which all turned out to be intimidating man-bars, though we thoroughly enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere of the last, until a dorky middle-aged Frenchman told Kris he “would love to see her again”).

We got out of the big city the next day for the seaside town of Howth where we walked along the coast on some amazing heather-strewn cliffs before it started raining more than we wished to endure. We rewarded ourselves with a delicious seafood dinner, and headed back to the city to pub it up. The beautiful, Victorian Stag’s Head had been too crowded the night before, but we found a spot the next night that we foolishly gave up to try out some other places which, by then, were crowded to the point of overflowing. Thus we began to feel our age. We skipped McDaid’s (recommended by the ever-trusty Let’s Go!), Kehoe’s (recommended by our ever-trusty bartender pal), and The Palace Bar (because of the aforementioned Frenchman). We wound up at Davy Byrne’s, immortalized in Ulysses as Bloom’s spot for a gorgonzola sandwich and glass of red wine in “Laestrygonians.” It took a while for me to get all the Joycean pubs straight, especially since Let’s Go! misidentified it as the setting for “Cyclops.” I troubled Kris with my massive nerd-dom on all this, and only resolved it two days later when I finally got my hands on excerpts from the chapters and a handy chapter-locating map.

Our next day in Dublin had a packed agenda: we started with giant sandwiches because I was craving a mozzarella panini, then we looked for bullet holes in the post office where Patrick Pearse (teacher!) read the declaration of an Irish Free State in the Easter Rising of 1916, headed back to the writer’s museum for postcards, spent three years searching for the Abbey Theatre which was mislocated on our inaccurate map, bought tickets for a play we never heard of, headed over to Trinity College to see the Book of Kells, trekked to Merrion Square to snap pics of the Oscar Wilde statue, popped in to the National Museum to see an exhibit of bog people (“C’mon, mum, let’s go see the bog bodies! I want to see the dead bodies from the bog!”), walked all the way to freaking Co. Cork to the Shaw birthplace (also misleadingly located on the map), braved the rain to see the remainder of the medieval city walls at St. Audoen’s Church, and finally ended with dinner at Temple Bar and our play afterwards. Not our most exuberant day (“Can’t talk. Schlepping.”), but we managed a few laughs at dinner and a high-five about seeing a play in each country we had visited, except Wales, which doesn’t really count.

Finally, Saturday we made the pilgrimage to the Joyce museum in Sandycove, where we found breakfast at the most overwhelming restaurant in Europe—children, piles of potatoes pouring into cafeteria trays, an inexplicable ordering process—and I failed to dunk my feet into the Irish water for a photo op labeled “Usurper.” Due to the weather, I did not dunk my feet into any bodies of water this summer, unless you count puddles on Cornmarket—my only regret.

And then it was back to Oxford and two nights of hostel living. So far, no bedbugs, which is good. After all these many weeks, we managed to not find the souvenirs we had been surrounded by all summer, I managed to almost fall on those slippery sidewalk pavers, and, in a happy turn of events, we managed to make it to Chiang Mai for yummy Thai dinner (and great dessert!).

There’s so much of this summer I haven’t chronicled, hoping that it would stick in the memory and already it seems like another lifetime, especially as I finish this up in the Montreal airport, thinking already about errands to run, school supplies to procure, phone calls to make. These past two weeks have helped me retreat smoothly into my icehouse, but who knows what awaits me in my post-BL life, empty, in the immediate, of constant companionship and stimulation, and in the long-term, of green and white envelopes promising enrichment of the mind and the soul. So far, I think an anticlimactic nothing. We will all remain calm (mostly) and carry on (always), some at a brisker pace than others, but carry on nonetheless. I won’t be haunted by Oxford in the same way I have been by Juneau, though hills green and rolling and misty, in Alaska or in Britain, keep their hold over me. Maybe I’ll be back to those parts of the world, but those places will never be precisely intact, not even in my increasingly imperfect and selective memory. As it turns out, you can’t go home again. I wonder if that means this home too, the one I’ve known for so much longer than any Bread Loaf campus. Sure, it can’t all be hours of brainy conversation and rounds of shoulders (or famous people in a hat, or homemade $25,000 pyramid, or the Falstaff drinking game), as if there were nothing in between, but it shouldn’t be irrelevant either, and that’s the challenge of “regular” life, to live with a sense of importance, but without taking everything so damn hard.

I guess I’m being groomed for my increasingly inevitable return to life among the alter-kochers in Great Neck: the bus-ta-move tour has officially begun. Today’s highlights: scotch in the hotel with Kris’ parents. But let me work backwards…

I’m not sure what to say about graduation on Saturday. Last week was the first week of solid summer weather we had, and graduation day was the hottest day yet. The sun was beaming down on us, even though I had popped up at 4 am, bright grayish-white daylight in my window, thinking, My God, it’s graduation day, and it’s going to rain. We had had a pretty early night on Friday—Thursday was the senior party, followed by cheesy OX clubbing (so, a late night)—and all that rowing and schlepping led us to the Eagle and Child and then home at around 11. I was a little antsy all day, thinking about practical stuff like packing, but we climbed to the top of St. Mary’s Church and almost died because the stairs are very narrow and people were coming down as we were trying to get up. It was panic-inducing, but also especially frustrating, because we had almost avoided the giant busload of tourists but got caught in their midst. We then hit the Ashmolean (finally) for a little bit and checked out some great paintings.

Graduation itself was beautiful, funny, solemn… The sun was shining, everyone had that extra friendliness that comes from a combination of nerves and nostalgia. The speeches were just the right balance of sentimental and smart, and all the formality of the ceremony took the edge off any emotions I might have been feeling. I was able to parlay everything raw and human into tradition, which is why I guess we have traditions. Then we got the privilege of walking on the forbidden grass, taking our Pimm’s in the Rector’s Garden (the secret garden), and having a candlelit High Table with all our families. Miriam played with the wind-up caterpillar we gave her at the high table, which was brilliant, and then it was another night (our last) of darts and beer in Deep Hall. The right way to end, I suppose.

Of course, we were the last folks out of Lincoln, and we spent Sunday puttering around London—looking aimlessly for a Jack the Ripper tour and then finally getting dinner in Notting Hill. On Monday morning, Corinne became the last of our friends with whom we had to part: Tim and Nick in Deep Hall, Chrissy on the Turl, Tim and Charles in Paddington Station, and finally Corinne, when we were mostly asleep in a Regent’s Park hotel at 6:20 am.

Now Kris and I are on the tour. I am so used to being stimulated in different ways that the adjustment is a little tricky, but we are seeing interesting things (the Tower of London, Big Ben and Parliament, Trafalagar Square, Buckingham Palace, the outside of Westminster Abbey, Windsor Castle, St. Paul’s Cathedral) and learning interesting things (Anne Boleyn had a sixth finger on her left hand, the bell in Big Ben is cracked, Admiral Lord Nelson’s body was preserved in brandy, Buckingham Palace only has twice the acreage of Kris’ farm, Westminster Abbey took 500 years to complete, Henry VI founded Eton, where annual tuition is £34,000, William Blake is buried in St. Paul’s). Our big stops of the past day and a half were punctuated by the following highlights: seeing John of Gaunt’s armor in the Tower of London, finding the crests of Henry Bolingbroke, Henry V, Richard II, and, of course, Henry Percy, in one of the state rooms at Windsor Castle, and hearing Big Ben chime 21.00 on our evening cruise. We’ve also found our share of adventure—Brick Lane, but no Jack the Ripper tour; the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which has been operating for 500 years and where Big Ben and the Liberty Bell were forged; and a great Burmese dinner just a few minutes from our hotel.

It’s not the way I love to travel, but I’m making it work.