Finally, after all these weeks...

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.

We don’t know what these stones are for.

Today was a long but sunny day of sightseeing—starting with a morning walk at the gardens of Henry VIII’s Hampton Court where we saw the oldest grapevine in the world; a drive to Salisbury, where we saw the tallest medieval spire in England and one of four original copies of the Magna Carta; followed by Stonehenge, where we had the least informative audio tour in the entire United Kingdom (“We don’t know how these stones were brought here or what purpose they served!”); followed by Bath, where we saw the Roman Baths (did I say Stonehenge had the least informative audio tour?).

The biggest piece of information yet: I’m fatter than I’ve ever been in my life… And I mean it this time.

Bus-ta-move.

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.

Graduation day.

Schmucks in punts.

After she partied all night and slept for about four hours, we made Corinne (aka Biceps McGee, the Jetlagged Wonder) row our sorry behinds on the Cherwell. Punting had long been one of our goals, but recent floods have made that difficult (read: impossible). So when we headed over to the dock, the lad attending us said that punting was not recommended. The next easiest option? A rowboat, of course. Between the current, the entire South Korean delegation to Oxford summer camp, and other assorted teenage yutzes (including the Spaniard paddling alone--I guess he thought it was a canoe--who did a very convincing Johnny-Depp-as-Captain-Jack-Sparrow), we had a tricky time staying out of the shoreline or the brambles. It was like they had set up an obstacle course called "try to avoid the thorn bushes."

Afterwards, we headed over to The Oxford Story to try to cheer up Chrissy with a ride. It is, apparently, the longest (slowest? most boring?) dark ride in Europe, and features plaster figurines (like "It's a Small World" without the animatronics, boats, music, or childlike delight). It was a twenty minute history of Oxford that we toured from moving "desks," the creak of which, as they chugged painfully up the coaster track, occasionally overwhelmed the tape recorded narration pumping into our headphones.

What a lark! What a plunge!

Who's that girl?

Corinne flew into surprise us for graduation, my professor loved our paper, and we are gearing up for a senior party tonight, Deep Hall lovingly decorated by us in an Alice in Wonderland theme. I might weep for joy.

All's well that ends well.

Though I have one more class tomorrow afternoon, it really is the end of the road. It's the week of many lasts. Monday was our last play: A Midsummer Night's Dream in Regent's Park. The sun finally came out for us and the whole evening was enchanting. As with so many of the plays we've read this summer, I found a new love for this play and what it says about "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet," about true friendship and art, about the power of love and imagination.

Yesterday, I handed in my final paper of graduate school. It was a collaborative monster created with Kris to fully solidify our brain-sharing this summer, and the only right way to end Bread Loaf.

I would start listing some other final things: last toasts, last games of darts, last rounds of "famous people in a hat," but hopefully there are still a few more of those in the next few days before we make it official.


Flowers in Regent's Park.


How Kris and I felt about "Logic" after handing in our final paper.



Punts are still underwater, but at least the Magdalen Deer Park is not. Haven't seen rain in three days...



Two celebrations: The Turf yesterday and high tea today.

One day in Stratford makes the hard man humble.

The birthplace, surprisingly void of tourist traffic.


The Swan Theatre, where we should have seen Macbett. Consolation prize? Prince John almost walked into this picture.


If we were in bikinis, this would be a Benny Hill sketch.


The Dirty Duck. Such an innocuous place...


More dirty ducks, Chrissy's personal nightmare.


Stained glass in Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare is buried.


Boats on the Avon, named after Shakespearean heroines (moored, of course, due to high water).

What's that big yellow thing in the sky?

Happily, 2 Henry IV was not rained out yesterday, though our trip to Stratford got a little held up by an accident on the motorway. Nevertheless, we made it to our professor's house, she fed us a delicious dinner, we talked with a wonderful (and down to earth) actress, and then went on to the show, which was actually a really sad experience--we had seen three histories with the same ensemble, and now I feel like they are my little stage friends and I will miss them. Before BL, the first item on my when-I-get-home list was Harry Potter. Now it's Henry V with Kenneth Brannagh. I just can't wait to see what happens to Prince Hal. Nerds on vacation? Speaking of Prince Hal, we'll be meeting the actor who plays him today. Some of the ladies in my class are turning into, in my professor's words, "screaming teeny-boppers." Nerds on vacation.

Not much else to report from Stratford. I had brought my camera to take some pictures with the girls at The Dirty Duck last night, but I was in foul (fowl?) spirits because it was so crowded and there was a lot of actor-ogling happening that made me feel goofy. I didn't want to wait in a queue of Bread Loafers to drink an overpriced Hoegaarden, and I didn't want to accost someone who had just spent two and a half hours pouring his soul out on stage. The hottie who played Prince John did, however, give me a very gallant "after you," which almost started a girl-fight with another Bread Loafer who had designs on being the next queen of England. I think the word "usurper" may have been bandied about... Anyway, I'll be eager to hear post-Duck tales from those who stayed in Stratford overnight. Maybe somebody got lucky with Poins or Doll Tearsheet.

Stay tuned. If this sun-like glimmer sticks around, I'll post some pictures of the birthplace, etc.

Really, England? Really?

It's pouring. Sideways. And I have to get on a coach to Stratford in half an hour. At least I'm not underwater, yet, but I do feel like I am drowning in rain, heavy cream, and seventeen different productions of Othello.

O sunshine! O Vitamin C!

Hello? London calling?

It’s not the first Clash joke, but not unlike Kris’s legendary bear paws/pause (it’s a sight gag), it never gets old.

We did get to London yesterday for a lackluster Othello, despite the continued sogginess of the weather. It’s a nasty, damp, blustery day, one that makes you wish for wool socks (check) and a mug of hot chocolate (still working on that). I’m not sure what this rain is doing to nearby water levels, but things remain copasetic here at BLOX in that neither I nor my belongings have floated away (nor have any small children, senior citizens, math campers, or tourists from Mother Russia, at least not to my knowledge).

I’m limited on good stories from the past few days—paper writing, reading 2 Henry IV, finishing a paper on 1 Henry IV, particularly overstuffed (Falstaffian?) High Table dinner (salad avec deep-fried croutons, cream of celery soup, roast duck, rice pilaf with wee little chunks of liver, buttery snap peas and carrots, dark chocolate ganache tart; italics added), post-dinner paper-editing enlivened by wine, four hours of class on Tuesday morning, the coach to London where sunshine greeted us, rotating sushi bar (plus one point for entertainment value, minus one point for hunger pangs), back to four hours of class today. Tonight? More Shakespeare after dinner in the form of a private screening of Orson Welles’ Othello.

Let's just say the pictures below are worth more than the 226 words above.


St. Paul's as reflected in a shop window.


St. Paul's en vivo. Hey, thanks London!


Kris and Chrissy on the Millenium Bridge. It's a little dark, but you can squint. I would've retaken it if not for Kris' paralyzing fear of heights/rickety bridges, and the masses of rush-hour commuters making their way around us.

Water, water everywhere.

For those of you concerned re: BBC reports about massive flooding in England, rest assured. Though the Thames rises and the Magdalen College Deer Park is underwater, the punts pointing downwards to their high water moorings, I am high and dry here at Lincoln, for now. Some parts of the Cotswolds that I walked through last weekend seem particularly hard hit, and I am keeping my fingers crossed for our trip to London for Othello tomorrow and Stratford for 2 Henry IV on Thursday. Missing these would be very sad indeed, but not as sad as having all of your belongings swept away by river water. "Remain calm and carry on" is a fair motto to adopt, as per our intrepid director. I agree.

Not for lack of trying.

I guess it's hard to punt when the rivers are in flood. Actually, it's hard to punt when the punts and the docks are underwater. We walked down to The Head of the River, after some tasty croques and cafe au lait, to find that even the waterfowl in the Cherwell were being swept away by the current. So we paused to finish Act V of Othello and then had some drinks and snacks at the pub. We were doing homework, really, finally having the discussion we should have been having all summer in class, catching up on some much-needed girl time, and enjoying the sunshine. We had a great day, though we affirmed the recurring theme of this weekend: if at first you don't succeed, try, try again, and then give up and have a beer. I've never failed at so many things in such rapid succession as I have in the past two days.

The biggest regret, really, was coming back to Lincoln at 6:45 to find a note under Kris' door that Johanna's birthday celebration had congregated and left at 6:30. We are so resourceful that we found the restaurant they were going to with no further information than "Slovak food," but having misread the address and neglecting to bring directions with us, we wound up wandering up and down Cowley Road for nearly an hour, at which point we gave up, sat down at a Moroccan tapas bar, and had a lovely dinner. We came home to discover that we were probably just a block or so parallel to where everyone else was, which means missing out on the post-dinner festivities. That's fine, but not ringing in Jo's birthday stinks bigtime.

The best laid schemes.

My life at Oxford has turned into an absurdist play. Friday’s downpours did not prevent us from schlepping over to the train schedule to proceed with our as-planned trip to Stratford to see Macbett. “Stick to the plan” was a phrase being thrown around. At the train station, we discovered there were no trains to Stratford. Not a surprise, since we already knew that Chrissy’s train to Manchester had been a no-go. But what’s a little rain? In England? There had to be other means of transport. We refunded our train fares (which we didn’t think we’d be able to do) and called the box office to discover the potential fate of our £30 fourth row center tickets. Tim, in the spirit of adventure, had brought with him driving directions and the phone number of Enterprise. He was willing to drive stick on the left side of the road in the rain. Apparently, we were not the only stranded travelers, so his death wish remained ungranted.

Then we tried at the bus station. It seemed the buses to Stratford were running, but there was a catch. We would get in, according to the schedule, a hairsbreadth early for the performance, and there was no return bus at night, which meant finding a hotel room after the performance let out. Still undeterred, we called the box office again: we kept alternating between new versions of “Will you refund our tickets?” and busy signals. The man with the soggy bus schedule led us, unsurprisingly, to a pub, where, on the nastiest couch in the entire United Kingdom, we decided to proceed with our brilliant plan (because we love Ionescu that much). So we hopped on the bus (#20) to Chipping North (where we would either take a taxi or get the transfer bus, #50). It took nearly an hour to get out of Oxford traffic, but we finally hit the first rotary and then we were verily humming along through the Cotswolds. We played some bus games, laughed at ourselves, and admired an incredibly well-behaved dog a few rows ahead. In the delightful hamlet of Chipping North, we disembarked at the bus mall and pondered our options. According to the bus driver, the #50 was running, but no taxi driver would drive us past a certain river crossing. And that’s when it all clicked. The whole morning I had been thinking, “Really, England? Really?” I mean, what’s a little rain? And then I got it: after the rainiest June in recorded history, the rivers were in flood, and there were few crossings over them. All those charming country by-roads converged upon the same bridge. Not to mention that Stratford-upon-Avon is called that for a reason, so who knew what the Avon would be doing if/when we ever got there. So there we stood, soggy and cold, under the bus stop overhang, weighing the alternatives: a hotel room in Chipping North, literally 35 minutes away from Oxford? Wait for the #50, but until what time? Get on the next #20 and hightail it home?

As it turned out, the King’s Arms certainly had a lively pub, but only one single room with one single bed left. The #50 never showed. And at a certain point, we were so hungry and cold we were ready to gnaw off our own limbs. Back to Oxford it was. No Macbett. We tried to compensate with a huge meal, drinks, and a round of “Famous People in a Hat.” Which ended fine, but it took literally seven hours for the waitress to bring me my drink (the place was empty; I ordered a vodka tonic—that’s two ingredients, four if you count the ice and lime). I was tempted to go behind the bar and make it myself, and when she finally did arrive with the wrong thing, I had to cause a scene in The Slug and Lettuce. (I felt awful immediately afterwards. I know that’s no way to build karma.)



(Tim Sullivan gets credit for the above picture and the one at the top.)

Saturday, I awoke to clear skies. I got trucking on my paper early (by which I mean I chatted online with friends who live 15 yards away), consumed three days worth of calories in a hot chocolate and croissant from the French bakery in the Covered Market, and buckled down with the Page-to-Stage team to read Othello after lunch. I love Othello, but it is a long play, and I had to stop for a nap break. Also, we discovered that the Swan Theatre is flooded, and Saturday’s performances were cancelled (but not Friday’s…drat.) By dinner, the mayonnaise buffet, I was delirious, but I ate my bowl of mayonnaise salad like a good girl, and hunkered down with the paper again. It was pouring and I had no desire to have another Night Out. Plus, there was the promise of Brighton to look forward to today.


So I rose at 6:30, walked down to the train station with Kris and Chrissy. Forget Brighton. They refused to sell us tickets anywhere. It’s a blue sky day, at least for now, and there’s no seaside kitsch to be had. So sad! But we’ll try to make a day of it. My goals are meager at this point. A Croque Madame. Punting, or at least a long walk. A beer by the river. If I keep my expectations low, I’ll be pleasantly surprised later. (That’s a lesson from Prince Hal. Not a paragon of good behavior, but he’s all I’ve got.)

The rain it raineth every day.

Yesterday, while trying to make reservations for a weekend in Brighton, I suddenly realized that it was Thursday. Already. Impossible how quickly the time goes. It’s pouring, and if my mattress did not feel like a rice cake with iron prongs sticking out of it, I would want to stay in bed all day. Alas, yet another trip to Stratford (this one voluntary), a paper, and two plays to read, plus a (possible) weekend voyage to the (probably very rainy) seashore make efficiency a moral imperative. So, in brief, to recap:

On Monday, we went to see Twelfth Night in Chichester, which is a town that falls asleep at 6pm, at least on weeknights. We grabbed dinner at a chain-restaurant-worse-than-Applebee’s housed inside a beautiful old church. The food was atrocious, the worst meal I’ve had in England yet, even including all those creamy potatoes, but it was an adventure. You’d think the “buy one get the second for 99p” would’ve tipped us off. This Twelfth Night starred the same cast as our first Macbeth, with Patrick Stewart transforming from tyrant to Malvolio (so, in some ways, not much of a transformation). During the show, I wasn’t wowed by it, I think because I find Twelfth Night to be unbearably sad. This production definitely played up the tragicomedy, setting the play in 1919, and emphasizing the post-WWI desperation of all the characters. The set was magical, and I would have liked to have seen it again.

Tuesday, we spent about 18 hours trying to plan our week. It was incredibly unproductive, but there were delicious milkshakes at the end of it all, we got (most) of our plans figured out, and then we turned the whole thing around by spending the evening reading 1 Henry IV aloud, which was an uproarious good time, especially when we go to Act IV, opened a bottle of Syrah, and drank every time someone made a fat joke about Falstaff. (A game that Chrissy promptly reported to our professor, much to our great embarrassment.)

Wednesday, we made an impromptu voyage to London. When we walked to the train station to buy tickets on Tuesday, we bought off-peak tickets at a discounted group rate. Immediately after completing the transaction, Tim said, “What if the first train after 9:30 is at, like, 10:15 and the last train before 3:30 is at, like, 2?” Panic ensued. Then we resolved that whatever happens, it wouldn’t suck. So we hopped on the 9:38 into Paddington, stood for a little over an hour in the space between the doors and the loo, tried to negotiate my Let’s Go! and a tube map, and figure out the agenda for the day. At Paddington, we bought the most expensive subway pass I have ever bought in my life and got on the Circle line, which I thought would take us to Russell Square and the heart of Bloomsbury (our goal), though, in fact, the Circle line does not go to Russell Square (I had accidentally misread the map). No problem, because we could get out at Euston Road or King’s Cross, except this train went only one stop and terminated. So we had to hop out, wait for another train, and complain about the lack of signage. Long story short: The Tube? I’m not impressed.

We finally made it aboveground again, walked in a circle before getting oriented, and eventually found ourselves on Gower Street, where Chrissy interpreted the placards on the buildings for us, though any names I would have recognized (Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, Forster, etc.) I did not see, with the exception, of course, of Bonham-Carter, about which I can only make assumptions in filmography. Would that we had had a walking tour of famous houses in Bloomsbury! But I’m convinced that London is actually not for tourists at all. In any event, I can’t complain about a beautiful day and a charming stroll. We finally wended our way to the British Museum, ran in to see some plundered artifacts and elbow through crowds. It was actually the perfect approach, because we didn’t have the time, attention span, or emotional energy to see more. The Rosetta Stone, the Elgin Marbles, some awesome mosaics, and the mummy of (the?) Cleopatra were enough for me.


(Sullivan was kind enough to email me this picture.)

After a little more aimless strolling, we set a lunch goal, got momentarily befuddled but never lost in our London of winding streets and bad maps, found a great pizza joint with good pizza and good people-watching both, hopped on the Tube again (after not being able to find the right stop—how are you supposed to interpret an arrow sign that essentially bisects the right angle made at the intersection of two streets? Also, Oxford Circus really is a circus, in that Herald Square kind of way.), got out at Kensington Gardens, had a mint chocolate chip ice cream and strolled through the park, where we were unable to find the Peter Pan statue but did stumble across the Albert Memorial, which is the most gaudy, gilded, ginormous piece of insanity I have ever seen in my life, walked back to Paddington and then almost ran because we couldn’t find the station entrance and our train was in 10 minutes, and made it back home just in time for High Table and a lecture on my least favorite of the Great Poets: Wordsworth, at which my professor caught my eye as I walked in approximately 75 seconds late and signaled energetically for me to sit up front. I guess being teleported back to late college nights hunched over a Norton anthology was well (words)worth it. Oh, nostalgia.

Thursday, we were thwarted in our attempts to make hotel reservations for the weekend in the Coney Island meets Provincetown of the UK: Brighton. Not sure yet whether we’ll make it, and there are actually torrential sheets of rain right now, so I’m not sure if it’s even worth it. Last night, there was Thai food (that made my eyeballs sweat) and 1 Henry IV in Stratford. The show was great, but now it’s paper-writing time, and I’m at bit of a loss, though, to be honest, I hadn’t really started thinking yet. Tonight, it’s Ionescu’s Macbett with the same cast as Macbeth, which should be a great way to go to the theatre without having the pressure of academic performance.

I hope the weekend brings fun and frivolity, as my time in England is coming to a very rapid close. Feeling already like I haven’t done or seen enough, but I’m trying to force sadness and regret out of my mind…

Fill in the blanks.

In the absence of free time, I leave your imaginations to tell the story of the above photos. Extended monologue forthcoming...

“I’m surprised more people don’t know what stinging nettles are. What part of America are they from?”

The word “perfect” is so often overused, especially by a captain of hyperbole such as myself, but I can imagine no better way to spend a Saturday (after a week of sitting and studying) than to go for a long walk through wheat fields and dappled sunlight, happy dogs dashing along the path. Expatriating doesn’t sound like such a bad idea if it means donning some wellies and a tweed coat to amble into the countryside, a hound at my heels.

We set out early from Oxford but began walking through the Cotswolds, a cluster of picturesque villages and rolling countryside, around 11. Our intrepid director led the walk, along with his adorable teenage children (quoted above) and black labs, who scampered along the path (off lead!), waited patiently for their masters, responded when called, chased deer, swam in ponds, and collapsed in a delighted heap at lunch. The walk took us on grassy meadow paths, past a medieval church, through some sticky and slippery mud, to a wonderful local pub with delicious sandwiches and a garden for post-lunch napping in the sun, down a patch riddled with stinging nettles (level 3 bushwhack, at least), into a wheat field, and finally (nearly ten miles later, they say) through the town of Charlbury and back home on the train.

It made me tired but sun-kissed and happy, nettles and all.

Paraskavedekatriaphobia.

Well, I’m not howling at the moon, but I ought to be. If Friday the 13th isn’t bad enough in itself, then dark hours of paper-writing certainly are. It’s been a long week, and a long day, and in the absence of rhetorical structure, I’ll resort to the fine art of list-making.

Monday: Paper due. Four hours of class. Two hour bus ride to London. The Merchant of Venice at the Globe. Home at 100 hours.

Tuesday: Four hours of class. Laundry day (finally!). Now my pants don’t walk by themselves. Debauchery into the wee hours that earned us a reprimand in the next morning’s “Paniculum” newsletter.

Wednesday: Departure at 1500 for Stratford. One hour bus ride. One hour session with the actress who played Lady Macbeth. Absolutely mesmerizing performance of Richard II, starring Jonathan Slinger as a captivatingly debauched and humanely fallen Richard. My only notes on Gaunt’s “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England” speech was: WOW. The man gave all 38 lines from a wheelchair. Also, the actor playing Green was very pretty.

(Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Loafers all were enjoying a special High Table dinner with the director, screenwriter, and producer of a new film version of Brideshead Revisited currently being filmed at Lincoln College. Which means that there are two very adorable young actors shooting a scene involving drunken vomiting into someone’s dorm room (fiction?) here this week. Of course, I haven’t seen them at all, but the place is covered with all sorts of camera equipment, &c. &c. Also, though she is not in the scenes being shot here, the film stars Emma Thompson. So I’m keeping my eyes peeled for it-boy celebrities.)

Thursday: Stratford from 930 to 1900. Visit to the Shakespeare Center Library (yes, that is the First Folio, kids), two hours of class on Richard II, a session with the brilliant Mr. Slinger, who makes rolling up his sleeves look like an act of religious devotion, followed by tea at my professor’s house, which was the first time I have seen a fruit other than an apple or banana all summer. Blackberries, strawberries, melon, cherries, and grapes: it was like I was recovering from scurvy. (Malnutrition joke courtesy of Kris, who else.) Then, back home for another cream-and-potato dinner concoction, followed by trivia night. I am proud to report that our team, A Wilderness of Monkeys (five extra credit points on your next quiz for finding the allusion), tied for second place with a few clutch answers, losing only to a team that was obviously playing with too many people. Good times, for sure.

And now, paper-writing. Sigh. But tomorrow a trip to the Cotswolds. Keep your eyes peeled for picturesque English countryside.

Spitting on the groundlings.

We started off a marathon week of reading, writing, and theatre-going with a trip to the Globe on Monday. Kris warned me that I ought to start learning how to feign excitement now for our Bus-ta-Move tour after BL ends. Apparently my response to “Look, it’s London” was not satisfactory, but really, I was excited, more excited than I expected to be. On the one hand, London is a big, bustling city, like New York. On the other hand, we saw Big Ben and Parliament all lit up as we were driving out after the performance, and it struck me that I had never been here before and this was all fresh and new, despite the centuries of history. Actually, our only reference point for Big Ben and Parliament was that Chevy Chase movie, so maybe we were looking at something altogether different.

So, not a big day in London, just an afternoon—an hour or so to trot across the Millennium Bridge, take a look inside St. Paul’s but not climb to the cupola because it was Evensong, trot back across the bridge, look at some ominous clouds in the distance, eat, and go to the Globe, where the performance of Merchant of Venice was lackluster compared to what we had been seeing, but the fake vomit and real rain (both, unfortunately for them, on the groundlings) made the experience. Of course, I need a back transplant now from sitting on those horrid benches… but the carnival atmosphere of the Globe was nothing short of enchanting and well worth the stiff neck.

Sunshine on my shoulders.

It's been a weekend of glorious sunshine, which means, of course, allergies. Also, every math camp for high school students began this week, so there are roving bands of gangly American teenagers and their wealthier, prettier teen-tour counterparts in the streets, making the place look like Soho on a Sunday afternoon or Schreiber HS on a Friday. With any luck, the rain, which has already returned, will drive them from the streets and I can go back to enjoying this already-crowded little town.

Of course, sunshine also warms the soul, despite the negative effects of paper-writing, Richard II, or roaming high school students. Sunshine means reading outside, watching well-trained dogs without leads bound ahead of their wellie-clad masters, and even catching a little cat nap on the grass at the park. Brilliant!

Lay on, Macduff.

Well, I’ve survived a week of The Scottish Play, but just barely, having inadvertently invoked the curse just moments before exiting the Swan Theatre in Stratford after last night’s performance. Luckily, we didn’t die in a fiery collision on the bus ride home, and I haven’t read any news reports about heavy scenery falling on hapless actors. (Knock wood.) The first performance, Tuesday night in Chichester, cast Patrick Stewart as a Stalin-esque Macbeth who builds a reign of terror that inevitably collapses around him. (That’s in the play.) From the first moment—even before the heart-stoppingly thunderous gunfire that starts the performance—the play was seriously creepy, with the stage set like a psychiatric hospital or interrogation room. I’m surprised that I went through the whole performance without screaming (a la Pillowman). Thursday, we were at Stratford for a more traditional but higher octane production (kilts, swordfights) but being in the front row (my knees were touching the stage) in a very spare theatre, I found myself nearly in my classmate’s lap several times during the show—when I thought I was about to get swiped with a boot, sword, or gob of flying fake blood. Now, it’s off to a weekend of paper-writing and (boo!) reading Richard II in preparation for next week’s packed schedule. Sadly, we won’t be acting out Richard in Chrissy’s room, since none of us has yet read it.

We did manage to get some fun into our afternoon with a visit of Blenheim Palace, a nearby summer home of the Churchill family that was given in 1705 by the Queen to the Duke of Marlborough for fending off the French. It’s an impressive place, though full of, if I may quote our on-site director, “ghastly Empire French” décor (I thought we were trying to get rid of the French…?) and the best part is the *free* grounds and exterior. Unfortunately, we paid the £13.50, but frankly, it was worth it for the hedge maze, the butterfly house, and the adorably surly young man at the ticket kiosk who, when Kris’ money nearly flew away in the wind and she apologized, said, expressionless yet dismissive, “It's not your fault.” Everything is instantly funnier when it’s deadpan and British. We almost got locked in at 1800 hours, had to schlep around to find the other gate, caught a later bus than expected, and missed an apparently anticlimactic and late 4th of July picnic. But since there weren’t any fireworks here anyway, I wasn’t too upset about passing on a dining hall wurst of some kind.

Chichester.

Changes in the weather.

After a weekend of paper writing and raindrop dodging, the sun has finally, if tentatively, come out.

First of all, England imposed a smoking ban as of July 1, which means smoke-free pubs!

Second, Kris and I had an adventure at the clothing outlet yesterday where everything costs £6—a major bargain—but there are no dressing rooms. Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, I bought a pair of jeans that fit perfectly right off the rack, without knowing the conversion from US to UK clothing sizes.

Third, we had High Table dinner last night with the director of the production of Taming of the Shrew we saw last week, who looks not unlike a British Benicio Del Toro (meow.), and, though I briefly contemplated the Macbeth-like murder of Kris in order to usurp her place next to him at the table, I was content with gazing dreamily at him in the Q&A session that followed. My own High Table experience last week involved being sandwiched between the Lincoln College librarian, Fiona, and a world-famous chemist, with whom I had to communicate through a giant silver candelabrum. Fiona was lovely, and it was by watching her that I learned that the funny mini-spatula at the right of my plate was a fish knife, but since it was the first day of the session, I was more than a little intimidated and more than a lot awkward.

Fourth, we are on our way to see Macbeth with Patrick Stewart in the title role. The weather is bright sunshine with patches of phenomenally black clouds from which rain pours steadily, but every once in a while, the sunlight hits the grass on the rolling hills (yes, they really are rolling), turning it a preternatural, glowing shade of yellow-green (ectoplasmic, really, especially on the background of a nearly black sky).

Three views.

Window boxes are everywhere, even outside of windows. And the flowers love the rain.


Memorial gardens beside Christ Church Cathedral.



Quintessential Oxford.

Mind at ease.

I’ve been blissfully oblivious about the recent goings-on in London and while the times we live in are certainly fraught with fear and danger, rest assured that Oxford remains an enchanted kingdom of dreaming spires, safe, if not by distance then at least by frame of mind, from the perils of the big city. While that’s not reassuring in any practical sense, I am comforted by the fact that Turf Tavern (“The Turf”) continues to operate since the 14th century and that yesterday I drank a beer there, or that “The Inklings” (Tolkein, CS Lewis, and friends) met at The Eagle and Child (“The Bird and Baby”) in the first half of the last century and read The Hobbit and The Chronicles of Narnia aloud for the first time there and that yesterday I drank a beer there, and that there is a pub underneath the dining hall of our very own college, and that yesterday I also drank a beer there. The full moon suspended over the spire of All Saints and an evening of clear, mild air were magical. Small comfort, perhaps, but comfort indeed.

Breathing room

…has been in rather short supply so far. The first few days of Bread Loaf are always a bit disorienting: keeping track of the new faces, realigning your sleep schedule and stomach to new routines, juggling the spirit of seeing and doing everything immediately (blast you type-A BL-ers!) with anxiety about your first paper. Determining the level of madness associated with total immersion at Lincoln College requires some mental calculations (not unlike the conversion of Centigrade to Fahrenheit (14°? Really?) or pounds to (gulp.) dollars). Add to this equation stewed fruit, a complete absence of anything that even closely resembles a stable weather system, and “Shakespeare: On the Page and on the Stage,” a course that elicits the following response to “So, what class are you taking?”, that most ubiquitous of Bread Loaf questions: “Oh, you’re one of those people.”

In fact, “Page to Stage” has taken up a chunk of time that others have spent holed up in some corner of the Bodley, incapacitated by the Rube Goldberg-esque conveyor belt system that delivers books from the stacks or deep storage (i.e., a salt mine in Cheshire. Seriously.), directing their own research in true Oxonian fashion amid the eight million books available to them (including the entire English literary canon—where to begin?), and getting yelled at by guards who accuse them of smuggling bombs or other contraband (kerosene, lighter fluid, a hibachi). My first days of class have involved watching film clips of The Taming of the Shrew, going to the theatre, and running around amid the “dreaming spires” of Oxford or performing staged readings of Macbeth with a bad Scottish accent in my free/homework time. Last night, the church bells tolled eleven to coincide with Macbeth’s line, “The bell invites me. / Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell / That summons thee to heaven or to hell.” In short, things have been busy, for sure, but also (aside from the weather) bloody brilliant.



The most I'll ever see of the Radcliffe Camera. Inside: every book every written in the English literary canon. Ever.

Ah, yes. Oxford.

Right. So, what is Oxford like? Well, it’s a college town. There are mimes who paint themselves silver from head to toe and perform on street corners. There are tourists buying overpriced pink hoodies with varsity lettering emblazoned across the chest. There are teenagers with mohawks wandering the streets at a relatively late hour. There are cute stationery stores. There’s a Gap.

But, it’s also a college town that is nearly a millennium old. We eat our meals in a dining hall that was built in 1427. And looks like it. Everything has spires and turrets and gargoyles. A lot of famous people spent time at one of Oxford’s many colleges, so there is a tremendous sense of literary history here. (Which sometimes translates into the JRR Tolkein equivalent of “Washington slept here.”) Occasionally, you see stodgy-looking white haired men walking around in Master’s robes. Or young women from a far-flung corner of “The Empire” in the same attire.



Oxford quotation of the day: "You remember, of course, Somerset Maugham's description in 'The Vessel of Wrath'... This reference wouldn't make it in America."

A fog machine. And a quad.

Wait, what day is it?

I think I’m over jet lag, and re-reading my previous entry, I recognize how completely scattered a dispatch it was, a sure indication of the fact that my body thought it was 27 o’clock on some day of the week that has not been named by the Gregorian calendar. Though I’ve had a little trouble sorting the days, I have solved some heretofore unsolved mysteries.

1. The jet-lag induced fit of hysteria that ensued yesterday? afternoon? at approximately 3:23 pm local time? over how to properly set a dime-store alarm clock may have been unfounded, though I find it completely unnecessary to make a snooze bar that cannot be properly activated from the usual position one finds oneself in while sleeping.

2. The Radcliffe Camera is apparently a part of the Bodleian Library (where yesterday I took an oath not to kindle any fires amid the books). I’m still not sure what purpose it serves, except that it was still lit up last night but you couldn’t get near it because of all the road blocks in the way. We caught a sliver of it over the heads of some pub-goers eager to sneak a peak of Nicole Kidman and a tamarind monkey.

3. Speaking of pub-goers… Where is The Purple Turtle, you might ask? As it turns out, I still don’t know, but I spent a little time wandering around trying to find it last night. Anyway, if you were a pub with such an atrocious name, you would hide too.

Why does sleeping on an airplane suck?

Perhaps it was sleeping for three hours on the plane with a perpetual sunrise on the horizon and a perpetual crick in my neck or perhaps it was the hallucinogenic mushrooms in the late-night salad I ate at the airport in Montreal that has made this first day a might surreal. It’s not just driving on the wrong side of the road or being silently sneered at by the rest of the stiff-upper-lipped motorcoach passengers (“We haven’t seen each other in a year. It’s not just because we’re obnoxious Americans.” –Kris) or looking at sheep grazing on the side of a six lane highway. That’s just, “Hey, I’m not in America.” It’s also the enormous fog machine that whirred like a jet engine lodged directly in my cerebral cortex, apparently a special effect for the cinematic adaptation of one of Philip Pullman’s books. So they’ve lit up the Radcliffe Camera (which is a dome of some great import which I have yet to discover) but it’s too cold and windy to go outside and look at it, though, frankly, I would be very surprised if they didn’t light the thing on a regular basis (because isn’t that just what’s done with old buildings in quaint foreign towns?) and I would be equally surprised if Nicole Kidman and a tamarind monkey didn’t show up at breakfast tomorrow (which will, by the way, undoubtedly have heavy cream as a main ingredient). Furthermore, if the steps to my dorm don’t kill me (it’s like climbing the great pyramid at Teotihuacan. With luggage.) then the steps to Chrissy’s dorm room will because they are about two inches square and abutting each other at crazy angles. I’m pretty sure the steps to my room are from the thirteenth century, and the armoire is at least from the 1920s because it has drawers labeled “collars” and “handkerchiefs.” (None for ascots; I’ll have to improvise.)

But all in all, this little penthouse apartment affords lovely views of a quad on which people in suits played croquet in the few hours of sunshine we got today. There are flowers in the window boxes downstairs and huge peachy-orange roses growing on the rose bush. The lawn is cut in a precise crisscross pattern and everything feels delightfully historical.

An epigraph for the motorcoach.

"The Mail Coach was streaking along the side of a narrow ravine. Up ahead the road swung so sharply to the right that it seemed they must plunge over the edge. Roadside notices warned of the extra danger, in words so severe they no longer rhymed. DRIVE LIKE HELL AND YOU WILL GET THERE was one... Just then a thick cloud, shot through with impossible, shifting colours, a cloud from a dream or a nightmare, hopped up from the gorge between them and plopped itself down on the road."
--Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories

"The Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the guard suspected the passengers, the passengers suspected one another and the guard, they all suspected everybody else, and the coachman was sure of nothing but the horses; as to which cattle he could with a clear conscience have taken his oath on the two Testaments that they were not fit for the journey."
--Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities