The morning of the Solstice I combined a walk with a quest to find the farm shop, which Wendy and Sue had been telling me about for years and which I couldn’t wait to see.

As I was leaving, Wendy said to me, “Now do you have a picture in your mind of how to get there?”

I could have kissed her, she is so dear. Wendy is an educator and she thinks like one, as do I, when I’m not behaving like I know my way around a place simply because I want to know my way around. As it turned out, the picture in my mind would not have gotten me anywhere near the farm shop so I was glad she checked.

I walked to the bottom of the High Street –we must talk later about what constitutes the top and the bottom of a street– across a field via one of those public footpaths that are everywhere in England and oh my goodness, I want to walk them all, and to what’s called the sub-road, a narrow two-lane highway that people drive like it’s the autobahn.

The Sour Down Farm Shop is a bustling little Honesty Shop. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, you can pick up what you want and leave your money in the box: eggs, bread, milk, cheese, farm vegetables, cakes, biscuits and also things like Sue’s photography cards, Prosecco lip balm and goats milk hand cream; and loads of chocolate. I walked home with a long, crooked Brussel sprouts branch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At 11:00, we all three went down the drain and around the corner to Alison’s house at Hadley Cottage. We were to fetch the key to her guest cottage for when Wendy’s sister Joy came for Christmas. I had an inkling that Fetching the Key from Alison involved a bit more than just popping in. I was right. There was tea, mince pies, baklava, and the omnipresent chocolate. After an hour of munching and chatting, Sue had to leave for work; Wendy and I stayed on for another hour.

I enjoyed everything: scooping the mince out of the crust to avoid the gluten, hearing Alison say things like “he’s quite camp, is our Alan,” and hearing her story of a patient who died on the stairs as she was helping him up to his room. She and I talked a bit of theology—she had been a Baptist pastor’s wife for 40 years, a very independent one, maintaining her own career as an occupational therapist.

And then her workshop where she sews and hold classes and allows other crafters to hold classes and to sell their art. Sue’s cards, for example. There had clearly been a sale of items for Christmas, a number of which I was to receive in my Christmas stocking but I didn’t know that then.

Wendy and I had lunch and talked for a long time about teaching. Currently Wendy lectures at Strode College in Street. She prepares young people for careers in early childhood education.

We carried on to the oldest town in Somerset, Frome, to deliver Christmas gifts to her friends, Lucy and Debby. Both of them had the same cough that Wendy and Sue had.

“All of Frome is down with something,” Debby said cheerfully.

No one masks and by then I had pretty much just given up, resigning myself to catching someone’s germs.

We all walked into the town, full of hills and “quainty” cobblestone streets. We had tea at the Strada Café. I had a piece of magnificent lemon poppy seed polenta cake. It was getting dark as we left the café and the twinkly lights were coming out on the quainty streets as we began walking back.

We passed what used to be a church but had been turned into a bakery called “Rise.” I mused on the name for a few moments before I said, “You know that’s brilliant. It’s ‘rise’ like bread rises but there’s also the sense of ‘arise, shine, for thy light is come,’ you know?”

They looked at me. “Yeah, we got that.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sue had made leek and potato soup for tea (supper). Then, tired as we all were, we decided to skip Lessons and Carols at St Leonard’s and watched “A Muppet’s Christmas Carol” instead.

The next day we were back in Street. I splurged on a Radley bag for myself in Clark’s Village. I went into Mundy’s flower shop to introduce myself as someone who had ordered their flowers several times from Seattle. I told them how glad I was they had survived the pandemic when so many shops had gone out of business. I went into Burns the Bread (the baker’s name is Burns, clever, no?)to just make sure they had really stopped baking gluten free bread as I had been told. It had been fantastic bread.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Home again, I began wrapping gifts and very soon crawled into bed and fell asleep. Beans on jacket potato for tea. That means canned baked beans on a baked potato.

In the evening we went next door for an evening with Anya and John, and Anya’s brother Michael’s family. Anya and Michael are Polish. Michael’s family (wife and two children who spoke no English and disappeared soon after introductions) had been living in Norway for a year. I said “Jag förstår lite svenska”(I understand a little Swedish.) Michael replied in a torrent of Norwegian and that was the end of the language portion of the evening.

Anya was bubbly, she obviously loves being with people. Her effervescence and that of her brother were infectious. John was a bit more professorial but a good sport.

The table was set with olives, cheese, crackers, satsumas, nuts, a box of chocolates and Nosecco (non alcoholic Prosecco, get it?) When Anya learned that I drank alcohol, she hauled out her Polish liqueurs for me to try. Let’s see if I can read my notes and get this correct: Soplica wiśniowa (cherry), Zolądkowa Gorzka(herbal), Tradycyjna (traditional, spicy) and Miętą (mint.) I liked them all.

We arranged for John to have a voice lesson with me in exchange for Michael seeing if he could do something about a piece of laminate in Sue and Wendy’s kitchen that an electrician had inadvertently snapped in two and that was going to cost 600 GBP to be replaced—this was a story I had already heard several times, the indignant tone rising each time.

Anya volunteered her brother to fix the board and Michael said sure, he’d come over and have a look at it.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I don’t know if you coming over and just looking at it is worth a whole voice lesson!”

Michael burst out laughing.  Our eyes met, both of us laughing. There’s a magic when something funny can be shared across cultures and threaded through languages. I felt myself drawn to this family.

After looking at the chocolates all evening, I stage whispered to Wendy, “Are you curious about those?”

The chocolates were another Polish treat: Ptasie mleczko or Bird’s milk. It is a sort of marshmallow covered in chocolate. Only marshmallows as I know them are crude compared to this delicate white interior. But the real prize were the Śliwka Nałęczowska: candied plums in dark chocolate. Feeling disloyal to Cadbury, I liked these best of all the chocolate I had in the U.K.

We had our nightly cup of tea with Anya, John and Michael, and went straight home to bed.