By the time Wendy, Sue and I arrived on Mull in the Scottish Inner Hebrides, I had spent nine hours on a plane, ten hours on trains and an hour on a boat. The three of us were still an hour by car from our holiday cottage not counting stopping for groceries in the island’s only town, Tobermory. Our immediate problem was that there was no car.

The origin story of this expected car is quite involved. Sue had started negotiations for it a year ago at which time the hire car guy, Billy, had required Wendy’s (the driver) license and driver history, her car inspection history, everything it seems except the bra sizes of those of us who would actually be in the car. He also demanded to know exactly when we required the car, down to the quarter hour, something Sue patiently explained she could only give him once the boat schedules were published for 2024, with the ominous rider that if we were late, he would not be waiting around with the car. Sue had exchanged several emails the week prior to our arrival to confirm and re-confirm.

So it was a bit rich when the car was nowhere to be seen. The air was damp, the hour growing late and we were cold and tired. Craignure is little more than a boat dock, a tourist office and a few cafes. Sue texted, emailed and called Billy while we stood by the side of the road with our suitcases. The boat left. A bus to town came and went; I watched it longingly.

Finally, I went into the warm tourist office to see if they could help. The woman behind the desk told me that Billy was often late and that he was a “very busy fellow.” She looked sympathetically at me and stopped just shy of rolling her eyes. She pointed to a collection of buildings a half mile down the road, saying that was Billy’s Caravan Park and where he kept most of his hire cars. She thought it was worth a walk to see if he was there.

“Your friends can wait in here where it’s warm,” she added.

I looked at Wendy and Sue grumped over our cases. I have seen them that way when the tea was late. “I think they’d rather freeze to death than chance missing the car,” I said.

I walked the half mile down the road on a gravel path lined with daffodils which I might be rhapsodizing about now if the memory didn’t retrieve how tired and cold I was. I was also blinking back tears. The turn off to Billy’s Caravan Park took me past the police station, a fact I filed away. And there at the end of the road was Billy tinkering with a car.

“We hired one of your cars for today and we’ve been waiting an hour.”

“Oh, was that for today?”

He disappeared inside his shack and came back out saying he didn’t see anything in his diary. “But, just a minute.” Another dive inside brought up this information: “I saw all the emails. You are 100% correct. It’s my fault.”

I stood looking at him, thinking, “And .  .  .?”

“A car has just come in. I need to get it cleaned up.” He looked at me. “You don’t need an automatic, do you?”

Huh? What was he asking? Was the car that just came in an automatic? What difference did that make? I knew that Wendy always drove a manual but I didn’t know what Sue had specified other than a small car. Wendy wasn’t comfortable with a large one.

“Is an American driving?”

OK, this guy’s communication skills were not great.

“No.”

“A manual will be fine then.”

What was that supposed to mean? People skills not all that great either.

“How long will it take?”

“You can wait or I’ll have it there by the time you walk back.”

I hesitated. I didn’t want to let this guy out of my sight.

“Look,” he snapped. “I have to clean the car. You waitin’ or walkin’?”

I walked back to the tourist office. I preferred the company of Wendy and Sue. At least we were all complaining about the same thing. We waited another 45 minutes.

“How long did he think it would take me to walk back? “I demanded. “And what was that crack about Americans and automatic transmissions? I feel doubly insulted. I can drive a stick.”

Billy finally showed up with a large Vauxhall. He popped the boot and put one large case in and reached for another.

“We ordered a small car,” Sue said.

At this Billy became Someone Else. He yanked the case out of the boot and slammed the door. “I can cancel this contract any time I want,” He snapped. “I already apologized.”

We stepped back in surprise. Good grief, what a situation. Sue appeared poised to insist on the small car. I sensed that if Billy drove off, we’d never see him in either a large or small car again. It was late, it was cold. Mull is a remote island with bad roads and few people. The only town was an hour away and the bus to it had just left. Billy’s was one of two car hire companies on the island.

“No, don’t do that!” Somebody said this. It might have been me. It might have been Wendy. I don’t think it was Sue.

“I can go get a small car, which will take at least an hour or you can take this one or I can just leave you here.”  His preference was clearly the last option apparently on the grounds that he had already apologized.

Three women in their 60s in the cold and damp on a remote island in the Hebrides? He’d leave us there? It was 5:00 and another hour, my Aunt Fanny. It’d be 9:00 before he get a small car to us if at all. We still needed to get groceries and find our way home in the dark (the Brits weren’t yet on Summertime) on winding one lane roads, not necessarily paved, taking an hour even in the daylight.

“Look,” he turned to me. “Didn’t I apologize? Did you tell them I apologized?”

I walked up to him and put both hands three inches from his chest. “Yes, I did,” I soothed. “I also said you were very good-looking.”

He gave me a wry grin as if to acknowledge that he knew what I was doing and to a small extent, it was working.

More huffing and threatening, he was dismissive of Sue because he assumed Wendy, as the driver, had done the booking. Of the three of us, Sue is the most dangerous to insult (with me running a close second and Wendy almost not at all.) One look at Sue’s face and I knew Billy had made a tactical error that he would pay for later. (Stay tuned.)

We managed to talk him down off his ledge and he showed Wendy how to drive the car. He seemed different at that point. Patient, calm, maybe even kind. Maybe it was just that he had no people skills. I’m really dredging the bottom to find anything to round out his character.

I went into the tourist office to make my report and see them properly horrified. It makes all of Mull look bad when something like this happens.

Finally, we were on our way to Tobermory. I wrote to Andrew that night and he responded: “Does he have ticks holding on under his kilt or something? ” And thus the car hire guy became Tick Billy. He seemed to accompany us wherever we went and by the time we left, a week later, we had thoroughly dissected him, as is only right and proper.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here I come with another U.K. travelogue. This one has two overriding features that make it different from some of my past ones. Firstly, on this trip, I left behind a sweetheart. A prevailing image that puts a lump in my throat even now when I think of this trip is that of watching Andrew’s retreating figure when he left me at TSA, his tall, gangly (I love gangly) body ambling down the concourse, around a corner and out of sight. Even though he was at home in Seattle, Andrew was part of my travels.

The other feature was that I got sick in the second week of my travels. Not Covid sick but a bad cold with body aches, sore throat and difficulty breathing. I have often wondered how I would manage being sick while I was on my own and traveling; the idea scared me. But I was with my English cousins through the worst of this cold and that helped—more on that later.

I arrived in London after the usual horrible nine-hour plane ride, took the Elizabeth line to Paddington and checked into the Paddington station hotel, a hotel I know well, where I lay in bed for 10 hours –don’t know if I slept—before getting on a train from King’s Cross to Glasgow. Last time I went to Glasgow on the train, I rushed from the airport after the usual horrible nine-hour plane ride and went directly to a four-and-a-half hour train trip. I decided I was too old to do that again.

But before this train, I got my Prets Posh Porridge from Pret a Manger in Paddington station. I love that stuff and it sets me up for the day like nothing else except maybe tea. At the hotel reception, an Easter display of chicks, bunnies and chocolate eggs reminded me that it was Good Friday. I checked out and got a taxi for King’s Cross where I did a thorough sweep of the First-Class lounge and sampled tea, coffee, fruit juice (watery) and got a banana and packets of biscuits for cousins Wendy and Sue who were stuck in the country having had their train to London cancelled. They were frantically trying to find another, enlisting a neighbor to drive them halfway to hell and gone to catch it.

The trains in England are a mess right now. Recurring train strikes mean that when you book a seat, you have to make sure that particular train line isn’t going to be on strike on that particular day. They publish a schedule of the strikes so at least it’s not an unexpected surprise. This has been going on for years. I got caught in a strike when I was there a year ago for Christmas and had to book two unplanned days in London before I could get down to my cousins in the country.

Last time I went to Glasgow on the train, it went straight up the west side of the country and I arrived in less four hours, no transfers. This train went all the way across the country, up the east coast and took over 5 hours and I had to change in Edinburgh. It’s the same train I took in 2005 when I went from Rye (on the English Channel) to Richmond (North Yorkshire). Back in those days I didn’t bother making reservations. I didn’t even know what train station I needed. I asked at Charing Cross information.

“Right. You need King’s Cross to Darlington.”

Darlington. I had never heard of Darlington. It’s not like it was Edinburgh or Newcastle or Oxford. I stopped myself just in time from saying, “Are you sure?”

So here I was on the train to Edinburgh, calling at Darlington, York, Newcastle and a much more seasoned traveller in the U.K. than I had been in 2005. When we were coming into Newcastle, I recognized all the bridges from movies, and of, course, the Vera television series.

“Wow, there they are!” I thought. This happens to me a lot, recognizing places from my reading or television or films.

Was it my imagination or were the people boarding at Newcastle more rugged and noisier? A new staff came on and they were no-nonsense. Here came a man, shaking a bin bag “Roobish? Roobish?”

I slept a little on the train. Every time I opened my eyes, I saw sheep and lambs like cotton balls in the green grass, the tiny lambs curled up together like kittens. White and Hallmark-ready from a distance, up close they are filthy.

The parade of snack and drinks carts began half an hour out of London and continued at intervals. “Can I get anyone anything at all? Any snacks or drinks at all? Does anyone need anything at all?”

I got some High Commissioner whisky, blended in Glasgow. And a cup of tea. I always get a cup of tea, even if I don’t want one. Because underneath it all, one always wants another cup of tea. Off the brunch menu, I got “Frittata with Posh Baked Beans.”

In Glasgow, I fell asleep in my hotel room after texting Wendy and Sue that I’d see them in the morning. In the morning, there they were, their familiar faces so comforting and welcoming. I immediately relinquished all sense of responsibility for anything. They always have everything in hand. (They hate having their pictures taken, let alone being published on the Internet; otherwise you’d see them here.)

In the hotel reception was a “Taxi Call” button. I pressed it. Another button came up saying “Ready to call.” Sue and I stood looking at it. Was it meant to be a confirmation that we weren’t children playing in the hotel whilst our harried parents tried to check in? What did it mean? Sue pressed it.

A taxi zoomed up to the front door. By the time we rolled our luggage out, a second taxi had pulled up and the two drivers got into a pissing contest over whose fare we were.

“We accidentally pushed the call button twice,” I explained.

“Whyja do that?” Taxi Number Two demanded.

Um. Accident?

As Taxi Number One pulled away with us inside, the driver said, “Sure it was a small accident. No need for ‘im to have attitude.”

At Queen Street station we sat in a waiting room with sandwiches we had found at the station’s Marks and Spencer. A giant, long-coated Alsatian named Thor and a crabby but talented pianist outside the waiting room entertained us. (The train stations all have pianos with wonderful amateur pianists. I noticed that a new reality TV show called “The Piano” is about to drop and will ruin this wonderful feature of the train stations. Soon regular people will feel intimidated and incompetent.)

We boarded a four-car, crowded commuter train for the four-hour ride to Oban, a favorite resort town since Victorian times on the edge of mainland Scotland. It’s a launch point to several of the islands of the inner Hebrides, one of which, Mull, was our destination. We had half an hour to get from the Oban train station to the boat that would take us to Mull, a window that shrunk to five minutes because the train ran late. It reminded me of the nail-biter when I took the bus from Glasgow to Kennacraig with minutes to get on the boat to Islay. At least Oban was a town with hotels. Kennacraig is just a boat dock in the middle of nowhere.

Our train steward called ahead to see if they could hold the boat. (I bet he said “at all.” As in “Can you hold the boat any extra time at all?”) The Caledonian MacBrayne “Coir’ Uisg” (pronounce: “coroosk”) was revving its engine when we came panting aboard. The boat was moving before we had stowed our luggage on the car deck.

 

After a quiet, beautiful ride, we alighted on Mull with the expectation that a rental car would be waiting for us in the tiny coastal town of Craignuir. It was late afternoon and cold. There was no rental car to be seen. Now what?

 

Two weeks into the sunroom remodel—a mere spruce-up, actually—I began musing on what could have made the experience worse. It could have been the middle of summer when the sun room feels 150 degrees in the afternoon. Or it could .  .  . no, that’s about all that could have made it worse.

I wasn’t even the one doing it. I was mostly in the house eating bon-bons and drinking single malt or so I told Erina when she worried that she had disrupted my life. Erina was, in fact, one of the few good things about the entire debacle.

I’ve known Erina for about eight years. She lived around the corner from me until she graduated high school and found a job and her own place. When she was 13 years old, she posted signs in the neighborhood announcing: I Will Do Your Dirty Work. I hired her to do some work in my yard, nothing especially dirty at first. She cleaned gutters and sawed down tree limbs. She loved anything that involved power tools.

She worked with her Bluetooth ear buds in, listening to old TV shows –Grays Anatomy was one—or music. I always knew when she had music on because she sang along in her lovely voice. Once I couldn’t find her.

I called her mother, Liz:

Is Erina there?

I thought she was with you.

I can’t find her. I know she was up on the was up on the roof.  Let me check.

Outside, I climbed the ladder that just barely gets you onto the roof. Erina was down at the far end, dancing to something she was hearing through her ear buds.

I texted Liz: She’s fine. She had her ear buds in.

Liz: I hate those things.

Erina has painted a lot of my house, inside and out. I have an indelible image of her painting the bathroom ceiling that reached up to a high skylight. She was barefoot and on tiptoe on the top of one of those stepstools that warn you not to stand on the top of the stepstool, keeping a calm and perfect balance while she wielded the roller. When I came around the corner and saw her, I dropped the laundry.

“I’m getting the tall ladder.”

“No, I’m fine.”

She’s delightful, artistic, musical, funny, bright, a girl after my own heart. Except she has mounds more energy than I do. Of course, she’s fifty years younger. I just figured that out. That makes me want to take a nap.

Anyway, to get to the Disaster Story, it all started when Erina painted my living room in lemon meringue yellow and I had three gallons of leftover paint because I don’t understand how to figure square feet.

“I guess I could use it for touch-ups until I die and I’ll will it to you.”

“I could paint your sunroom,” Erina said.

She painted the sunroom. In between coats, she painted my front door and the baseboards in the living room. She secured a shelf, which I put up years ago that has never been stable. She mounted my TV with an adjustable mount so secure, a child could swing on it.

“What do you want to do with the trim?” she asked. “You know what, you should paint it blue.”

I bought a gallon of peacock blue. Erina painted the trim.

“I could pull up this flooring,” she said.

The flooring in the sun room was an ugly brown that broke off in both large and small pieces as it pleased, revealing a cement floor with gunks of hardened black stuff—tar, as we found out—stuck to a jute fabric. All of it probably 70 years old.

Erina started scooping and scraping and peeling with shovels –including my snow shovel–with hand scrapers and putty knives and my neighbor Bill’s spud. Finally she rented an electric tile stripper. When she had gotten the ugly brown linoleum up, we were looking at lumps and patches of black mastic, a substance that appeared to have petrified there on the floor.

Then began the first of many trips Erina made to Home-Depot, Lowes, Aurora Rentals, Tweedy and Popp, a place called Dependable Construction and an Ace Hardware up in Everett, 30 miles away. I marveled at how many trips she could make in the same day in between toiling over the black crud while maintaining her optimism and cheer. She talked to the folk at the stores, she did research on her phone, she watched You Tube videos.  My contribution was to make popcorn for her every day.

Her mother, Liz, got in on it later when it seemed like the ship was going down. Both Erina and Liz are forces of nature. The two of them together are an explosion of ideas, research and arguments.

I hate research. I just make decisions and live with them. For example, here’s me picking out a Christmas tree:

“I need one between five and six feet.”

“Here’s one.”

“I’ll take it.”

One Monday, Erina poured five gallons of Blue Bear mastic and adhesive remover on the floor. She was still humming and dancing, listening to Grays Anatomy and scraping. She was leaving swathes of bare cement.

“I’m going to need the floor tiles tomorrow or the next day.”

I picked out some slate blue peel-and-stick tile that looked lovely with the peacock blue of the trim, bought enough for 300 square feet (accurate calculation) and was home within the hour.

By “tomorrow or the next day” lumps of sticky black tar remained all over the floor,  Erina glopped what she could into old containers I had lying around.  We looked at each other.

“I think we need a degreaser,” she said.

“How are you going to clean it up? How are you going to clean any of this up?” (Notice the use of the “you” pronoun.)

“We need a lot of rags. And I’ll wear my rubber overalls.”

Two gallons of degreaser went down. Now the gunk wasn’t just sticky, it was oily.

“I think I can hose this down with my power hose and slurp it up with a wet vac.”

The next day Erina showed up in a giant pair of rubber overalls that I called her haz-mat suit to start hosing and slurping. The main thing this accomplished was to spray tar all over the freshly painted yellow walls and ruin my neighbor’s shop vac. I had to buy more yellow paint, which, you may remember, the surplus of which was what started this whole thing.

Liz found a scrapy tool that was a giant razor blade on a handle. Erina commenced to scraping. We had to trade up to a machine that would do the scraping for her. After an hour, this gave us about a foot of bare cement.

I said, “Did you tell me that we could put tiles down without getting up all the mastic and it would last for maybe a year?”

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t we do that because this floor is going to be the death of me.”

“You’re kidding?”

“Only partly.”

Yet truly my main inconvenience was that if I wanted to get to my cabin in back, I had to walk around the house and unlock the back door to get in. That and the fact there was sticky black stuff everywhere. It was worse than when I used to run the chocolate fountain for my student recitals. I would find chocolate all over the house, even in places I knew no one had been. At least the chocolate would come up with soap and water.

Erina washed the floor as best she could and mopped up everything with rags and towels. While the floor dried she cleaned tools and floors and the shop vac; she spent hours getting the viscous ooze in and out of the sunroom.

She had been at this project for two weeks before she lost all her glorious energy and optimism. She sat down and cried. Earlier she had burst into tears at Dependable Construction. It was over.

Then a friend made a stray comment to me that cork underlayment might work on as much of the floor as we had gotten clean and dried. I did the research this time and made the phone calls. Erina rallied.

Before she set out for the store in Everett, I said, “Don’t let them tell you this won’t work. Everything they have said would work hasn’t”

“This is our ‘Hail Mary’.” she said

I got a text from Erina an hour later. “I’ve found a dead pigeon on 8^th and I’ve made a coffin for it. Can I bury it in your garden?”

I had seen that dead pigeon earlier and had told myself it was just a rag. “She is such a nicer person than I am,” I thought.

Erina and Liz were there til 10:00 that night putting down the cork underlayment. Erina buried her pigeon in my pet cemetery, already the final resting place of five cats and one dog.

Erina re-painted the walls and put down the tiles.

They looked lovely. I was thrilled. But by the time Erina arrived the next day to help move the furniture back into the sunroom, the cork underlayment was buckling and the tiles were expanding and peeling up off the floor.

“Oh NO!”

“It’s okay,” I said. I’m going to live with this. I’ll cover the high traffic areas with a big rug.”

I am living with it although Bill said it was a problem still waiting to be solved.  I bought him a new shop vac, by the way. There is still a pile of glutinous refuse– a lump of foul deformity, Shakespeare might have said, a big boil, a plague-sore–I’ll stop now– in my side yard because no one will pick it up until I have it tested for asbestos.

“I’ll help you sort it out and we’ll take it to the dump ourselves,” said Erina.

You know what? I absolutely love this young woman.

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you are only here because of the provocative title, the relevant information is about halfway through the post.

New Years Eve day I again walked the Compton Road loop and got drenched and did a trial pack of my suitcase. The outlook was not good.

Sue and Wendy were still “poorly.” Sue was so poorly, she had called the surgery (that’s what they call a doctor’s office) and bullied her way into an appointment with a doctor. Now she was taking anti-biotics, and inhaling something that she claimed didn’t work.

We watched Call the Midwife Christmas special and Midsomer Murder Haunted Christmas and went to bed early.

New Years Day was a melancholy one because it was my last day. I walked halfway to Baltonsborough to take pictures of mistletoe, which I had never seen in its native habitat. I only know the little treated horrors tied with a red ribbon and selling for $5 at Christmas time.

Then Wendy and I drove down into Devon to visit a part of the family I had been hearing about for 40 years but had never met. Hazel is the namesake of my Hazel, the first family member I had met in 1980. I stayed several times with Hazel in her cottage in Harrowbarrow, Cornwall and she showed me the cottage in the Combe where my great grandfather was born.

The Hazel I met on New Year’s Day is now in her 80s and she was a breath of Cornish air. She spoke with the Cornish accent that was reminiscent of so many memorable times in Harrowbarrow. We all chatted—she and her husband, Brian and their children Gaynor and Alan—and Gaynor had arranged a whole plate of gluten free fairy cakes. We had all spontaneously hugged each other and I was made to feel like family, which of course, in a byzantine way, I am.

On Jan 2, I took the train—soon to be on strike again– into London. I had gotten everything into my suitcase by dint of leaving behind my nasty old house slippers and my boots since one of the soles had split open and was letting water in. I immediately missed Somerset and the village. Most of all I missed Wendy and Sue. But I always feel that way when I’ve left them behind.

The next morning, I took Christmas candy, by way of thanks, to James, the concierge who had loaned me his phone charger and to Ziyad at the Royal Cambridge Hotel who had evidently made a trip to the Paddington Hilton on his own time to return to phone charger I had left there on my first day in London. See Part One: Preliminary Drama

Then I set out for two days of museums. I walked in the rain across Kensington Gardens to the Victoria and Albert museum where I immediately asked if there was a cafe. Behind me, I heard a couple ask the same thing and then felt them at my back.

I turned. “You know, it’s not safe to follow me anywhere, ” I said. The woman laughed and the man assured me in a shocked voice that they weren’t following me.

I fortified myself with a pot of tea and squash soup before starting around the exhibits. I particularly enjoyed the Beatrix Potter. Then because it was still raining, I took a taxi to Tate Britain and recalled that I had been there before so I found my old favorites. From Tate Britain I maneuvered back to my hotel on the buses.  I am proud that I can do London buses even though they take longer than the Tube. Between the buses and walking, I learn the city.

The next day, however the buses defeated me. It was too complicated to get where I wanted to go: all the way to Bethnal Green in northeast London. Earlier I had been looking for the Sir John Soane Museum when I had seen on the map the unlikely attraction, The Vagina Museum. I looked up the web site and booked an appointment. Sir John Soane was going to have to wait. The Vagina Museum had a gift shop and for no other reason, I had to see what that was all about.

When I emerged from the Tube onto Cambridge Heath Road, I saw that I was in a neglected part of the city. Within five minutes I had been approached by three people asking for money. I gave some to a woman who I knew would use it for nothing good and who then asked for more.

I escaped into the Sainsbury Local to get my bearings, then found my way across the main intersection and down Victoria Park Square. I turned onto a path called Sugar Loaf Walk, which in my overactive imagination, resembled a kind of canal, like a vaginal canal. We’ll pass over the connotations of sugar loaf at this point.

The museum was run by young women, not surprisingly. One exhibit displayed how women have managed their menstrual periods over the centuries. Sphagnum moss was an early Kotex. Another exhibit followed some of the horrific shaming and shunning of women’s bodies and monthly bleeding. Pregnancy, labor and birth was presented.

Photographs of 56 different vaginas filled a wall. I had no idea there was such a variety of configurations. I’ve known a lot of women who thought there was something “wrong” with theirs. I wish this sort of information was as Out There as this museum, especially to young women.

“I can’t describe how it feels to see products I used in the 60s in a museum display case, “ I told the young curators. I swept my arm around the room. “But I think this is wonderful. I am thrilled to see it. Do many older women come in?”

“Yes, we get a lot of older women and they all say exactly what you just said!”

The Foundling Museum was my second museum of the day. It is dedicated to the history of foundlings in London. Orphans. Babies and children who for whatever reason were abandoned by their parents. The first floor was a melancholic place. The stories were upsetting and the little tokens that identified the children were heartbreaking. These were small lockets or chains or thimbles mothers left in order to identify their children should they ever come back for them.

The top floors were the P.R. floors. George Frideric Handel and Charles Dickens had both been benefactors of the museum, raising funds and advertising its existence with concerts and readings. The upstairs opulence and elegance were a sad irony to the starkness of the first floors. They also gave me a little relief. Handel donated all his original scores to the museum. Not sure how that would have helped a destitute child but it was interesting to me. There’s a Handel Museum over by Claridges and I bet they’d love to get their hands on those scores. Handel and Dickens are two of my favorite historical figures.

Back at the hotel, I got packed and left early the next day without any interesting incidents that I can remember. Thank you for reading my chronicles. It was fun to relive them.  I’ll leave you with links to Catseye Images where you can purchase Sue’s lovely photographs and the link to No. 96 Chapel Lane, the airbnb in Butleigh, which all the best people book.

 

Two days after Christmas, Wendy, Sue and I sat in the front room. Wendy was writing thank you notes, Sue was doing something on her phone and I was writing my second batch of Christmas cards and blaming their late departure on the Royal Mail, which was still on strike.

Wendy looked up. “I hear bells.”

“It’s the anti-biotics you’re on,” said Sue

Wendy opened the kitchen door. “No,” she said. “Those are bells.”

“They must be practicing,”

“But they always practice on Monday.”

“Well, Monday was Christmas, wasn’t it?”

“So, they’re practicing?” I asked. I pushed back my chair. “I’ve got to get up there.”

I took a swallow of the ever-present tea, grabbed my coat, got into my boots and went to the door.

“You’ve got a torch?” asked Wendy.

“I have my phone,” I said.

I knew where the bells were pulled in St Leonard’s because I had been up in the bell loft the summer of the 2016 fete. I thumped up the street; the bells were quiet and I was afraid I had missed them. But as I turned into dark churchyard, they began again:

I crept along the side of the church to the tower in the back where one lighted doorway spilled out into the night. I climbed the narrow spiral concrete steps to the ringing chamber and peered in the door. I had happened upon a group called the Axbridge Bell Ringers, a group of Somerset ringers who had spent the day traveling around Somerset, ringing church bells.

When they finished ringing the change, they invited me in. They let me watch and then, Gentle Reader, they let me ring a bell. The leader showed me where to hold the rope and how to pull. It takes a very light pull and you don’t pull far. It’s the uptake that can yank your arms out of their sockets. I got into a rhythm and pulled until I was declared a natural, a polite way of saying they were finished with indulging me.

I burst into house through the back door.

“They let me ring the bells!” I exclaimed, hopping on one foot to get my boot off.

“I thought they would,” said Wendy calmly.

The next morning Wendy ran me into Street where I caught the bus for Wells. First stop was Ye Olde Sweet Shoppe one of those old confectioneries that used to be in every London neighborhood and now you can’t find one anywhere. Rows and rows of jars with boiled sweets (hard candies): humbugs, acid drops (not what you think), aniseed balls, Kop Kops, rhubarb and custard, Army Navy drops, Yorkshire Mix (enormous lumps of different flavoured boiled sweets.) I bought a small amount of every form of black liquorice on the shelves.

I was peckish and did not want to dine on my cache of sweets; I was hoping—incredibly—that they would make it to Seattle. (Most of them did). So I went into a pub called The Crown. The very second I sat down with a menu, music began blasting out of speakers. This happens to me all the time. They see me coming, they wait until I am settled and then crank up the music. I walked out.

I tried the Market Place Café across the way. It was quiet except for low talking. “You’re not going to turn on loud music the minute I sit down, are you?”

The young man at the counter laughed. “We don’t play music at all,” he said.

“Is there a wifi password?” I asked.

“We don’t have wifi.”

This was my kind of place. No loud music and no wifi. I took note of the complete lack of pretention. On my table was a jar with sprigs wintergreen, snowberries and a candy cane.  I enjoyed my weak tea and excellent squash soup and relaxed.

I went into the Roly Fudge Shop to gather ammunition for an on-going argument I’d been having with Sue and Wendy about chocolate versus chocolate flavored sweets. They call fudge a chocolate-flavoured (spelt that way) sweet whereas something like a Cadbury chocolate bar is chocolate. (Actually what they call fudge is not even chocolate; it’s penuche but never mind.)

In the Roly Fudge Shop, Fiona explained that a chocolate-flavoured sweet is something that probably starts with butter and sugar and has chocolate added to it.

“But it’s real chocolate that’s added, isn’t it? I mean it’s still chocolate.”

“Well, yeeesss.” But she was doubtful.

Then I realized what was bothering me. “In America when we say something is chocolate-flavored, it usually means some kind of synthetic flavoring has been used, not the real thing.”

“Oh, yes, we’ve heard that.” Both Fiona’s and her assistant’s heads bobbed.

“All right then,” I thought.

I am familiar enough with Wells– having been there half a dozen times—that I know some of the cats. However I hadn’t met Basil who was parked in the middle of the entrance to Wells Cathedral posing for photographs and making everyone walk around him. The woman at reception told me that he lived about a block away and came in every morning to be fussed over. Until recently, his owner had no idea that Basil was the new cathedral cat, the former one having departed this life.

The next day, I was back in Wells, courtesy of Wendy and Sue who both had appointments there. We had lunch at the excellent Market Place café where I had the excellent minty pea soup.

I had noticed the day before that an older couple had ordered the same squash soup that I had and it seemed as though they had gotten a bowl whereas I had gotten a cup. So this time I asked for a bowl of soup.

“There’s just the one size,” the server said.

“But that couple behind me had big bowls yesterday.”

I didn’t realize it at first but everyone froze. Remember in a previous post when I said that nothing about Americans seem to surprise the British? (I just can’t speak for what they tell their families at night.) The server explained that there were two different styles of bowl but they were all the same portion size. I thought I was only trying to figure out what was available and how I could get a big bowl of soup. After Wendy told me she was a little shocked I decided I had put it too bluntly.

Beaten but unbowed, when Sue and Wendy left for their appointments, I carried my American-ness next door to the Roly Fudge Shop where I asked Fiona if I could video her explaining the difference between chocolate and chocolate-flavoured sweets to play for my cousins.

“They said the same thing you did,” I told her. “But you were so much more polite about it.”

Fiona was game. (She was young.)

“Thank you,” I said when we finished the interview and I clicked off the record button. “They are going to love that.”

The Cathedral gift shop had been closed the day before so I went back today. Who should I find holding court in the gift shop but Basil? Actually he was just in the way but I expect a lot of monarchs have been like that.

Sue called to say they were just parking and to meet them at Boots. From there we went to a Café Nero for “a proper cup of tea.”  The cafe was quiet except for the stereo coughing of Wendy and Sue. I told them I had a video interview for them to hear. I clicked play and we all heard “They are going to love that.” The End. I hadn’t actually begun the recording until the interview was over.

“Well done,” they said.

We walked back to the car as Christmas lights began appearing. Wells is a lovely little town and looked pretty in the twinkling twilight.

More observations of Wells:

 

 

 

 

 

Christmas and Boxing Day were over and the next day was a bank holiday because Christmas had been on a Sunday, which cheated people of that extra day off work. Wendy and Sue, feeling worse than poorly, could finally collapse. I had wondered since I first sat in their surround-sound coughing,  why was I not sick?

I left them languishing in bed (except for feeding the cats, running the continual laundry and I was suspicious that Wendy was actually doing some work) and went for a walk to Baltonsborough. All through the pandemic, Wendy and Sue told me about their walks to Baltonsborough (adding the annoying tally of how many miles they had walked.) I wanted to know what they were talking about.

I set off down the narrow road. The wind was blowing but it wasn’t cold; the sun was visible but weak. Few cars forced me off onto the mucky shoulder. Most of the drivers waved—either a thank you or an “I noticed you and refrained from running you down.”

Seeing a church ahead, I verged onto a footpath that followed a little offshoot of the River Brue, thinking I would be okay if I kept the church in my sights. Something I often found myself saying at the entrance to a footpath was, “I wonder how much trouble I will get into if I go that way.”

The Baltonsborough parish church doesn’t have a cross atop it; instead there’s a rooster and a British flag. I pushed the heavy door and went inside where it behaved like most parish churches: dark, smelling of damp and age and with a few piles of leaflets about church activities. No pump organ on which to play “Roll Out the Barrel,” really nothing to keep me so I turned to leave.

I couldn’t get the door open. I pulled and wrenched and finally banged on the door. Oh god. It was Tuesday. They were going to find me on Sunday, mildewed and eating the leaflets. I took a deep breath and assessed the foreign looking bolts and knobs. I leaned hard on the thick door and was able to get the latch up and burst out into the clean air.

I wandered around Baltonsborough. It’s about the size of Butleigh—about 800 people—but with no village shop. I took a few footpaths trying to stay oriented to the main road. I was getting tired. It had been two miles to Baltonsborough plus all my wandering around. Clouds were coming in and I felt a few drops of rain. I turned toward home.

Before too long I came to a three-way intersection that did not look familiar. One of those maddening ones: no signs and high hedgerows all around. I couldn’t see the church. I wasn’t even sure I was going to right direction. The weak sun had disappeared and it was cold. Wind was blowing rain into my face.

I have learned that when an American behaves the way no British person ever would, no one seems surprised. So I took a poll: I asked all 800 people in Baltonsborough how to get back on the road to Butleigh. I knocked on a door, I flagged down a car, I flagged down a bicyclist, I asked a woman who was pruning her hedge. They all told me much the same thing: Go to the top of the road and take that first left, then go right and right again, then left. You’ll get to a triangle called Moor House or maybe it’s Moor Farm, the woman who lives there keeps herself to herself. There’s a signpost that will point to Butleigh, just stay on that road.

How could it be this complicated? I walked straight from Butleigh to Baltonsborough on one road. Here was the answer to my question, “How much trouble could I get into if I took this path?”

I was soaked when I got home.

“Do you want a cup of tea?”

Yes, and my five and a half miles gave me license to eat a huge piece of my Christmas cake.

John, the neighbor from next door came for his voice lesson. He didn’t think he could sing. It turned out that he was trying to sing things in keys that his voice range couldn’t accommodate.

“That was the key on the internet.”

“It’s not the best key for you.”

“It said to use a capo.”

“Well, don’t.”

Later I fussed over Wendy and made her scrambled eggs and toast. Sue got up to watch The Lost King about how Richard III’s bones were found under a parking lot in Leicester, a thrilling (to me) story.

The next morning, Wendy got a nurse appointment. Here’s what they have to go through because the NHS is in as much trouble as the American medical establishment: You begin calling at 8:00 when the office opens. You get in the queue, which by 8:05 is 37 people. You get cut off. You keep calling. If you’re lucky by noon you’ve got an appointment for some time that day with a nurse. If you bully, you might get a doctor. Wendy got lucky.

I took the bus into Street for a wander around the shops. I had discovered that a lot of DVDs in the U.K. had Swedish subtitles so I was on the hunt for shows I liked. I bought To Kill a Mockingbird.

“Where’d you get that?” Sue asked

“British Heart Association, I think.”

“I just took that in. I would have given it to you!”

In the chemists I asked about kinesio tape. I had yanked a tendon in my leg in November and that walk to Baltonsborough had caused it to kick up again. The shop assistant showed me where the tape was but said she didn’t know how it was used. I had taped myself up with the last piece I had brought from home and asked her if she wanted to see how I used it.

I zipped down my boot and pulled down my sock and showed her the tape snaking around my ankle. I struggled to get the boot zipped back up because I had broken the zipper pull. (I broke three different zipper pulls on this trip; It was a wonder I managed to stay dressed.)

The shop assistant continued to stand next to me. “It takes me a while to get this back up,” I said by way of releasing her.

Her feet didn’t move.

“You don’t have to watch.”

Her feet turned ever so slightly toward the front of the shop.

“Unless you want to,” I added, yanking on the zipper.

She turned back.

“It must be awfully boring for you.”

Finally she went back to her line of customers. Was this a possible entry for Very British Problems?

After asking directions from everyone on the south side of the High Street, including all the shops, I found my way to Arthur’s Court to visit Pam. Pam, if you don’t remember from a previous post, is Wendy’s mother. She had a stroke a few years back and can no longer speak understandable words. She was in the lounge with other residents and we enjoyed a lop-sided conversation about nothing.

Of all the wonderful experiences I had had so far, one of the most thrilling was to happen that evening.

Stay tuned.

 

 

Christmas morning, I woke up early and lay in bed for a long time, wondering if Wendy and Sue were ever going to stir. Sue and I had gotten a bit shirty (defined as throwing your toys out of the pram) about when we would do gifts. Just a bit. I come from a tradition of opening gifts on Christmas Eve because that was what my father’s family had done, a legacy of my Swedish great-grandmother. When Sue was growing up, presents were opened first things Christmas morning. Wendy was running Christmas, though, and she made us wait until afternoon after dinner for the big unwrapping, can you believe it?

As it turned out, Wendy orchestrated the loveliest Christmases I’ve had in a long time. We all had our various breakfasts with our various milks in our various tea. (Wendy, decafe with semi-skimmed milk; Sue, decafe tea with lactose free milk; Elena, caffeinated tea with oat milk). Then we dove into the stockings for the small gifts.

Dinner (actually lunch) was early afternoon. Wendy set a lovely table with placemats on a red polka-dotted tablecloth; candles, and crackers by each plate. We had turkey crown, sausage stuffing balls, pigs-in-blankets, Yorkshire pudding, potatoes rubbed in goose fat and roasted, parsnips in a honey glaze, boiled carrots, sprouts, broccoli and peas; and elderberry cordial.

We pulled our crackers. Let me enlighten the Americans who don’t know what a cracker is.  Basically, it’s like an empty toilet paper roll with three little items inside: a paper crown, a small toy and a piece a paper (called a motto) with an unfunny joke or silly riddle. (Mine was What do you call a fake noodle? An impasta.) But I did get an interesting little toy called a mystery calculator, the mystery and the calculations I’ve yet to figure out. I meant to do it on the airplane home.

Anyway, the toilet paper roll is wrapped in Christmas paper with ties on the end into which are embedded dots of gunpowder like we used to have in cap guns. You pull one side of your cracker and your neighbor at the table pulls the other and bang! Joy, Wendy’s sister who had arrived with piles of gifts and a vicious cough, pulled a cracker with me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then we raced reindeer. Many years ago the Christmas crackers had contained wind-up reindeer and they had become part of the festivities ever since. We all took reindeers, wound them up and raced them to the middle of the table. No one won.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Joy had made a gluten-free Christmas cake for me to have all to myself. She had made one for me several years ago but the postage to Seattle had been prohibitive so they saved it for when I came to visit nine months later. You can do that with a Christmas cake because it’s preserved with brandy. It’s a fruitcake with a topping of marzipan. Then the whole thing is encased in an almond paste fondant.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By now it was nearly 3:00 and I wondering (child that I am) if we were ever getting to the gifts.

“Do we have to listen to the King’s speech first?” I asked.

“Certainly not, “said Sue with a withering look.

At 3:00, every Christmas Day for 70 years, Queen Elizabeth had addressed the nation. This was to be the first King’s speech. We were well into our gifts when he came on the television and I looked up from all the wrappings. It was short. And it was very sweet. I looked at Wendy, the monarchist in the family. “I’m going to cry,” I said. And I did.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We piled all the (mostly) chocolate that we had amassed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I went for a walk as it was getting dark.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We all watched the second Fishermen’s Friends movie, had a cup of tea and went to bed.

The next morning, Boxing Day, I asked, “How are you two feeling?”

Wendy: “Oh not too bad.” She looked exhausted.

Sue: “I feel rough.” But she was dressed up to go out.

I left the two of them to hold up the empire and went for a walk on the Compton Road loop again, finishing up at the farm shop for another chat with Lucy.

Sue and I follow a thing on social media called Very British Problems. A posting on Boxing Day read, “Right. What’s the cheese situation?” One of the comments was “A modest surfeit lurks in the fridge.” That was our situation, too.  Cheese and chocolate are a feature of the holiday. Another is The Panto (short for pantomime.)

We went to a panto in Yeoville, about 40 minutes south of Butleigh. I’ll start by saying I had never seen anything like it. We don’t have anything remotely like it in America. It’s not mime and it’s certainly not silent. It’s a fairy tale (we saw Dick Whittington) acted by men playing women and women playing men, audience participation, slapstick comedy, outrageous puns (but much better than the ones in the crackers) and the audience “always gets wet,” said Sue.

There’s always a villain (Sue had played a villainous Rat in a panto earlier in December, a performance I would have loved to see and she got rave reviews.)  There’s always a dame played by a man. Our Dame Dolly was big and round and had enormous pink cupcakes boobs, an image I will never, ever get out of my head.

The audience participation was fun. Booing at the villain, screaming at the sailor to look behind him, singing along on some of the songs. Gas bubbles and streamers were ejected into the audience several times. The actors ran down the aisles with super-soakers and sprayed everyone. I adored it.

However, it was loud. Way too loud for me so I again put in ear-plugs and that helped. At the interval, I left Sue and Wendy to get ice cream—that’s another feature of the panto—and went for a walk to calm my ears. I meant to go around the block and I thought I had but in no time, I was lost and had to ask for directions of a couple who walked me back to the theater.

In the second act, Sue on my right, asked me to ask Wendy for one of her throat sweets. I leaned over to Joy on my left.

“Sue needs one of Wendy’s throat sweets.”

One was passed to me and I promptly dropped it by Joy’s leg. I leaned down to get it. It seemed to move left and I kept reaching until I had pushed Joy into Wendy.

“What are you doing?” Sue asked.

“Trying to get you your bloody sweet,” I said. “I need another,” I whispered to Joy.

“Here,” said Wendy holding out a second one, which she then dropped.

The third one made it to Sue about the time the super-soakers came down the aisle.

It could have been part of the show.

 

More images from Christmas Day

 

 

 

 

Two days before Christmas began the long slide into what would be Christmas Day. I again went for a long walk in the morning. This time I took the long way to the Farm Shop. I started at Wendy and Sue’s house on Chapel Lane, walked to the top of the High St, crossed the sub road to Compton Road and carried on around a big field that I could have cut through (public footpath) if it hadn’t been so mucky.  I came back to the sub road on Wood Lane and turned up the hill to the Farm Shop.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the Farm Shop I met Lucy who was replenishing everything for the Christmas rush. I introduced myself and we chatted. I find that mentioning Sue-at-the-Village-Shop is my entrée into polite society because everyone knows her.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wendy and I went for The Big Shop at Morrisons. The big grocery stores are Tesco, Sainsbury, Morrisons and Waitrose, the latter being the most upmarket. There are smaller cash and carry shops, Lidl and Aldi, where you can find things not in the big chain stores, like Anya’s chocolate covered candied plums.

The most intriguing thing Wendy bought were the goose fat roast potatoes. I get that the potatoes are prepared and ready to roast but I had never heard of rubbing them with goose fat or any kind of fat, really. I just throw them in the oven and bake as is, then pile on the butter. But Wendy said this was the best way to do potatoes and I find, after an internet search, that I am apparently the last person on earth to know this. She got sausage ball stuffing, bacon, a turkey crown, sprouts (I’d finished off my branch from the farm shop), parsnips, carrots, peas and more cakes, mince pies and selection boxes. The Selection Box is a thing. It’s a nicely presented box of chocolates. If I read my cousins correctly, their preferred selection boxes are Quality Street, Cadbury Milk Tray or Cadbury Roses. Wendy also likes Lindor truffles of which you can get about 25 different flavors in the U.K. I mean, really the U.S. is a chocolate desert by comparison. Other selections boxes are Galaxy, Maltesers and Celebrations.

 

 

 

 

Back home, I wrapped gifts in my little cottage and with Coope, Boyes and Simpson going all afternoon. Sue introduced me to this rich vein of carols from the midlands where she grew up and I was enchanted. Then I fell asleep again.

 

In the evening we set off for Stourhead to the festival of lights. Stourhead is a National Trust property of house and gardens. A path had been established in a long loop. Every turn brought us to another illumination of trees and plants with amplified music so loud, I put in my ear-plugs and then could just barely tolerate it. Dotted along the trail were little refreshment huts, one of which featured marshmallows with an open fire pit on which to roast them. Wendy zoomed in like an English pointer. She and I are especially fond of marshmallows.

My favorite display was one of actual fire-lit torches with Auld Lang Syne on the speakers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the drive home I heard Once in Royal David’s City on the radio and asked Wendy to turn it up. I wanted to hear my line: “when our eyes at last shall see him.’ We ended up listening to a lessons and carols service broadcast from St Paul’s in London in aid of seeing-eye guide dogs. All was right with the world, listening to carols in the dark on the long drive home, safe and warm and looking forward to Christmas.

The morning of Christmas Eve I again walked the Compton loop. Wendy and Sue were up when I returned.

“How are you two feeling?’

“Poorly,” said Sue

“About the same,” said Wendy and then, in Sue’s words, barked like a stricken sea lion.

I was still well.

More wrapping and napping and in the evening, caroling on the village green. Sue and I went, leaving the barking sea lion at home.

Thirty or forty people came, all with torches or phones with lights. I recognized David, the choirmaster from the earlier caroling and the woman with all the descants in her memory. She was clustered with others of her species and the descants were glorious.

There was mulled wine, compliments of the owner of the village shop, and when we finished singing, a snow machine!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back home, Wendy and Sue broke out three pair of matching Christmas pajamas and we watched A Christmas Carol with Patrick Stewart and ate chocolate.

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

From the Castle Cary train station, we “did a shop” in Street (that’s a town.) It seems to me that we “did a shop” almost every other day. And the washing machine was going 24/7—more about that later. On that first day, Sue took me around Clark’s Village, an outlet mall built on the site of the first Clark’s shoe factory. Jet-lagged and fuzzy-headed, I stumbled like a hypnotized person into Radley London, Weird Fish, White Stuff, Fatface (look them up) AND the Cadbury Shop where I bought bags of Cadbury chocolates.

I bought Christmas cards in a charity shop. All the charity shops (thrift stores)–British Heart Foundation, Sue Ryder, Cancer Research, Oxfam—sell Christmas cards, the proceeds of which go to the charity. Touching, clever, pretty, Sue and Wendy do a massive business in sending and receiving cards.

Earlier in the month, in Seattle, I had ignored everything I could with the excuse, “Oh, I’m sorry, I am getting ready to go overseas” but I did want to send some cards and not just to gloat that I was in England for Christmas.

At last we were in Butleigh, a village of about 900 people in Somerset, three miles from Glastonbury and nine from Wells –if that helps you. Wendy turned onto Chapel Lane and into the drive of the stone house with the rabbit hutch to one side. There are no longer rabbits in the hutch. Firewood, gardening supplies and other things are stored inside and it serves as a place to hang the washing and as a roof for Izzy the cat to sit on as her sister Lizzy used to do.

One of my first actions was to pay homage to the cats and we began as we meant to go along: Tabsy crawled on my lap and dug his claws into me to knead and purr. Izzy allowed me to pet her and fuss over her but would not sit on my lap. Seamus leapt up in alarm and hid whenever he sensed me near.

During the pandemic Wendy and Sue turned a mother-in-law apartment, heretofore called The Cottage, into an Airbnb. It was beautifully appointed (they are Super Hosts—that’s the industry term) and scrupulously clean. Though connected to their part of the house, it had its own entrance and it was to be my home for the next two weeks.

We ate cheese and biscuits and salad, salad being defined as lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes arranged artfully on a plate, and talked. Then we had tea and cake and talked. Both Wendy and Sue were sick with appalling coughs, congestion and sore throats – and the most they would ever say about being ill was that they were doing poorly–and I resigned myself to becoming sick before too long. But that first night I was merely jet-lagged.

In the evening, I joined a group of villagers to carol around the village. I went down the drain (the drain is a passageway resembling a tunnel that was at one time an actual drain but now functions as a foot path. I never like to miss a chance to say I am going down the drain), outfitted with a torch (flashlight.) It was pitch black except for a few street lights around the shop and the glow from cottage windows.

At the village shop I met up with a small group of glorious voices, led by David the choirmaster at St Leonard’s parish church.  Latching onto a wonderful bass named Brian, I sang along side him, eventually gushing all over him about his voice for which he seemed both pleased and bemused. One woman had descants stored in her head from her school years. On the last verse of every carol, she let another one rip. It was thrilling.

We sang songs I knew but that we rarely hear in the states. “Once in Royal David’s City,” “Christians Awake,” “Infant Lowly,” “As With Gladness.” I had first heard “Christians Awake” when I stood next to Hazel (the oldest generation I have met of my family) on Christmas Day in 1991 in Metherell Baptist Church, Cornwall. She was planted on the floor like Birgit Nilsson in Die Walküre and held forth with “Rise to adore the mystery of love” with its beautiful melodic swoop.

We sang “Ding Dong, Merrily on High” several times –merrily, “O Little Town of Bethlehem” English tune; and the odious “Away in a Manger,” the only thing making it bearable was the English tune.

I was my usual American-on-holiday self, chatting up people I might have walked down the far aisle to avoid if I’d been home. I can imagine them complaining over breakfast the next morning about the brash American with the crude speech patterns.

We sang for Wendy and Sue after which I cut out and followed them inside where Christmas music accompanied a small cottage industry of wrapping paper and gifts boxes, scissors, cello tape, gift cards and a mile high stack of Cadbury chocolate boxes and other delectables.  So industrious were they that I was inspired to sit down with my ten Christmas cards and write them all. (If you didn’t get one, it’s the fault of the Royal Mail; it was on strike. What mail didn’t go out late probably got lost and that’s where your card is.)

My first morning in Butleigh, I lay in bed until I felt the heat come on. Running through my head was the wonderful line from Once in Royal David’s City: “When our eyes at last shall see him.”

Before Sue and Wendy were up, I was out the door for a walk around the village. I wanted to re-visit the field where I had watched the sheep at the same time that the church bells were ringing and had thought, “Could anything be more English?” I found the field but the sheep had moved. Funny how that works. Then I found the sheep and there were week-old lambs. I waved at the farmer—Keith– and asked if I could come in and look at them.

Back home, Sue was up and ironing.

“Is it “Once in David’s Royal City or “Once in Royal David’s City,” I asked. It was reminiscent of Ruth’s Kris Steakhouse.

“Once in Royal David’s City.”

“Thank you. How are you feeling?”

“About the same.”  Violent coughing ensued.

Sue had to work at the village shop in the afternoon. Wendy proposed that she and I walk “up the tor.”

“Are you sure you’re up for that?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m all right.” Violent coughing ensued.

I follow a woman on social media, Michelle Cowbourne, who walks up the tor every morning before dawn and takes the most glorious photographs. Earlier I told Wendy that I wanted to walk up the tor before dawn.

“Well, you can do that,” Wendy said. But there was no offer to take me at that hour or show me how to get started. We set off at a more convenient time.

The tor is a dizzying climb and I was still quite jet lagged. The wind was fierce and I thought several times I was going to topple down the hill. We walked up the steep backside and came down the gentler grade in the front.

The Glastonbury tor is a 518 feet hill that used to be surrounded by water. At its top is St Michael’s tower.  Looking over the Somerset levels it’s easy to imagine Avalon rising out of the water and the mist. The atmosphere is otherworldly –or at least it is when you’re jet-lagged and have vertigo. I can see why people come to commune with the ancients.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wendy and I carried on to Arthur’s Court in Street, the care home where her mother Pam now lives. Pam has shrunk to her bones since the last time I saw her and she can’t form words that are understandable but she is still vocal and babbles on either in pleasure or irritation. I was so pleased that she recognized me. We looked at photos from her and Mervyn’s trips to Seattle and I fed her Cadbury Dairy Milk buttons.

My favorite part of this visit, however, was watching Wendy’s face as she helped her mother eat. The love in her eyes. The patience, the sadness, the acceptance. The love.