A star looks down at me, / And says: `Here I and you / Stand, each in our degree: / What do you mean to do?

There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound. - Thomas Hardy


Let us now retrieve the fallen thread of our yarn. Since last we spoke, it has rolled through the English countryside and come to rest beneath a squashy armchair upholstered (within an inch of its life) in threadbare fabric blooming with overlarge-but-otherwise-nondescript flowers. The armchair sits in the parlour of what I have learned is a very typical English house, bulging with mismatched furniture in likewise-nondescript and likewise-mismatched woodgrains. Tatted doilies and absurdly small cushions abound, as do assorted knickknacks that we would call tchotchkies but that the British call, loftily, “objets d’art.” Prints on the wallpaper (wallpaper! Blue, printed with cornflowers) range from hunting scenes, to pastoral images of ducks and shepherdesses, to a dolphin that looks like something you (well, alright, not any of you, but someone) would pick up on a spring-break trip to Destin, along with pukka-shell-tipped cornrows. This is the B&B in the little town of Wimborne, Dorset, into which my hosts have kindly inserted me, so that I’ll have my own space.

And that yarn we mentioned earlier? The end of it is being toyed with and frayed between the paws of the resident cat, a large, vocal and friendly orange tabby named Charlie, who took quite a shine to me and decided that my lap was exactly the place he wanted to be each morning at 8 o’clock, when I “took my breakfast” in “the conservatory.”

My room here, alas, lacks the robe, the slippers, and the view of London, but I do have my own electric kettle, a window that opens onto the charming garden, and another large and comfy bed. There’s also a shower that is actually in the bedroom. Glass walls and all. Just hanging out there in the corner like a particularly damp closet. You have to turn the electricity on every time you wanted to use it, with a little light-switch type thing next to the shower doors. (We won’t even go into the advisability of putting the switch right there by the water – leave it to the British.)

My hosts are a Quaker couple in their fifties whose five children have all grown up and left the house empty. These two, the squat and smiling grey-haired Ruth and her equally amiable husband Richard (who was as keen to chat as an ageing maiden aunt), decided to open the rooms to pensioners such as myself “so that there’d still be some life in the place, yeah?” – which Richard explained to me about four times on my first evening there. They were both lovely, actually, and it was soothing to feel like I was a guest in someone’s home, although I found it difficult to repress the instinct to bring my dishes to the kitchen after breakfast, and I couldn’t stop myself from making my own bed each morning and feeling guilty that they washed my towels every day.

Wimborne itself is a 4000-person village, complete with genuine thatched cottages and gobs of flowers spilling from baskets and window boxes and seeming to seep from the very walls of the numerous public houses. It’s south of London, close to Poole, and to Bournemouth and Southampton, and to the Jurassic Coast, which has signature white cliffs, has just become a World Heritage Site, and where you can forage for those little spirally mollusky fossil things you always see in natural history museums and on the covers of Biology textbooks. Little old English ladies totter about in trenchcoats and sensible shoes toting baskets for their shopping, and little old men shuffle through the cobbled squares in cardigans and those flat, buttoned caps that must be requisition issue on retirement. The spires of the Wimborne Minster, a 1300-year-old church that is still a pilgrim site and is dedicated to St. Somebody-I-Never-Heard-Of, tower over all. You can check out the photos of the church and its crypt, and see the little Nutcracker statuette that stands guard in one of the towers, apropos of nothing in particular.

So, then, the question becomes, what did I do in England? I took a great many walks. Wimborne is surrounded by numerous walking trails – as is much of England – and I discovered a delightful one that wound for miles alongside the Stour River, passing sheep and cows placid in pastures, climbing over stiles (for those of you who’ve read Tom Stoppard, I’ve finally experienced a ha-ha), and foraging for blackberries.

Feh. How to sum it up? I had Guinness at a real English pub(okay, two pubs. Okay okay. Three.) and some insane local brew called MacStinger’s that was made from nettles (local nettles, even). And … I think MacStinger is the name of a landlady from a Dickens novel. From Dombey and Son, to be precise. Correct me if I mistake. I quietly munched muesli and natural yogurt in my little corner of “the conservatory", Charlie on my lap, and surreptitiously spied on a family of tourists with broad Yorkshire accents like they’d walked out of a James Herriot story, eating beans (seriously – baked beans) on fried bread, bacon, sausages, fried eggs and fried tomatoes for breakfast. I saw more placards beaming the legend “Wm. Shakespeare slept here,” or “Charles Dickens dined here,” or “Thomas Hardy drank here” than any of those illustrious men could’ve had time for. I looked at a lot of very old things made of stone. I had Devonshire cream tea at a teashop in a weensy little town teetering over a cliff and shadowed by a 2000-year-old castle ravaged by Parliamentary forces during the English civil war. I drank quite a lot of tea, as it happens. Quarts and quarts. I also learned that the rain doesn’t pique one at all if one simply takes no notice of it. Such is the English way.

I really did love it all.