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.

If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.

This melancholy London- I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air. - William Butler Yeats

Ooolalalala. It has been far, far too long since I have updated this petit cahier, n’est ce pas? Allow me to begin by assuring you that it’s not for lack of wanting to, not at all. That being said, I’ll try to bring you up to date on my adventures. Setting? I’m at my computer, at my rolltop desk in my room in Toulouse. The door to my balcony is open to the balmy evening. I’m drinking coke *light* flavored with orange and listening to James Taylor.

One thing that this traveler, at least, has felt in force is the realization that there’s nothing quite like becoming the stranger in the strange land to make one conscious of being an American. Not in the “ooo, I’m sure all these Europeans hate me; I oughta paste on a quick maple leaf and start saying ‘Eh?’” sort of way. More like, in the midst of other histories, other traditions, other languages, other everyday objects, there surfaces an acute familiarity with the weight of known history, tradition, language, popular culture and so on through which one habitually and oh-so-unconsciously moves. Made poignant by its absence. Make no mistake - I’m not speaking of culture shock or homesickness. What I’m saying is that a person tends to live in a kind of shorthand, wherein the metaphorical “sentences” of life may be left incomplete. Well. I find myself having trouble filling in the gaps, of late. Which is what I mean when I say that I’m conscious of being an American. In a way it’s comforting, liberating, even, to understand how much that’s mine.

Continuing in this vein: After I left San Francisco, I made a brief pilgrimage to Philadelphia and New York before I decamped. The intensity with which I appreciated both places surprised even me. I’ve been to Independence Hall; seen the oldest Quaker meetinghouse in the US; visited the spot where my hero, Thomas Jefferson, wrote the Declaration of Independence. I spent a quiet moment in the cemetery and threw a penny onto Benjamin Franklin’s grave. I stood in the line for security at the Liberty Bell with a group of ravishing Italian tourists whose trailing scarves, fantastic shoes, and animated hand-waving laugh-punctuated chatter made me wish I spoke Italian and could join in the joke. Lorca also said that "New York is something awful, something monstrous. I like to walk the streets, lost, but I recognize that New York is the world's greatest lie. New York is Senegal with machines." But going to New York was, for me, like coming home. Something in the crush of people, cars, concrete, sound, mess, harmonious cacophony, something hanging in the space between all those things … satisfied my soul like nothing else. I know that some of you, at least, know what I mean.

So, then. London. I got on a plane from the British Airways pod at JFK – arriving absurdly early in anticipation of the crazy long lines. Made it through security in about … eight minutes, and although I had to remove not only my compact but also my pens (evidently Aveda powder and biro ink are potential security threats) to my checked bag, I was in fact issued a BA Ziploc in which to store them. Quite kind, really. And the BA terminal has wireless and good food and decent coffee and a place to buy a pencil, so the three hours I spent there weren’t a total wash. I arrived at Heathrow around 9 local time, heaved my pack onto my plane-crushed vertebrae, got my first Great Britain passport stamp (managing not to look too absurdly pleased in front of the charming guy with the charming accent), and headed through the sign at customs that says Nothing To Declare. Hrm.

The Finnish friends with whom I was visiting whisked me off to the loveliest B&B I’d ever seen, situated with British self-effacement on a quiet street in the trendy London borough of Kensington and Chelsea. I had a bed big enough for an entire Ukranian family, a desk, a tv that folded into its own cunning little closet (the drawback there being that it only got British channels, which involves three versions of BBC news, two sport stations that are almost exclusively dedicated to football, a weird soap opera network, and a lot of channels that were “experiencing difficulties in transmission” for the entire duration of my stay – well, I suppose I can relate to that sentiment), a shower the size of my entire bathroom in Colorado, and my own billowy cotton robe and plushy hotel slippers. Every morning they brought me breakfast on a tray and my own personal pot of tea or coffee and a copy of the Independent; every day at 4 they delivered another pot of tea with jam and scones. Absurd, right? My favorite thing, next to sprawling on the bed and trying to feel the pea, was to sit on the ledge of the window in my foyer (yes, I had a foyer) with my teacup and saucer, looking out over the rooftops of London for Mary Poppins. Everything else was so storybook that it seemed inevitable that she’d come floating out of the clouds with her parrot-handled umbrella and scold me. Spit-spot!

What did I see in London? Whew. Everything imaginable. Just look at the pictures on flickr and you’ll see … well, everything I saw. I haven’t got that totally updated yet, but it’s current through part of London. The internet is so slow here that it takes forever to upload photos. Particularly if you’re trying to upload like, 400 photos at once. (No, I’m not kidding.) So I’m working on it, and will do my level best. One of the highlights was a trip to the Sherlock Holmes museum, nestled (cleverly, surprisingly) at 221-B Baker St. It’s a recreation of the rooms of the famous detective as per the description given either by the patient Robin to his Batman, Dr. Watson, or by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, depending on the level of one’s suspension of disbelief. Again, refer to the photos. But there’s a man who wanders around with a pipe and a cravat and says “Hello. I am Sherlock Holmes, and this is my apartment” in just as wooden a manner as I have described. Evidently they retrieved him from some dank corner of Madame Tussaud’s, and I wondered what he’d do if you put a quarter in. (Also where you’d put the quarter.) There were actual wax figures on one of the floors though, which was tres bizarre. You walk up a narrow flight of stairs and into a low-ceilinged room to see a sort of mini-jail cell and a man inside with sorrowful visage and handlebar mustache, a cabinet with someone’s ears in it under glass, and someone else frozen in the act of hanging himself from the rafters. Rather distressing, and I don’t know how much it added to the experience. But I kept wishing that my dad was there and hearing his voice in my ears, which is why, if you look at flickr, you’ll see about forty pictures of the place. There you go, Dad. Next time I’ll take you in person.

Now I’m listening to a random Portuguese jazzish cabaret lounge-singer type woman. Talk about cultural crisis, eh?

After London we spent a day in Oxford – also refer to flickr, but I can tell you that when I saw the Bodleian Library, I think I had a tiny orgasm.

London, Baby!

So, I have to admit that today in London I was nearly as bad as Joey shamelessly stepping "into" the map to orient himself when they all (except for poor pregnany Phoebe, and lovesick Rachel, who goes belatedly to make the consummate faux-pas) go to London for Ross and Emily's (clearly foolhardy) wedding. I toured London for the very first time today, and I couldn't wipe the grin off my face any more than could an eighteen-year-old after Prom Night with the Homecoming Queen.

Yeah, you've already sat through a speech about how amazing New York was, so I won't go through all that once again. Take it as read. Today I saw more sights than I could conceivably recount: Piccadilly Circus (the English version of Times Square), Trafalgar Square and Nelson's Column (NB: How can you avoid inappropriate sniggering at a moniker such as that one?), Wellington's Arch (see NB above), Buckingham Palace, Tower Bridge (perhaps my favorite sight, actually - it's amazing), the Tower of London, which houses not only an infamous retinue of former prisoners but also the Crown Jewels of England, London Bridge, the Globe Theatre, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament (nod to National Lampoon's European Vacation), the London Eye ( a giant Ferris Wheel sort of affair with glass boxes from which an intrepid observer can view the city), of course the Thames, in all of this, likewise Westminster Abbey. Don't judge me if I tell you that Westminster Abbey almost made me cry. I know that's silly. It amounts to some lovely architecture that we've all seen about a thousand times in textbooks and a great many tombs. Architecture is all well and good, and I know that at some point a tomb is little more than a (hopefully) pretty rock over a dead guy, but I have to confess to you who love me that these dead white guys - yes, they're all white guys, with the exception of a couple of incredible female monarchs, and no women at all in Poets' Corner - resonated with me in a basso measure I'm almost ashamed to admit. I've been studying these people for as long as I remember. Today, on a typically-grey-and-drizzly-English afternoon, I stood in the very same spot wherein William the Norman became William I, King of England. In 1066, nearly a thousand years ago. I saw the chair he sat in. Man. Talk about transubstantiation. I literally felt dizzy and displaced.

You guys, I saw the tomb of Elizabeth I. "Bloody" Mary I (who's buried with her sister) and Mary, Queen of Scots. Their grandfather, Henry VII, who *didn't* get divorced. Edward II. Richard II. The shrine to friggin Edward the Confessor. The tomb of *Chaucer*, kids. And *Dickens*. Poets' Corner houses not only the monument to Shakespeare but also floor-tile plaques to all the dead white guys I love best, from Dylan Thomas to W.H. Auden. I was just so shaken to be there.