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March 31, 2018 to April 5, 2018
2018-03-31 LIVERPOOL DAY 1
‘I can’t believe it’.
And Hossein, all 6 foot 4 of him, gathers us in his
endless arms, welcome refuge from the dreary cold of Liverpool airport parking
lot. Last seen waving us goodbye at o dark early in Iran’s Tehran airport three
years ago, he has been a firmly anchored friend,…no, family … since. We can't
believe we're together again, either…in Liverpool. We telescope the 3 years
into a few laughing hours over Kurdish braised chicken, lamb shanks,
eggplant/onion stew. Persian Boy Meets Liverpudlians has enough episodes for a
BBC series.
We bed down
in his room, two of us comfy in the bed, Hossein on the floor, claiming
comfort, head pillowed on his rucksack. The pajama party continues into the
night.
2018-04-01 LIVERPOOL DAY 2
‘Sawat dee krap’…
…trills Hossein’s Thai flatmate, Simon, and follows
with an enthusiastic salad of mismatched pseudo-English syllables cemented by
intent if not syntax, but musical. He's in Liverpool to study English and this
morning whirls off to charm and confuse the Parisians for a week. This leaves the
three of us alone in Number 29. Tonight 4 couch cushions from the lounge will
join the pajama party as Hussein’s bed.
Tanked up on delicious breakfast omelets with
mushrooms à la Hossein, leftover Spanish cheese à la Us, and tea, we walk
through town with the Easter crowds to The Docks, the eye-challenging Tate
Museum of Contemporary Art, the holiday hurrah of the seaside. Liverpool
bristles. It's not the down and out relic I expected. The Beatles brought
Liverpool to the world…and maybe the reverse.
And, yes, Liverpudlians do speak English... to us. To
one another they stream vowels and gutterals, not without rhythm, and
expressive. They are a pale and friendly lot. Two women welcome us and direct
us up to the second floor of a two story bus, red, and anchored on the dock,
and dispensing fried things. Our crispy chicken is delicious in the low
ceilinged refuge from the grey chill.
At night,
Hossein pulls his stringed setar (relative of Indian sitar) from the top of his
wardrobe and plays his music. And so the day that began with the music of
Simon's almost English, and continued with the blunt lilts of the Liverpudlians
ends with the pure wailing music of Hossein's homeland. It carries the wind of
the desert in its poetry and us into the night.
2018-04-02 MELKSHAM DAY 1
‘April showers bring May flowers. May flowers
bring…Pilgrims’.
So sayeth Dennis.
Late morning we set off westward, pilgrims, to the
tiny village of Austerfield and The Manor House, home of William Bradford,
Dennis’ 15 times great-grandfather, before he sailed on the Mayflower and
washed up in Plymouth as its first Governor.
It snows. The countryside is hilly, the road winding.
We make a video of us rounding slushy Spring snow into balls for Abel, who has
never experienced snow. Daffodils, sunny optimists, color the white. A sign
welcomes us to the village, touts great grandpa Bradford.
The current owner of The Manor House, old and a bit
into dementia, is not a Bradford, but friendly, says local historian Susan
Allen via phone. We don’t bother him, pose in the slush, feel the pressure of
400 years. The house is one small one among the few dozen opening onto the
narrow road, a slender ribbon tying the hundred residents to slightly bigger
hamlets fore and aft. Only a few more crowded onto the Mayflower.
Beef pie, crisp chips (aka steak fries) and crunchy
early Spring peas in The Mayflower Inn belie the bad reputation of British
cookery. The meal holds us deep into the dark and southeastward towards Bath,
Stonehenge, and Melksham and our friends Janet and Brian Relfe. Eight hours
after leaving Liverpool we see two figures waving in the narrow village road
ahead. Janet and Brian (met in Peru, dined in Florida, travel story swapped in
emails) sweep us past yet more daffodils into their rambling stone house. Wine
and stories flow until midnight.
Tomorrow
there may be wisps of Romans in Bath or of Druids at Stonehenge.
2018-04-03 STONEHENGE - Melksham Day 2
Alas, the Druids are long gone. Even to them, 2 ,000
years ago, Stonehenge was a mystery clouded by the passage of 3,000 years. They
probably stared as we do, to wonder why, and how, and who.
We can’t walk among the stones, roped off from
graffiti prone predators. No matter. The stones suck our imaginations into the
circle. I don’t care what story we want the stones to tell. There’s something
elemental here, deeper than any story, deeper than language.
We walk away, ride the bus, seep back 4500 years, and
remember we're hungry. The Cheese Ploughman (aka hefty cheddar sandwich with
greens and red cabbage) at Polly’s Tea Room does us just fine. Janet is a
superb guide to the ‘hereabouts’ and to the bumpy road between British and
American English food words. Their chips are our steak fries. Our potato chips
are their crisps. Their scones look like our biscuits. Their biscuits are our
crackers. Pudding is any kind of dessert, mushy, solid, hard, or soft. (We pass
on Polly's.) Tea is tea. (We do not pass.)
Avebury is Stonehenge' slightly younger, and much
larger, sister. 350 meters across it dwarfs the circle at Stonehenge and any
other on the planet. Far fewer people wander among its unprotected stones. The
megaliths stand, or lean, or lie, huge, rough, in concentric circles across the
fields, We touch them. They feel warmer than they should under the cold grey
skies. Even without the iconic tight circle and improbable capstones of
Stonehenge, Avebury seduces our imaginations back 4500 years, a time machine.
Thoroughly stoned, the four of us join Brian for wine
and stories strewn across the beautiful rooms of the house. We start in the
huge kitchen, then herd into the dining room for Janet's fish pie (we would
call it a casserole). It is a perfection of salmon, smoked fish, shrimp,
simmered under leeks, and topped with mashed potatoes, and delicious whatever
we choose to call it.
Moving again across the patinaed wooden floors into
the lounge we sink into deep couches.
Imaginations
pulled back 5000 years, we spin stories, stitching friendships. As did the
Druids, and the people of Stonehenge and Avebury around their fires. I doubt
they ate as well.
2018-04-04 BATH and Melksham Day 3
‘Stella doesn’t give Jack Shit what you call her…
Says the bloke petting the piebald, wiggly mutt about
to lick us to death. Stella is a one of a kind ‘breed' designed by free-ranging
canine accident, opportunity and optimism, with a fuzzy hint of Jack Russell
Terrier and Shitzu in her recent family tree. Thus the Jack and Shit. She's
adorable and she welcomes us to Bath.
There's nothing accidental or hybrid about the glorious
Georgian architecture of this city. Georgian proportions are pure, simple,
perfect. Interpreted in the soft pale beige of Bath stone, the genius of the Georgian
eye created blocks, circles, crescents, rows, of buildings that massage our
contemporary eyes still, two to three centuries after their cornerstones were
placed on the hills of Somerset.
These glories are icing on the real cake of Bath: the
two thousand year old Roman ruins created around Britain's only hot spring. The
hundred degree waters still steam into the cold air as they did two millennia
ago, offering some solace to Roman troops and matrons, banished here to ancient
Britain far, far from the warmth of their Mediterranean homeland.
The barrel roof over the central pool was the tallest
structure in ancient Britain. Rubble for centuries, rediscovered in the
seventeen hundreds, built over by Georgian sybarites who came to ‘take the
waters’, primp, and wrinkle in great style, the Roman bath complex is now a
wonder of subterranean passages. We wander, tight-packed in the holiday crowd,
through Roman caldaria (saunas), frigidaria (quite the opposite), plunge pools,
evidence of Roman hydraulic engineering genius flowing around and below us.
The Romans loved their gods and goddesses. They brought
Minerva here, merged her with a local goddess of the spring, and created a
temple for the soul as well as the body. Think of it as a sort of Vatican Club
Med.
Our own Goddess, Janet, actually a Weather Witch, does
her magic on the clouds. It only rains when we are inside. We leave the damp
and dark depths to lunch. As the afternoon wanes, we walk in the sun along the
River Avon (yes, that River Avon), here a rumbling torrent, to Pulteney Bridge.
Shops line the bridge as they do in Florence and Venice, but uniquely for
Britain, here in Bath also. The Bath stone softens in the light. There are
daffodils.
For two thousand years people of taste have gathered
here.
No wonder.
2018-04-05 Melksham Day 4
Melksham sends us off in glory.
Beautiful, and sad, our last day with Janet and Brian
unfolds under brilliant blue skies, the sunlight of the great floes of
daffodils flooding upward, lighting the landscape. 56 years ago I had 10 days
in a row of such perfect days. Today, we thank our own Weather Witch for this
one.
The market in nearby Devizes fills our bags, pockets,
hands with fresh vegetables and fruit. Five British pounds buys us three heavy
cheeses, fresh from France, still cheap…until Brexit. We have ingredients for
yet another of Janet's great meals.
Brian leads us on an expedition through the charity
shops, source of the many sly touches in their glorious house. He has a great
eye and clever hands, and a gift of story-telling.
Stuff stowed in four-wheeled Henry, we wander in
Lacock, every Yank's fantasy of an English village. It's the source of those
fantasies: Judy Dench, and friends strode its streets in BBC series Cranford, Pride and Prejudice, Tess of the
D'Urbervilles, architectural glory exported.
Hossein stayed home to work on his thesis proposal
(something to do with heat exchanger technology and ship engines, and a
significant idea according to yachtsman Brian), but is ready for cheeses,
home-made preserves, seed bread, fruit juice…a typical Janet spread. Recipes
for her fish pie, savory pancakes (ricotta + eggplant, and avocado + chives),
and seed bread come home with us.
Fueled by hugs and promises to visit again both ways
across ‘the pond', we launch northward in Fred II. By 10 pm we pull into quiet
Liverpool and in front of the just locked doors of the Kurdish restaurant.
Stomach---if not taste bud--- yearnings, are assuaged by the wrap of grilled
chicken and some thing vaguely faunal at the Turkish place next door.
The pajama
party lasts ten seconds after we get horizontal.
April 8, 2018 to April 11, 2018
2018-04-06 DUBLIN DAY 1
“I’ll get so pissed!”
The guys are loud, burstingly overweight,
unattractive, sloppily dressed. Only the accent and vocabulary tell me Ryanair
Flight xxx has not taken a detour to Spring Break in the USA. They’re good
natured, though, just oblivious to the people around them trapped in this noise
coccoon. One girl, as lovely as the guys are not, sprouts a wedding veil atop
her long, glossy hair…and a white garter way up a shapely spandexed thigh.
Clearly this gene pool practices sex discrimination.
Moans and faked digestive sounds, the main acoustic
contributions of Boys on Booze, greet the announcement that whisky is
unavailable on the flight. Good move, Ryanair, thinks I. Whoops and hoots greet
the apologetic amendment offering gin. The flying time is 30 minutes. What can
happen, thinks I. Large bearded bloke, cyclone thighs raging out of smudgy grey
gym shorts, belly flopping below exploding tee shirt, sets me straight: “I’ll
get so pissed”---as in drunk, bombed, blind---and wildly waves the Ryanair
flight attendant into barkeepdom.
My attention goes elsewhere.
We left Hossein in the dreary grey of Liverpool. We
hugged, separated, needed more, and hugged again. He's a fine man, a valued
friend, a terrific travel companion. He and his Iranian passport face a tough
road finding a school and financial assistance. I'm pissed at that, without
booze. He has a lot to offer the world, more, I think, than the decibels, burps
and fake farts of the Boys on Booze. I suspect the lovely colleens will think
so, too.
We promise to visit wherever he winds up for his PhD
studies, even Australia. He is family.
2018-04-07 DUBLIN DAY 2
“They're
here only a few minutes and already called me a racist!”
“I'm
surprised it took them so long.”
“Woof”
Big, blustery John is a self-made man, Protestant in
Catholic Ireland, bright, informed, and under siege. He lives in a world of
conspiracies. He is pro-Brexit, pro-Trump, pro-Putin, anti-Brit, anti-Yank. He
slips into and out of a brogue so thick we get maybe half of what he says. We
suspect it, like his oracular political pronouncements, is a wee bit of a put
on for the pair of Yanks sipping tea at his kitchen table.
Caroline, sweet, Catholic married to this Protestant,
retired nurse, and volunteer at a palliative care hospice, has John's measure,
gives as well as she gets.
JD, Australian Shepherd, agnostic, concentrates on
important doggy things: finding new hands to scratch behind his ears and to
toss his tennis ball.
Suitably welcomed yesterday, set straight about how
the world really works, then well slept, and sorted out, as John puts it, over
breakfast, today we chug a half hour down and back along the Irish Sea to
Gravestones, joining the Easter holiday crowds in the dribbly, chilling mist.
Tacky Tourist Towns all bristle with the same bins of aesthetically challenged Chinese-made
‘local products', but they have the scruffy energy of people determined to have
a good time. All we need is a Ploughmans lunch, and a beer, and we're on the
train back into Dublin.
Dublin is a jumble of styles, an exuberant example of
the hodge-podge aesthetic of all the great city-scapes. It has one of my
favorite city ingredients: a river runs through it. O'Connell Street begins
above the quays lining the river and peters out near a greyed, undistinguished
church. Midway is the Spike, a 400 foot metallic needle of no great interest,
but stunning reflective impact. The crowds swirl around It, washing up in eddys
on the wide sidewalks.
Dublin’s mix is mostly happy, sometimes odd. My eyes
blink at the logo of the Apache Pizza chain, Native American bearing a pan of
pizza. Italian restaurants offer ‘Real beef lasagne with chips and Cole slaw’. My
taste bids curl and demand sanctuary.
The city has great charm and life and is eminently
walkable. It's a bit like Boston, but more reckless. It could do with another
visit, but is a lot more expensive than our usual haunts, so we'll probably
pass. We will get future doses of the lilt of the talk, and the easy
friendliness wandering in other parts of Ireland.
When we get
old.
2018-04-08 DUBLIN TO BELFAST DAY 1
“You come to Florida, bring the dog, leave HIM at
home.”
And so, we say goodbye to Dublin, sweet Caroline,
furry JD (and his sloppy tennis balls), and big, blustery John of the granitic
opinions and great charm, leaving him to stir the pot with future guests.
Local bus into Dublin City Center, a sit in the sun on
the quay watching ripples on the River Liffy, express bus across the
transparent border from Ireland to Northern Ireland, (Euros switched to Pounds
in our wallets), then to Belfast, and by 2pm we're in Yvonne and Jean Dumas’
red Audi, hugs accomplished. It has been almost a year since our last shared
gig as ushers at Sarasota Opera, and their move back to Yvonne’s native city.
There are travel stories to tell.
And meals to share. The first is baked cod at Daft
Eddy, out on a spit of coast[RF1]
overlooking the Irish Sea. Here, over half pints of Guinness3, we plan our two
days, decide to skip the city and drive the sinuous coast.
We also skip the Titanic Exhibition, housed in an
abstract metal evocation of a ship's pointed hull, silvery, and sailing
ghostlike over the docks. The Titanic slid out of dry dock from Belfast in
April, 1912, bound for New York. “She was fine when she left us” is what they
say here. Jean and Yvonne suggest the exhibit focuses more on the Belfast
beginning than the North Atlantic end of that voyage. The wild Irish coast has
more appeal.
Later by the
fire, our feet cushy on plush Moroccan rugs, Jean leads us through a tasting of
triple-distilled Irish whiskeys, both smooth, both equally effective.
2018-04-09 BELFAST DAY 2
‘You can almost see Scotland.’
Almost.
J and Y apologize for the rain-tainted day, wishing us
to see the view, clear over blue water to Scotland. Under a mottled grey sky,
the coast is wild, craggy, unfinished. It slips into and out of view, dissolved
by the Irish Sea below and mists above. We wind out onto long peninsulas, rocky
fingers scratching at the sea, then back. The Irish coast does not disappoint
us.
Castles and abbeys rose and fell here almost a
millennium ago, temporary geometric rearrangements of the haphazard cobbles
strewn by retreating glaciers. Most are now ruins of history, returning to
rubble. We wander among the hints of naves, arches, cells, to touch stones,
wonder about the stories and lives hidden in their smooth patina. We hear no
voices, but get the message: your end is inevitable so fill your brief now with meaning.
We cross over the top of Ireland, leave the Irish Sea
behind. The water is as grey here but a fit to its name: the North Sea. Here
also is The Giant's Causeway, a stretch of strictly geometric stones that
disappear here on the Irish coast and reappear out of the sea in Scotland. How?
Aliens? Giants? Alas…volcanos. These ‘causeways' creep up in many places across
Mother Earth where the right volcanic input occurs.
I like the giant story myself.
The Irish giant and the Scottish giant railed at one
another in the gale winds between their islands. They each began building the
causeway to reach the other. The Irish giant was faster and sneaked up on the
Scottish guy, who was so big that the Irish giant turned tail and ran back
across the causeway to Ireland. The Scottish fellow did not see the Irish
bloke. He ran across the causeway to the other giant's house demanding to fight
him. Mrs. Irish Giant had it all under control. She swaddled her hubby in a
huge blanket and had him lie in their bed, apologized that her hubby was not
‘in’, and invited the Scottish guy in to see her ‘baby’. Scottish guy took one
look at the not so ‘wee bairn’, imagined how big his ‘da’ must be and high
tailed it back across the causeway tearing it up as he went. As stories go,
it's neat, clean, and a triumph of brains over brawn.
We may be among the few Americans who have not seen
Game of Thrones on TV, but we now see where it is filmed, here in the mists,
where myths are spawned.
The place names rumble in the throat then roll off the
tongue: Carnfunnock, Lough Neagh, Bonamargy…
We stop at the place Yvonne and Jean met at a peace
and reconciliation center three children and many countries ago. In a tiny café
on the rocks strong tea washes down Irish beef stew, then warm rhubarb cobbler,
Yvonne’s traditional Irish fare for lunch, delectable, and but a tasty preamble
for Jean’s traditional Swiss raclette for dinner. Melt tangy cheese onto boiled
potatoes, add salt, pepper, paprika. Wash down with wine. Done.
These are
wonderful people and essential friends.
2018-04-10 BELFAST DAY 3
‘Go NOW!
Yvonne is right. Irish weather is a jumble of
possibilities, many wet, most damp, some gloriously bright. We grab a less grey
slot mid-morning and head eastward, sprinting between the dodgy (and wetter)
spots. Ireland may tout itself as The Emerald Isle, and green it is, but the
fields are just emerald baguettes, settings for the bright yellow of the hedges
of prickly gorse, and the white of shaggy sheep. It's lambing season and this
year's crop are puffs set in green, tiny chips next to their woolly cabuchon
parents. Everywhere long chains of golden and platinum daffodils dangle across
the landscape.
Fish and chips, plus Guinness are preamble to a bakery
foray. Everything on display is of the ‘take a pound of butter' approach to
baking. We escape unscathed for now, but prepped for tomorrow with a ‘bap',
round hybrid of loaf and roll, raw material for take along sandwiches for our
trip to London.
Irish beef is dinner, tender steaks, not a hint of
hormones, or altered genes. Our last evening is decanted friendship, rich.
These are wonderful people.
We are so
lucky.
2018-04-11 BELFAST TO LONDON
Wrapped cheese sandwiches on slices of yesterday's
bap, hugs, and promises of more visits launch us onto the 2-hour bus ride, non -top
to Dublin airport. Once again, we slip through the transparent border between
Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. And once again Ryanair staff
sacrifices the budget airline's draconian luggage policies to convenience, and
waive us on, bags unmeasured and unweighed. Apparently it's a crapshoot, but
maybe we've loaded it in our favor. Our backpack stuff weighs in at about 8 kilos
(18 pounds), their limit. True, our multi-pocket vests carry about 3 kilos of
Kindle, guides, chargers, batteries, and round out our silhouettes. Ryanair
minions take no notice. All Americans are, uh, ‘full-figured'.
Blessed hotel points, ancient relics from my working
days, but still breathing, buy us a night right at London’s Gatwick Airport,
and a free breakfast. Next stop is familiar Istanbul, briefly to change planes,
and then Georgia, terra incognita.
We are so
ready!
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