In the Stone Circle, the Unpronouncable Village, the Widest High Street in Britain, the Place Where the Thames Starts

After we arrive in Bedwyn, I tell the Man that my right boot is still making funny sounds.
"Funny sounds?" he says.
"Yeah. Like a horse clopping down the road."
I shake my right foot. I can feel something jiggling. I've had this feeling off-and-on since we came back from New York. He follows the movement of my leg.
"It's because your HEEL IS ABOUT TO FALL OFF," he tells me.
I look down. The heel of my boot is dangling from several rusty nails. Several questions pop into my head all at once. How have I not noticed this before? Why did I somehow think that the jiggling was coming from the toe of my boot? And, more pressing still: how am I going to cope with a broken boot in a village so small that the first cab driver we call says, "oh no, sorry, I'm just having myself a cup of tea, I can't pick you up"?

In Avebury, where we end up after a pint and a perusal of the Guardian whilst waiting for the third cab driver we call to arrive, we meet up with friends and I am able to borrow the wellies of an 11-year-old boy whose feet are definitely at least a size bigger than mine. The Man gestures wildly as we stand on a windy ridge overlooking a circle of giant stones (only in England); he punches a hole in his Barbour.
"We're a mess," I say. I like our mess, but still.

It's overcast and the children want to climb the stones, roll down the hills. A humourless pair of English hippies in moon-patterned trousers and tie-dye jumpers tries to stop them: in future re-tellings of this story (and there will be many), they say, Don't climb the rocks. This is our temple; this is our Church. But in all truth they do not say this, just look disapprovingly, just bark . They remind me of the puckered old woman in the Great Tew church telling us: What do they think this is, a nursery? In my day children would never be allowed to play in a place like this. The hippies with their sour countenance, their wild hair and ugly demeanor, move on. Ned the puppy pulls me along the side of a hill. We have no time for hippy temples, for rules or regulations. Only time to stand windblown on a ridge, to watch children rolling so fast and so far it makes us fret (but briefly).

In Mildenhall which is pronounced Minal we sleep above the pub. There is no store in the village and no school; the people are rooted to the place only through a town hall and an eating-and-drinking establishment. We mention we might want a taxi to the train station after dinner.
"A taxi?" says the woman.
"Oooh I dunno about that," says the man. We feel like the city-slickers, even in our torn Barbours, our too-big wellies.

So we stay; in a room which is the essence of the English bed-and-breakfast. Shabby floral curtains, pulled back to reveal the pub sign, the cobbled pavement, the thatched cottages across the narrow street. Upholstered chairs, worn and soft. An ugly purple duvet, a flowery third pillow.

"Why are there three pillows?" I want to know. The Man holds up the third pillow.
"Just look at it," he says. Then he hits his head on the mantelpiece-above-the-bed.
"Why is there a mantelpiece above the bed?" I also want to know, but the simple answer is that there is no why; the why is in its existing at all. And in the morning, we have a greasy and delicious full English breakfast while the owners' three black poodles wander around the front room like a trio of furry balloon animals.

Passing through Marlborough; the widest High Street in Britain, though you wouldn't think it now. Just a parking lot now--a thick row of vehicles clogging up the centre. But look at a picture of it a hundred years ago and it is impressive. Like a sea between the two sides of the road.

Now past the place where the Thames starts.
"Look, you know the Thames, the Thames in London, this is where it begins," says the boys' mother, one hand on the wheel, pointing over the bridge.
"We know the Thames is in London," says one of the boys, pouting, pressing his face against the side of the car. "You don't have to keep saying, 'the Thames in London.'"
"But look," we say, "this is where it starts, isn't that incredible?" And then the Man adds, "and it goes through Oxford, too. It splits into two, but it's still the Thames."

(And then we can't remember, for a bit, which is the Isis and which is the Cherwell.)

Burford suddenly feels like home, because it's the Cotswolds--Cotswold stone, Cotswold colour. I am lost in the map of England, it's swallowed me completely, and every foray from the city where we live feels like magic and mystery (and so does every re-entry).

Anatomy of a Dinner Party/Autumn Days

Have been flipping through photographs in my effort NOT to work on my thesis this weekend (goodness knows I have PLENTY of time………..right?). Came across a particularly delightful series taken by a friend…having put them together, no wonder it takes us three hours to cook a dinner and at least six to eat it. Consequently, no wonder we go through at least 10 bottles of wine. And on top of that…we hardly even all fit into the kitchen!

Makes me rather homesick, in a weird way. It’s very cold in my apartment; I would love to have lots of people and hot food on the table and wine being spilled. What I have at the moment is a pile of blankets on the floor and the hum of the refrigerator which will, I suspect, drive me BATTY by the end of this term.

Today was one of those AUTUMN DAYS: clear as anything, cold, crisp, leaves falling from trees. It was hard not to smile (stupidly, really) the entire day. I went for a long walk, ostensibly doing errands but really just finding excuses to a) not work on my thesis and b) stay outside. Couldn’t even bring myself to run because it would seem a shame to go quickly past such a day: I wanted to linger on streetcorners and squint up at the skyline. On such days, it is easy to be captivated by Boston’s charm. It’s a city that looks bleak and rundown through a rainy lens, but positively sparkles on a clear day.

Went to the vintage shop down the road (and found myself wondering, as I always do, how they can pay rent if they’re only open two days a week) where I toyed with the idea of buying myself a pair of 1950s vintage black pumps. They were ten dollars and fit like a GLOVE, but ultimately I told the woman I couldn’t justify such a purchase. But now I find myself wondering if they shall still be there next weekend, and if so, perhaps I can summon up some sort of justification.

Yes, it was THAT kind of day. Also grocery shopping day, which is always, in my view, a good day.

On the Power of a New Pair of Shoes, & Various Artistic Impulses, Among Other Things

I am quite excited that my fancy SLR camera has, thanks to a little battery purchase at CVS, been brought back to life! Now I can be the geeky girl that not only carries a thick notebook, ten pens, four or five books, and several changes of clothes in her handbag, but also an enormous, hulking black camera! Am looking forward to getting back at all the tourists who have glowered at me (or made rude comments to my retreating back) for unwittingly stepping into their perfect picture of the entire family, including great-great-grandparents and several unborn fetuses, standing in front of the Statehouse, by kneeling in the center of the sidewalk for an artsy shot of, I don’t know, say, some paint peeling off an old fence, thus blocking the progress of said family as they meander (and by “meander”, I mean compete with the snail and the tortoise for the ‘it will take me six hours to cross the street’ award) towards Fanueil Hall.

When we were in Fés (in the good old days of the digital camera—lost, I’m afraid, inexplicably somewhere between the King’s Arms and Hurst St., or, quite possibly, in the house itself—stranger things have happened) I used to stop every five seconds to take what I thought would be an amazing picture of that really cool thing! (Perhaps, in retrospect, my camera was confiscated until I could learn to control my artistic urges) We called it having “tourist eyes” and came back to Oxford with that same breathless way of seeing things. So I’m equipped again for such adventures of the lens.

I had one of those “I just rolled out of bed and my hair’s sticking straight up—oh great, there’s someone I know!” moments today in the grocery store. Went to pick up supplies for dinner, etc. and ran into an old friend of mine from several years back. We were close for about a month, until she, and then more gradually I, moved on. I didn’t realize quite how disheveled I looked until I got home, but my hair was falling out of its rubber band, my t-shirt was four sizes too big (and stank slightly of stale sweat, I’m afraid to say), I wore no makeup. Luckily, however, I bought a very cool pair of Keds on Saturday, and I felt fantastic. Thought I was the hottest damn thing walking those aisles, I swear. And if this girl happened to glance foot-ward, I’m sure she’d have agreed.

Am feeling fantastically uninspired about my thesis. I just tried to fiddle with a story and ended up making it both worse and shorter; and I’ve lost the impetus to start a new one. Perhaps my trip to Oxford next week will, by making me incredibly happy, also serve to rekindle my creative impulses? If not, guess at least I’ve got my camera…

Have been slogging my way through Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I don’t mean to say “slogging” as if the book is bad—it’s not—but it’s awfully slow (shades of the tourist family, perhaps?). I’ve been reading up on the employment of narrative and story-structure in political messages (by the way, Kingsolver’s message is political. It can’t not be; there’s no way to separate “my family and I are moving to a farm in the south to grow all our own food so that we can reduce the oil-fueled mileage our sustenance has to travel” from “oh yeah, there’s a huge energy/environmental crisis happening in the world”, and Kingsolver doesn’t try to).

She’s following some of the things that people like Lakoff and Gardner suggest quite well; so the scholar part of me is impressed, but the reader part of me begs for more dialogue. That’s all. I suck up (and, more miraculously, since I suck up a ton of words all the time, remember) the bits where she talks to her kids, or her husband, or their neighbor who’s selling rhubarbs at the farmer’s market. I gloss over half the rest of it. Lesson for my own work—not that it’s doing much, at present, except festering in the folder called “thesis” on my desktop.

Another cup of tea and then to bed for me, I think, where I shall ignore Kingsolver in favor of a good old-fashioned murder mystery. In the end, story always wins over politics, for me…