Photos, Churchs, and Other Things

It would seem that blogger is having some difficulty. Not for today then a discussion of religion in England. Instead a photo for you. Before I remain remiss, I do want to thank Lizzie's Steve for agreeing that roughage and a better exit strategy keep English toilets from clogging. I do like it when people agree with me. You can see Lizzie's full explanation in the comments on this post.

On the Way to London

I don't prepare for travel well. I'm fine for the actual traveling. It's the getting ready that knocks me for six.

The travel dreams always begin classically. The Greeks also dreamed that their Trojan horse was boarding, they'd forgotten to pack and had no idea what they'd done with their passports. For me one anxiety dream begets another. The other night I dreamed that both my parents had been murdered via the oh-so-likely vehicle of a car crash. In the dream one of my sisters and I had to set all to rights, but we couldn't figure out how given all of the hard grieving we were doing. The problem is that it sometimes takes me hours after a dream to sort out what is real from what is produced by the ether of mind. I spent the next morning trying to shake the dream. I kept reminding myself that there hadn't been a car crash, that there was no rush to sort out funeral plans, and that my parents were still alive. Except that last one isn't quite right. Mom's been dead for sixteen years now. It's that part of the travel dreams that I couldn't cope with this time around--the part where I think everything is as it should be only to remember it isn't.

I finally wrote a packing list last week and packed. It made the dreams stop; though, I've had to repack since then. It's odd what I thought I needed until I realized that I didn't really want to carry it. Fair warning to the family: I washed ten pairs of socks. I can't find them now, so my feet will probably smell.

Fabulous Things About England #29: The Gulf Stream

Friends of mine in the US Midwest and parts of the South are still freezing their tushies off. In fact those in Kentucky and Tennessee have just begun posting about their trees beginning to bud. Sightings of daffodils have just begun in Northern Illinois, and the pacific Northwest isn't quite sure if it is the end of winter or the beginning of summer.

Of course England's good luck has everything to do with the Gulf Stream and very little to do with being a tropical island.

Fabulous Things About England #28: Bus Stops

I used to drive. During my last winter in Alaska, I taught at a high school, the university, and the community college arm of the university. My close friends lived ten to twenty miles in the other direction. It was the rare day that I put less than sixty miles on my car, and the rarer day that I did not drive at all. I was last in the States four years ago; I haven't driven a mile since. Now when friends text and ask where I am, the answer is almost invariably on the bus, waiting for a bus, or wondering where the bus is. I do not miss the driving. It would take me much more time to travel from home to town if I took a car, but there are days when I tot up the hours spent queuing at the big blue and white signs.

Bath Abbey, February 2011

I stand nowhere more frequently than in front of a bank, looking out at Bath Abbey. I must have hundreds of photographs of those same flying buttresses. Very little changes. The same buses drive by me. The tourists ask for the same directions, and the clock turns or does not turn the time. It's easy to forget the happy luck that brought me here to look not on strip malls but on architecture greater than any I had seen before. It is as easy here as it was in Alaska to forget to see what I'm looking at, to forget to appreciate this city for what it is. I'm trying to remember to note that the abbey, aided by the light and sky, has moods of it's own.

I've lived here for five years now, and it has only recently occurred to me to photograph the back of the Abbey, to take the time to stand back and take in the whole of the building, to wonder what it looked like before the taxi rank twirled around it. What, I wonder, did those hundreds of years of tired people think when contemplating their place below its towers.