chartley

You have clearly fallen heavily for the Cotswolds, and it must be wonderful the first time you come across sheep eating grass. However, your enthusiasm for Bourton on the Water and Broadway is a little misplaced. These are tourist destinations - very attractive, well maintained, and the shops sell a better class of tat - but they exist for their visitors and the visitors come to them for what they are. Other Cotswold towns and villages are more authentic in that they have a real role in the neighbourhoods, and their attractive arhictecture is sometimes compromised by industry and commerce. Cirencester, Winchcombe, Painswick and Chipping Camden are in that category.

Three pints of scrumpy? Are you sure it was the real stuff, and not just ordinary cider? That amount can lead to madness, blindness and worse.

annhig

Three pints of scrumpy? Are you sure it was the real stuff, and not just ordinary cider? That amount can lead to madness, blindness and worse.>>

worse? a desire to read the Daily Mail perhaps, or to try Morris dancing?

PatrickLondon

Or incest. Or all at once.

If you could move at all, that is.

JoEwriter

Day 7 THE COTSWOLDS Part III: The Golden Years


Blenheim Palace or Sudeley Castle? Kip had already been to Blenheim before, but I thought Winston Churchill’s place was worth a look despite that. I dunno, maybe it’s just me. Arriving there in our rented Vauxhall, we had one of the longer walks of the week just ahead of us. Indeed, the grounds were so vast, so shamelessly expansive, that there were literally shuttles of tourists being taken from the parking area to the front gate. And there are people who own this property and live inside it.

For those of you who haven’t been, it is by definition a bona fide palace, and it stands monumentally in the center of a literal park, undulating from one elaborate garden to the next, adorned with rows of statues, columns, even a bridge over a lake, into which water surges from a cascade. This is not what surrounds the property. This is the property. And there are people who own it and live inside it.

After being dwarfed by his house, which was built for giants, I believe, and his gardens thick with rows of naked stone men, none of which seemed to resemble the Churchill family as seen in the immense portraits in the mansion, Kip and I set off for a refreshing change of pace in the categorically modest Slaughter villages. They’re so modest, in fact, that I still don’t know the difference between Upper Slaughter and Lower Slaughter. But modesty is a beautiful quality, I think.

And any village with a water mill has that trait, especially along the natural route of such a gentle, pastoral walk that felt timeless. Timeless is the perfect word, I think, for a place so populated with slugs. No matter how dutiful and persistent they were on their own respective little journeys, the time it must’ve taken them to get as far as they’d gotten could’ve been the age of the village itself. They were like little hourglasses. Oddly enough, listening to the loud, pontificating American in the Chipping Campden tea shop we stopped in was like staring at one. But all the same, time flies when you’re enjoying the luscious ritual of tea and scones.

What meal would that be in American terms? The remaining sour cream and onion Lays chips in your car? Or did you make that arduous trip all the way to your car, all the way down the block and deal with the gross inconvenience of waiting behind the exhaust-jetting Dodge Ram barge at the drive-thru for a steroid and processed starch burger?


That night back in Sheepscombe, after our final stroll through the hideaway paradise of Snowshill, Kip and I lay on our beds taking in our final gasps of the heavenly lavender sky, the sounds of the sweet, free and innocent surfer dude sheep, and the wind caressing the unsullied fields.
　

JoEwriter

Day 8 LITTLE MALVERN TO SHREWSBURY


I’ve never been anywhere before, I feel certain, where an attendant at a joint petrol station/motor repair knew the burial site of a Romantic classical composer. But that’s where Kip and I stopped. After awaking to the rain resuming itself after reserving clear skies for our beautiful stay, we ordered Simon, our GPS, to guide us to Shrewsbury. On the way, Kip felt compelled to mess with Simon’s chi by stopping in Little Malvern. Sir Edward Elgar, composer of one of the most traditionally instilled march melodies in the Western world, whose likeness is illustrated on a sterling bank note, a statue of whom stands in Worcester, is buried in a plot practically scrunched up against the back of a small church on the side of a back road as the petrol station/motor repair. On the stone, his wife gets top billing, and in larger-size words. The Sir Edward Elgar Museum is in a weedy cemetery at the edge of a large field. We were its only guests during our visit to it. But remember what I said about this country’s modesty and understatement? They don’t compromise those qualities under any circumstances. Unless the tea is tepid.


Before arriving in Shrewsbury, what overhung in my mind the most was that at Elgar’s boyhood home, locating behind the museum, there lay the grave of his two beloved dogs, complete with a large gravestone and words meant for both dogs, as loyal individuals.

I think the fundamental difference between England and the US is that we tend not to do or change certain things because our cultural rationale carries the possibilities to outrageous extremes. In England, they eat tons of meat, but everywhere you see sheep and cattle roaming and grazing freely. Why? Well because they’re healthier and live better lives, and you don’t always necessarily have to mow the enormous breadth of grassland. Tell American agricultural companies not to cage livestock knee-deep in their own bile so we can ride around on our combines and tractors and get paid to let highways cut through miles of beautiful grassland, and we hear notions like cattle running loose in the middle of the road and into town. But that strangely never happens in England. The only livestock met in the middle of a road are sheep. I don’t mean to take a glass-half-empty view of my homeland, but with the amount of helpless deer, squirrels, cats, raccoons and even a couple of dogs that I’ve seen pulverized on expressways, highways and indeed residential roads just in my time as an American driver, I can’t help but find it shocking not to have seen a single solitary “flat meat” carcass of theirs in the entire 3-week sojourn.

I hadn’t even seen road kill nearly to even a fraction’s extent of that in Ohio, where every day I irk at deer, raccoons, squirrels, etc. mashed into the manufactured pavement. With the exception of the Yorkshire Dales later in the trip, where I saw tons of rabbit casualties for some odd reason, the only things they seem to mash in the UK are their peas. Another instance, much more relevant: Taxes in Britain are a huge bite (and they all gripe about it with effective reason), but the US dollar is practically worthless when exchanged for pounds. Likewise, OUR taxes are lower than they’ve been in half a century, and THEY’RE the ones with light rail, its all-around service trade has seen a hearty expansion in the past twenty years, signaling a falling off of the manufacturing industries that plague the diet oligarchy that is the US, and don’t let’s get started on healthcare. And despite the decline of Britain’s manufacturing trade, it exports tons of beef and all the food at the pubs is from farms only a few miles down the motorway. A country the size of Idaho is without these major humanitarian problems in a country fifty times that size, and also without the preventive measures to those same problems.

In the States, we can’t even embrace the implications of our own deficit reductions, let alone deeply ingrained social customs. But I won’t get started on that. I was insatiably refreshed by not being inundated with the debilitating crisis of our political state of affairs, even though the more I see how unique our superpower nation has unconsciously become, the more dangerous one realizes the rise of free-for-all enterprise and rah-rah nationalism really is.

If I recall, this was what Kip and I mostly talked about on the ride to Shrewsbury, only to realize how quickly we’d come to the part where Kip was going to need full attention on both our parts on the directions to the Catherine of Aragon Suite. Ultimately, after getting ourselves lost in the thick of the town, we resorted to calling our soon-to-be host, who exercised the true extraordinary limits of English patience in guiding us, two exasperated American tourists.

For sure, when Tony Walters entered the picture, this grey Englishman in purple and pink emerging on the cobblestone street to switch seats with me in busy traffic, arriving smoothly to our destination from, I think, the only parking garage we came across anywhere in England we went. This jolly, cultured and giddy man humbly ushered us down the street to his enormous old home, where we met his stout, equally ebullient wife Mary. One shouldn’t imagine being any less jolly if one were the owner of The Old House Suites. To live on property like this in a town like this was a feat I never thought possible.

We literally stepped back in time. Our said suite was a full three rooms and a bathroom that flushes with a lever hanging from a wooden box. I haven’t seen one of those since I was a child and my grandma still had her house, which was a far cry from the warm, vivid rugs and dark, certain wood and high ceilings here, where Tony and Mary had left us champagne from their own son’s vineyard and flowers dedicated to our welcome. What’s more, arriving up the narrow steps to this suite, which felt like the top floor but turned out not to be, we had cursory glimpses of the house’s library, it’s corridors, paintings, tables and stained glass windows.

Despite the stress at the tail end of our journey---it always was when Kip had to navigate an intricate urban area in a psychologically startling driving situation---the ride to Shrewsbury felt short to both of us, and we leapt back out onto the streets almost immediately after relieving our luggage to the comfortable confines of Catherine of Aragon. There was a noticeable increase in modern storefronts. There was even a mall. But guess what it’s called? You’ll never guess. And if you’re American, you’ll be taken aback. The Charles Darwin Shopping Center. Normal teens seemed to be hanging out in there. I wonder if they’re all going to hell? I learned that Shrewsbury was Darwin’s birthplace. At any rate, however many progressive businesses seemed to reside here, they managed not to spoil the uncanny geometry of this town. This was true even though everything felt so close together, tight and intimate. That may have had a bit to do with the town being tucked in the rain shadow of the Shropshire Hills, but more to do with the gardens and courtyards tucked to the offside of so many shuts connected the often up or downhill sidewalks.

It wasn’t long before we had made relatively quick work of our fish and chips, served to us by an excited young girl who had never met Americans before. If I remember, Kip’s after-dinner smoke was shared outside with her, where she expressed worry that her manager would find out she smokes. She was like 17 or thereabouts. We began browsing tucked-away courtyards and gardens as if they were shop windows, and settled on one, where we got ourselves a couple of pints and met a very amiable and educated social circle whose diverse array of relationship dynamics unfolded to us over the course of this very ecstatic night. We met them where you meet most interesting people: in the area where they allowed smoking. It began when Kip struck up a conversation with one exceedingly charming professor named Alice Stanley, who happily welcomed our company by showing us the little half-hut in the back of the pub where we drank and smoked with her as her friends and colleagues came and went. One information-gushing older professor, energized by his drunkenness, we met in the courtyard explained to us in lively tones that the town’s two churches, St. Alkmund’s and St. Julian’s, despite being so close together as to virtually be on each other’s property, were at constant odds.

Generally, our single-serving circle of mates were intrigued by our presence. Why would Americans visiting Britain come to Shrewsbury? That very same older professor seemed to correctly express the novelty of our presence when he said something slurred but nevertheless to the effect that there’s no one culturally pervasive item in Shrewsbury that would call its attention to anyone outside Shropshire. Kip’s impetus for coming here was to experience the inspiration of the poets who lived here and wrote about it, A.E. Housman and Wilfred Owen. Sure enough, Alice and this older colleague of hers could quote a Housman verse in unison. They were accompanied by other colorful chaps and birds, such as a younger colleague and his very young German girlfriend. Kip chatted for quite awhile with her. I engaged more with Alice and a lanky, bespectacled young colleague. I think I’d become fixated on her company because she’d explained that she taught in Italy and had a boyfriend there, and she and he had been to Reggio di Calabria, where my grandfather’s family came from. She was able to describe the mountainous character of the region in a way that elucidated it more specifically in my mind than anytime before that. And then there was Louie. Oh, Louie, Louie. Was there one thing we talked about that wouldn’t be too distasteful to include here? I’ll save those stories for my friends on Monday nights.

It was late when we finally returned to Catherine of Aragon.

bilboburgler

Ok give us an American view on Darwin? Surely there arn't any more people in the states who dis-believe his theory? I'm sure I saw a film about the court case but that was Jimmy Stewart (I think and a Brit) and he has been dead for ages.

Still I love the "Catherine of Aragon Suite", sometimes we are just too twee.

tjhome1

Excellent trip report, good of you to put the effort in to making it different but still engaging.

irishface

I am truly enjoying your report! It helps me remember all the wonderful people I met and all the interesting places I visited in that part of the world. You have hit some places I missed and your story is making me know that I want to go back to England--not that I really need any excuses!

Thank you for sharing!

alya

I stumbled across your thread and have spent this evening/early morning reading Kip's account of your travels.

Wonderful that you both have different writing styles (he's certainly quicker than you at getting things down on 'paper' ) but you both have the same story to tell in a way that makes me keep popping back to his post to compare the two.

DO get a move on I want to know what you thought of my birthplace - Yorkshire.

JoEwriter

@bilboburger: Wow. American views of Darwin? Sir, do you happen to know what something called the Creation Museum is? Let me explain it for you and other readers fortunate enough to live somewhere where such a thing is laughably inconceivable. The Creation Museum is a place founded and dedicated to presenting an account of the origins of the universe, life on earth and early history in keeping with a literal reading of the Book of Genesis. At this place where parents take their kids to be educated and people in their seventies and eighties go to reinforce genuine lifelong beliefs, the exhibits reject all or most scientific findings about evolution, and maintain that all life on earth, including earth itself, was created 6,000 years ago over a week’s time. This includes the assertion that humans and dinosaurs coexisted, and that dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark.

There are miniatures of the Ark as it supposedly was precisely designed. There was at one point early on an exhibit of a dinosaur with a saddle on its back. Still there is an exhibit of a human standing next to a Tyrannosaurus Rex, which is eating leaves. Kids can take turns riding a little mechanized triceratops near the front. Is it all meant as an offer of open interpretation, you ask? No, the museum depicts war, starvation and natural disasters as the results of God being angry that so many people believe in evolution. There are educational video screenings for kids that teach that boys looking at porn and girls getting abortions as direct results of lifestyles not based on Biblical literalism. Though homosexual couples or normally ejected by security, the museum has nevertheless hit the one-million visitor mark in only four or five years of being open. I live forty-five minutes away from this place. That’s why the Charles Darwin Shopping Centre was refreshing.

bilboburgler

Joe Wonderful. God angry? I thought "he was love". What religion are these people?

Thanks for updating me.

annhig

please Joe tell us where it is so that we can make sure we avoid it.

JoEwriter

Day 9 Shrewsbury, Church Stretton and One Long Mynd

We never saw Mary, really. Save for that cursory but very big-hearted introduction upon our arrival, the only relationship we had to Mrs. Walters was through the unqualified satisfaction of the breakfasts she sent to our living room. Tony was the humble courier his wife’s serialized breadth of banquet. Just after ribbing me about my obviously hung-over need for the coffee he’d just set down for us, he reminded us of his offer to give us a tour of the house. Judging by how glad he seemed to be when we expressed excitement about it, this is surely one of this eccentric man’s very favorite things to do.

Or maybe he’s not eccentric. Maybe he only seems that way to me. From my limited life experience, an old Englishman invariably dressed in pink and purple who knows everything about everyone who’s ever entered his house, whose every room contains its own epic, wildly convoluted novel of historical intrigue, is a definite eccentric. I’m disappointed in myself, looking back, hardly having retained a single word of the thrilling stories he told us. I would love to revisit him someday and take the tour all over again. I only vaguely can recall the larger-than-life adventures of the most craftily deceitful politician who may have ever lived, I remember thinking at the time with full grasp of how much of an overstatement that must be. But whoever he was, step aside Rove, move over Cheney, and get outta here Nixon.

Here’s how limited I am. The one story freshest in my mind, and Kip’s for that matter, is that one of Tony’s sons played the boy Melanie Griffith cared for while posing as a maid or something in Liam Neeson’s house in the American film Shining Through, starring Michael Douglas. It came out in 1992, I believe. But now, Anthony Walters is an adult who works as a respresentative of Goldcrest Pictures and worked as such on Tropic Thunder, Eagle Eye, Twilight and Knowing. That’s the extent of my incurable couch potato-ness: No matter how extraordinary it was to be in a house linked to pivotal narratives of European history, I remember virtually none of it, and instead have retained our enthusiastic, quite hilarious storyteller’s son’s IMDb page more dependably than anything Tony spent something like 2 and a half hours telling us. Maybe it was interesting to me on a more first-hand level because Anthony had passed me in the upstairs hallway covered in nothing but a bath towel, not 20 minutes before I learned that I’d seen him in a Hollywood movie.
Anyway, standing for 2 and a half hours the morning after hours of drinking and smoking did absolutely nothing whatsoever to benefit me on our walk up the Long Mynd.

Squeezing out layers of sweat with every step further on up, we hiked and weaved through an immoderate half hour of abrupt, grassy valleys, rocky outcrops and broken slopes, populated by untroubled vagrant sheep and Europeans in such good physical shape that some even peddled bicycles up and back down the Mynd. But arriving at the top felt so gratifying. I honestly felt more complete than I had in quite a long time. The plateau at the top was like we’d climbed to an exclusive altitude of life. I swear the clouds must’ve only been a couple of hundred feet or so above us. Heather, bracken and sheep droppings were never released from the effortless might of the barren winds. Descending the hill was easier, though that’s not to say it was “easy.” It was actually difficult sometimes keeping control of how fast I would decline as gravity became a little greedy with me.

Upon our sweaty return to Church Stretton, we found a sign for a tea shop. We followed it into a house. It felt residential. We went up the steps to the top floor, where what could’ve otherwise been a bedroom was a counter, a few tables and a kitchen. We ordered afternoon tea and went back down and into the backyard, where a few tables rested among a kind of floral forest. As we engaged the delicious custom, which we’d earned considerably, birds perched three and four feet away from us. Unafraid. What a peaceful world we were in.


Peaceful isn’t how I’d describe my feeling seeing the Church of St. John the Baptist, what with the whole idea of being beheaded. Simon did a well enough job getting us to Stokesay Castle, where we admired that and the nearby Gatehouse, which was starkly different in that it was quaintly decorated with carvings. I still don’t think I’ve taken the initiative to understand the history in the walls of this centuries-old fortification I had the privilege of visiting first hand, but its jagged gravestones and overall remoteness will probably stay in mind for years.


I think I wasn’t as interested in the details of the things we did on this day because I was still reeling a bit from the night before at The Old Post Office, the pub hidden through a shut on one of the main streets of Shrewsbury. The conversations we had, the pints we shared the revolving door of interactions with Alice, Stephea, Rosa, old James, younger James and Louie the Welshman. You’ve never met a teacher like Louie. No teacher I’ve ever talked to outside the decorum of a classroom has ever been this fun-loving, candid and raw. We traded exceedingly R-rated thoughts on exceedingly NC-17-rated subjects, which was the closest I felt to being in a social situation at home with people my own age. And all these first-time or highly unusual and unexpected experiences all day for so many days is obviously thrilling and awe-inspiring, but it does take you further and further out of your element. Talking with people as far removed from any circle of people I’ve ever met so far in my life, and yet being able to get hip to how to engage and entertain one another on a casual, comradely level in such a succinct, fulfilling amount of time was a rush.

annhig

The conversations we had, the pints we shared the revolving door of interactions with Alice, Stephea, Rosa, old James, younger James and Louie the Welshman. You’ve never met a teacher like Louie. No teacher I’ve ever talked to outside the decorum of a classroom has ever been this fun-loving, candid and raw.>>

and in the nicest way, i am sure that they remember you and Kip too!

julia_t

Thank you so much for posting your impressions of the Welsh Border counties, as you rightly say, so rarely visited by Americans.

Shropshire is my favourite county in all England, and I live in the glorious (and rarely-visited-by-Americans South Cotswolds).

I lived close to Ludlow for 3 years in the 1990s, and before that for 7 years just a couple of miles from Elgar's birthplace. I know EXACTLY what you are talking about in this part of your TR, and I'm loving it all.

Please continue.

BTW, although you stayed at Sheepscombe (B&B, there is a particularly pretty village called Sheepscombe south of Gloucester/Cheltenham, tucked away in a little valley near Painswick.

And like annhig, I wonder how you managed to drink 3 pints of scrumpy and still be able to remember most of what you did! It must have been the commercial stuff, certified fit for human consumption.

The real stuff, which you can rarely find these days due to elf'n'safety, usually has had a lamb carcase or dead rats chucked into the mix to add flavour (!!!) and is incredibly intoxicating. I refuse to confide details of what I do recall after my nights on the scrumpy when I were a young lass and they sold it in the local pub...!!!

bilboburgler

I think the rat would have been just to add some proteins and accelerate any clearing of the murky stuff.

ancestralvoices

Day 10 Llandudno, North Wales


I don’t know whether to say we left Shrewsbury that morning, or that we left “Shrowsbury.” It’s hard to tell when everyone in England uses an arsenal of historical knowledge to back up their claims even on something as trivial as a fight over pronunciation. In America, we almost let ourselves default by not raising the debt ceiling, and no one involved mentioned that the previous administration raised it for the 19th time just a mere few years ago. Historical facts is to England what football fandom is to America. Really, you could say that the Brits who believe putting the clotted cream on the scone before the preserves and vice versa are like the Americans who want the Steelers to beat the Cowboys this season and vice versa.

We seemed to arrive in the seaside North Wales town of Llandudno so gracefully, simply connecting like tape on a spool to a wide curving roadway divided from a Victorian promenade of dreamlike color and symmetry by a ribbon of garden, and parking, as luck would have it, for free right outside our hotel, the last of the many hotels and bed-and-breakfasts at the end of the Parade, bringing us full semi-circle. It was The Waverly, where we were greeted by the wide-eyed, smilingly unassuming proprietor, Bob. He made every concession for us, treating us to a room with a bay window that saw straight back across the promenade on the shore to the Great Orme, or the Little Orme. Now we had come full semi-circle.

We were hungry so we immediately set out for fish and chips at a pub on a street off the promenade. Of all things, it played American rockabilly and played a teen pop concert on a TV. What an incongruous sort of thing to see in North Wales, I thought. The whole town began to feel like a kind of fantasy as we began to explore the grand, populated boardwalk and the glittering, outdated arcade on the pier. Before I knew it, hardly even noticing the transition occur within me, I began to feel very sad. I’d been feeling homesick intermittently throughout the trip so far, despite how much I had indulged the unreal thrill of it all. But this was a much more intense feeling going through me. I began to feel like I could hardly hold my head up. It was inexplicable. Could it be that what I was seeing cast a gloom over me? The town really was a fantasy, populated by people who seemed to be living in a fantasy.

Though I suspected maybe I was to blame for Kip’s mood following suit, he and I began to realize we were both thinking the same things about this seaside reverie. We both felt as if we had stepped back to the 1940s, but the nostalgia didn’t feel like a fascinating novelty, or a return home, at least to us. It literally felt like we were surrounded by a forlorn yearning for the past. Everywhere we went had a sort of beaten-down humility smothering it. We peeked inside the Grand Hotel. The paint on these grand walls was peeling, the grand carpet was old, dusty and linty. But people of old age, some interlocking arms to see their lifelong vows to the bitter end, some sauntering to the grand dining hall alone, didn’t seem to expect much. It began to compel me back to the room in the Waverly, and Kip as well, because such a feeling of melancholy just made my separation from my home environments and attachments much too intense and it became a level of distress for me.

It was baffling to feel this way in what was truly an overpoweringly beautiful location. What’s more, now that I’m back, and I’m writing this on a beautifully overcast, gently windy autumn day because I’m such a slow, undisciplined writer, and thinking about how it felt in Llandudno. It was only a bit wetter, and the surroundings were much more akin to the fall mood. That film noir mood, almost. The nostalgia, melancholy and the transient clarity of a dream. So it was still a richer experience of environment. But still, I remember this unexplainable pressure crushing me into a diamond.

By evening, we’d found ourselves back on the pier, where the town brass band was about to play to the town, here on the pier with the waves behind them. A town choir had already accumulated a congregation around them singing hymns. We found ourselves sitting down on one of the long benches as the noble Llandudno Town Band started to play its repertoire. In between songs, the dauntless band leader would make subtle jokes when commenting on the day and the next piece. Like all band leaders, his jokes were bad. Believe me, I know. I was surrounded by them growing up. They share the same shamelessly low-brow “How round was she?!” sense of humor. Not this guy. I was surprised to find myself catching his quips as they just about flew over my head with the seagulls. He had the driest delivery, as if the jokes were meant to go undetected.

A buck naked child ran across the pier at one point, I remember, by the time Kip and I had in the most elusive instant become surrounded by elderly townspeople, all lifelong couples sitting arm in arm very close to one another. They were singing along to hymns they would’ve known in their sleep, but they didn’t sing back at the band. They were singing as quiet as each other’s earshot. They were singing to each other. So many of them had dogs, who just sat patiently, and contentedly at their feet. I think it was about when they were singing Abide with Me that I was just overcome. Purely and simply, I just cannot remember the last time I was at such a loss of emotional control in such an open, crowded place. Maybe it was the intimacy this entire town had with each other that signaled me to such a candid betrayal of my gushy center. The band leader in due course said farewell to the people, finishing then with the British anthem, for which all stood, even the very oldest folk. We did, too.

I don’t quite recall whether or not it was me urging Kip or if we both agreed that we needed desperately to stop playing Mrs. Miniver and bury ourselves in our room at The Waverley for the night. It was a great night, because instead of staring at the screen of my Toshiba for hours until falling asleep, Kip found from Bob that Bob’s son ran the most discreet bar probably in the world out of his little office right across from our room at the front of the hotel. It was only appropriate that we buy the two most urgently needed pints probably in the world. Outside on the porch directly in front of our window, we found ourselves talking to the most friendly, peaceful young couple either of us had met in what felt like forever. It wasn’t just two of them. They had a baby who slept like one the whole time. They were Danish.

Kip talked to them about the parts of Europe he had gone to when studying abroad, and their viewpoints were always so modest and good-humored. They laughed quite a lot, and their English was charmingly burdened with their accents. Kip knew how to speak to them in simplified, sensitive and pleasant terms. I found myself laughing with them quite a lot before chiming in, which admittedly was mostly when conversation trickled into pop culture. But I’m part of Generation Text, whether I like it or not, and being able to engage them on subjects common to those in my mingling at home, was an urgent retreat back to soothing, uplifting normalcy from the overpowering vulnerability I’d felt all day.

JoEwriter

The Llandudno portion of the above report is mine. Kip and I share the same desktop and he had not signed out when I posted. Sorry for the confusion. I'll stick with my laptop next time.