No, Thursday's Out....

I’m isolating in the Knowle neighborhood of Bristol, just a couple of blocks from the old, partly overgrown Arnos Vale Cemetery. It’s wooded and beautiful and nearly empty, and now that I’m feeling better, I’ve gone on a couple of walks there. What jumps out is the number of gravestones dating from the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic : Darling Teddie, age 10; beloved wife Maria, age 35; and the hard-hit Clarks: Albert, age 5; Thomas, age 75; Priscilla, age 7; and Rosina, age 8 months.   I’m attributing these deaths to flu, although I know there were many ways to die in the early twentieth century.  As for t he young soldiers in military graves, I’m attributing their deaths to World War I, though there, too, some are noted as “killed in action,” and some simply list the regiment. Those may have been flu as well, as it tore through military hositals. I know, walking through a cemetery is a gloomy thing to do when one is on the mend from our latest pandemic. But it’s also an opp...

After a while, I started to see the London part of my trip as a series of pilgrimages. For instance:     The choir room is downstairs in the Crypt of St. Paul’s. Memorials to a lot of famous folks are in the Crypt, and a person could spend a day finding all of them. I go looking for William Blake and Florence Nightingale, but I’m actually on a quest to find Arthur Sullivan, of Gilbert &.   There he is, with his harp. And right beside the choir room door, there’s a memorial to a music person who was not at all famous, Robert Eaton, a singer in the choir. It’s very dim in that part of the Crypt. So much history. I made it to the British Library, the “treasures” room, an amazing place:  Magna Carta, Gutenberg, Mozart  scores. Handwritten early drafts of Beatles lyrics. Thrill upon thrill. Manuscripts by Wilfrid Owen, Wodehouse, Virginia Woolf. The last time I visited, there was a display where you could don earphones and listen to a scratchy recording of...

I went punting in Cambridge two weeks ago, and I went boating on the Avon Wednesday morning, so this has been a wonderful trip for a boat-lover like me. (I used “boating” there, because we were in a craft called a “Kata-Kanu,” two hard plastic canoes lashed together, catamaran-style. It was great, but every fiber of my being resists turning that monstrous noun into a verb. I went boating.) It’s lucky we went in the morning, because by afternoon, I had a tickle and a cough, and Thursday, I tested positive for COVID, for the first official time. I’m not posting a picture of the test. You’ve seen them. I’m also not posting a picture of a slightly more alarming development, which is that I have a jowl. Just one jowl, on the left. I swear I didn’t have it when I left home, but I have it now. It showed up yesterday, too, around the time my throat went raw, and I would be thrilled if it turned out to be an artifact of having COVID, maybe a temporarily angry lymph node, rather than a perma...

Our beloved choir director, Bruce, says, “Don’t take it literally” when he wants us to watch his phrasing during the chants, but I take it a Christian precept: Don’t take it literally. Look up from the page. Follow me. My gentle friend, Vakare, says, smiling, “Singing takes courage.” She is a frequent soloist, but she means it takes courage for everyone to sing, which feels like a benediction . And I think, “Oh, that’s why so many people are afraid to do it.” My friend Mary says, “It’s an incarnational faith,” and she’s talking about religion, but it’s equally true of the performing arts, faces and voices and eyes and arms and ears, giving and receiving. Sound and light up in the glorious dome, ringing and ringing even after we stop. We make the hair stand up on people’s necks, and the organist, Katie, makes their chests vibrate.   And this although it takes effort, and our own bodies are soggy toast. Our throats are scratchy and the soles of our feet are paper thin. ...

On the bathroom logos of Kensington Palace, everyone is royal!  And I do mean everyone - you, your baby, your partner and your pal!  Also, and you may need to enlarge the photo to see this, the wallpaper features images of Diana, Princess of Wales. Some things confound Americans. I speak for my nation on this. While we’re at it, I have another bathroom mystery to share, and I would remind you that no one is forcing you to read this: I’m halfway through my trip, so I washed some underthings in the tub. I plugged the drain, and squeezed in a bunch of soap, and then I got in and took a shower, agitating up some suds and getting a foot soak at the same time. Efficient and ecological multi-tasking! Later, I  noticed a lot of sand in the bottom of the tub. Really, a lot of sand. It would be wrong for me to say that the tub was full of sand, which is what I wrote before one of my friends on the Hyperbole Police Force showed up to correct me. So fine. The tub had more sand ...

I am reliably informed that this summer’s fashion trend is “coastal grandmother.” You can Google Image it if you like: big white shirts, loose linen pants, bucket hats, straw hats, flowing dresses, giant cashmere shawls, primarily beige, pale brown, and yes, taupe. It’s vaguely convalescent, but on the upside, it’s far from corseted. Fellow coastal grandmas , our drab yet comfy time has come. We can be like Jane Fonda. Alas, I didn’t know that the coastal grandmother look was a thing until after I’d landed In England, and met up with my lifelong pal and traveling companion, Dana, who keeps abreast of such things. I’d packed my bags in Practical Grandmother mode, for three weeks on the road. That means I’m   tromping around in my black Doc Marten Chelsea boots, grey pants, and bright floral tops that somewhat disguise food stains. Not that I care deeply about being unfashionable, because I don’t really want strangers to notice me. If I do draw attention by mistake, my travel ...