So, and it’s a sad, sad blog post that doesn’t start with ‘So’, so I’m a going to England, where I hope to learn to speak the Queen’s English in the manner of the newsreaders of the BBC. I also desire to come away from my time there with an appreciation with how to wear a bowler hat with just the right degree of insouciance. This may be a mite difficult, as no one appears to actually wear bowler hats any more, except in period dramas. But one should always have a dream, unless it’s something like building a Bible themed nightclub in Las Vegas, which just came to me for some reason. Now I’ll have to go and have my imagination rinsed out, it’s obviously all gunked up with something.
Anyhow, I’m going to England and this blog is going along. Oh, and so is Mary. For the next three months we’ll be living in London as the English if the English were a couple of expatriates from the US, which of course they aren’t, so I don’t know quite where we’re going to go from there. It’s a thing. And I will document it, as frequently as I can be pulled away from visiting take-away curry places. Because that too, is a thing, and it will be my thing for a while.
Mary has encouraged me in her inimitable manner, with lots of big words, and a fair degree of hand waving, to consider some new possibilities while we’re in London. Or to put it another way, to expand outside the original concept for the blog which was to have consisted primarily of a list of pubs I’ve visited, and what I watched on the Beeb, the previous night. She wants to dissuade me from making blog entries that sound like this one:
“I went to the ‘Three Laughing Pigs’ pub today that’s a couple of blocks over from the ‘Two Weeping Washerwomen’ pub I went to yesterday. They have four new types of real ale I haven’t sampled yet, and this will bring my list of real ales tasted to three hundred and forty-two, which means that I only have another eight hundred and six left to go.”
“The pub also had chips which I would rate as 6.7 on the patented Waring Fried Food Rating System.”
Instead, there will be live plays with live actors saying lines and maybe, on occasion, singing. There’s walks and museums and train rides to the country, where I will ramble with the locals, and cafes, and take-away places and riding the Underground out to the last station on the Piccadilly line, which is called Cockfosters, just because once in your life you ought to visit a place called Cockfosters.
There’s shopping at Fortnum and Mason with a stop in the restaurant there for a bit of Welsh Rarebit for tea. Lectures on some subject with which I am completely unfamiliar but Mary will assure me is quite interesting. Concerts. A picnic lunch in a tiny little park, grabbed hurriedly between rain showers. Trying to suss out the bus system. Determining how many different meat pies are made in England. Going grocery shopping without a car.
And that’s just a few of the things I hope to check out and post about. The adventure begins…..now!