The British Invasion: Part II - Hampton Court Palace and Salisbury Cathedral

( My tour began on Tuesday morning. )

Burger Time

My Dad fancies himself a good cook. Sometimes he does make good food. Other times, well, not so much.

Let me tell you about the time Dad decided to make supper for my sister and me.

He chose to make hamburgers. Sounds pretty basic, doesn't it? Well, not this time. Dad decided to become creative, and began mixing all sorts of things into the meat. I don't recall most of it, but I do remember he minced up lettuce and blended it with the ground beef.

When he slapped the patties onto the pan, they stank. Not like rotten meat, mind you, but like something horribly wrong. The meat was an unappetizing pallid grey. He put the ruined meat on buns and presented them to us. We shook our heads and said no, thank you.

Dad got furious at this, and told us to eat the burgers. I took a bite, then spit it out. It was disgusting. I couldn't make myself eat it. My sister was more stubborn, and wouldn't even take a single bite.

After railing at us a bit more, Dad finally decided to try his own cooking. "Oh," he said, then spit. "Oh. Oh."

In the meanwhile, our little yap dog, Terry, had been dancing all around us, begging for food. One of his nicknames was Garbage Gut, because he would eat anything.

Dad put his burger in Terry's dish.

Terry took a bite of the burger, lifted his leg, pissed on the burger, then ran away yiking like he was being kicked to death.

And so Dad threw the burgers out and we had Corn Flakes for supper.

The British Invasion: Part III - Stonehenge and Clovelly

After the Salisbury Cathedral, my tour group had one more sacred site to visit on Tuesday: Stonehenge.

We drove through fields heavily populated by sheep and what I know as Holstein, but what the English call Friesian cattle. Though it was September, the grass was every bit as green as Canadian lawns in late May. Now this is what I call pastoral. One of the women on the bus calls it bucolic. That works, too.

Hedges great and small lined the narrow roads. Some were only about waist high. Some soared higher than the tour bus (or coach, as it's referred to in England), giving the roads a claustrophobic feel. There were times when our driver Russell would stop and back up a bit to let another coach or lorry through. These country roads don't have shoulders, and there were times when there couldn't have been more than two inches of clearance between us and the passing vehicle. It was often unnerving, but Russell is a fantastic driver, and navigated the enormous bus around as though it were nothing.

The fields are expansive in Salisbury: almost prairie-like, but for the hedges making patchwork quilts of the countryside. ( There are no trees to slow the wind near Stonehenge )

Seminar on the Nature of Reality

I’ve never seen a person dance with death
so gracefully before. As if you were—
not rushing to embrace it, not enthralled,
but fascinated, ready to explore
this new phenomenon the way a boy
might wonder at a frog he’s caught or stand,
head cocked, before a tree he thinks he’ll climb.

Geez, you’re dying, and you act like this is
just another challenge to be mastered.

Most of us fear death. Consider Hamlet
and his dread of something after death
so strong that we would rather fardels bear
than face the undiscovered country
from whose bourn no traveller returns.

Yet here you are, a twinkle in your eye,
telling me about the hospice music
therapist who sang for you today
and how next week you’ve got a physicist
coming here to lead a conversation
on what is real and what is not and how
when things are very large or very small
they don’t behave the way we think they should.

You can hardly walk, you can hardly talk,
you can’t even breathe without oxygen,
and still you’re organizing seminars
you might not even be here to attend.

Maybe this is what you are: so large
a mind, so very large a heart that you
just won’t behave the way we think you should.

-- by W. D. Ehrhart