I still remember the trip

When he is playing Jack Bauer, Keiffer Southerland is awful mean and tough for a Canadian. I guess he is a Canadian. At least a part-Canadian. We ate ham and green beans and dressing pones for supper tonight. Yum. Hard to beat.

Even without gravy. Dressing pones go well with turkey and pork and chicken and probably even beef. I would like to have yorkshire pudding with beef and mustard. That sounds like a good English meal. Fresh peas. Trifle. Sherry. A good sharp cheese.

Then we would go into the parlor outside the dining room and smoke a cigar while sipping on a brandy. That reminds me of a supper I shared with my compatriots from W&L at the dining room of the Red Lion Inn in Salsbury. The Red Lion is an old coach inn with a central courtyard. We drove in in the afternoon and settled into our rooms. Later, we walked down into the dining room and I ate a nice meal of leek soup, Scottish roast beef with potatoes, a glass of red wine, followed by a selection from the cheese board. Later, we settled into the smoking parlor and enjoyed cigars and brandy.

In retrospect, it seems that that scene might not have happened after W&L went coed. The scene would definitely be different.

We also enjoyed a delightful breakfast at another coach inn in Yorkshire, this one outside of Harrogate. We had enjoyed a nice supper the night before, but the breakfast was truly sublime. I sat down with the early Spring sun shining through the windows. White tablecloths and flowers in the center.

They brought me a pot of good English breakfast tea. They even brought me a lemon. Then I asked for porridge, with brown sugar and real cream. I even had fresh-squeezed orange juice. That is far and away my favorite breakfast. It stood me in good stead as we walked around the grounds of the next grand estate we visited that morning. Later, we ended up in Thirsk, staying at a bed and breakfast. I think that was one of the few times I watched English television. We watched a bizarre program in which a family was depicted where the parents were going out for the evening and the Irish sitter arrived to care for the children. She brought the children a statue of a bleeding heart, wrapped with barbed wire. I never could quite grasp the tone of the show. It was funny and strange.

In the last few weeks in which we stayed in England, I spent a lot of time at the University of London, doing research in their drama library. In the evening, we went to pubs and just lived in Bloomsbury. If I had had a laptop computer with a wifi access, I could have sat in local pubs and written about my travels. Instead, I waited for thirty years and sat down in my living room and remembered the good times and the bad.

I will say this, by the time we got to the end of the six weeks, I was growing tired of England. I was ready to get back to Atlanta and the delicious humidity of Summer. I had to travel over to the American Embassy. I remember taking the underground to Grosvenor Square and popping up on the surface to see the American flag flying over the American Embassy. There was something cleaner and brighter about that flag than the Union Jack I had been seeing for six weeks. Then I went to the embassy and encountered the Marine guards at the entrance. That was impressive as well.

The night before my flight departed Heathrow and arrived in ATL, I shaved my beard. By the time, I could feel the humidity through the tunnel from the plane to the International Concourse, I popped up into the waiting area and there were my parents. It was good to be home.