A Yank in Great Britain. Not a Fairy Tale

But pretty close.

York - The River Ouse

Hello friends, are you still here? I crossed the big pond, and I have to tell you, right from that first ride out of London’s Heathrow to Stratford-upon-Avon, a journey of about an hour-and-a-half, I willingly, happily let America slide and never gave it much thought again until I landed back at Detroit Metro a full two weeks later.

There is no British or Scottish blood in me at all, according to my DNA, but you couldn’t have convinced me, not for a second, that I didn’t belong there. The sights alone were overwhelming and gorgeous, but the people in both England and Scotland were just simply outstanding. Kind and fun and smart and witty. And they always looked the part.

I fell in love with nearly everyone we met, whether or not I could understand them. (Looking at you, Scotland.) I people-watched openly, grinning like a fool, and I tried to commit every sight, every sound, every experience to memory, which has all of my life failed me.

So I took pictures. Hundreds of pictures. And some really awful videos that I always managed to mess up. Especially when I most wanted them to succeed. One example: I met a woman at the Edinburgh train station who told me she was returning home after attending a music festival where she and her partner sang and took home a prize. I said, “Oh, I would have loved to have heard that” and she said, “I’ll find you on the train and I’ll sing for you.” Well, as it turned out, we ended up sharing a table with facing seats for about a half hour before her stop and she did sing—beautifully—a Gaelic song she had written herself, and I recorded her. I could see her on the screen the whole time, but when I played it back later the screen was black and there was no sound. Nothing.

I may never get over that.

But let me start at the beginning: Stratford-upon-Avon. Shakespeare’s birthplace and they never let you forget it. But it’s okay, because as you know, Shakespeare was pretty impressive.

Shakespeare’s purported birthplace - and me.

Stratford is beautiful, even those parts that aren’t all about Shakespeare. We stayed two nights at a hotel called The White Swan, just a couple minutes’ walk to that area on and around Henley Street, where Shakespeare reigns. We chose that hotel because it was walking distance to the bus station, where we would be getting on a bus early the next morning to tour the Cotswolds. We had no idea we would be that close to Shakespeare’s history until we walked around the corner and found it all. Nice surprise!

In the dining room of the White Swan we were shown an amazing set of frescoes uncovered during a renovation in 1927 and dating back to 1555-1565, during Shakespeare’s time. Parts were damaged and haven’t been repaired but enough of it remains to be pretty amazing.

We were in that hotel for two days and I kept going back to look at it, trying to imagine what it must have been like to create something like this in times that seem so primitive to us, since in our country the 16th Century would have found only wilderness and those indigenous tribes who nurtured and husbanded the land and tried to mind their own business. And long before that, Leif Erikson and his Viking crew, who only stayed long enough to leave a few traces that they were ever here.

Here is our hotel:

You have to remember when it comes to world history and antiquities, I’m a total hayseed. I didn’t get my first passport until earlier this year. Those long-past histories of castles and cathedrals and farms and feasts were the stuff of fairy tales.

It completely boggles that I could be looking at gorgeous buildings and handcrafted artworks that predate anything I’d seen by many hundreds of years. (In Edinburgh they’re celebrating their 900th year! More later. Substack wouldn’t let me publish my large pictures and I haven’t figured out how to make them smaller and then be able to find them again. Sorry. I’ve tried. If this post appears tear-stained, there’s a reason for that.)

While we were in Stratford we took a day tour of The Cotswolds, that area touting magical villages that time seems not to have forgotten but to have enhanced and enriched. This tour was called “The Secret Cotswolds”, promising sights that most tourists wouldn’t get a chance to see. Right up our alley, since our goal was to see how people really lived in and out of those areas known mainly for tourism. It wasn’t exactly true that those villages were hidden, judging by the number of tour buses coming and going. But it was of course beautiful. Spectacular, even. Nothing could ever surpass it!

Or so we thought.

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Next time: The Lake District, Liverpool, Scottish Highlands. Two weeks wasn’t long enough, and yet it was. I’m home now and it feels like a dream. I look at my pictures and it’s hard to believe I was really there.

And that I lived to tell about it.

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