Full circle

I know that I was a bit remiss about posting during the final weeks of my time in England. In part, that's because I went to Berlin (which is my new favorite city), and in part that's because I was so occupied with the idea of having to leave, and not wanting to, that I didn't have much to say. But now that I'm in Richmond, and I've just come back from a British-style pub with Beatles albums, illustrations of men in full tartan dress, and football scarves on the walls -- a pub where you can go to watch football matches, no less -- I feel as if I should write a final installment about the UK. I was there for long enough for it to start to feel like home, long enough that when Kristian picked me up from the airport and we were driving down 90/94, I found that the highway signs looked strange and the cars seemed big and the facades of houses and buildings just seemed different. There's something to be said for this, for the experience of perceiving the place where you've been for quite a long time as if you have just arrived: it's defamiliarization, I suppose. I was at this party in London, in fact, where I was having a conversation about Shklovsky with a composer who turned out to know much more about him than I did, and we were agreeing that it's valuable to see things that are familiar as if they are strange. And now that I'm in a gigantic hotel in the middle of a city I don't know, I could be anywhere, really. The self-sufficient convention center is a world unto itself. In a way it feels like a buffered transition back to life in Chicago. But then again, it's just another place. A place where everyone is giving papers about the eighteenth century, mind you, but just a place. And so in the past week I've walked up Parliament Hill, come back to Chicago, left again; in the process, I've seen the dials of spring turned up and down and up again. If I kept it up it might begin to feel like time travel, but for now it just seems like I've got an established relationship with my suitcases. And after I've soaked up all the eighteenth-century talks I can, I'll saddle up and head back to the midwest for a spring of teaching Milton and getting work done. I look forward to cooking for all of you within range soon!

Old school

There is, on the way to Norfolk, a town called Little Snoring, and next to it, a town called Great Snoring. In fact, there is one intersection where the signs point to both: head left, you're on to Great Snoring; head right, Little Snoring. Perhaps snoring meant something different in Anglo-Saxon -- like great warrior of the night -- but these days, the jokes about sawing wood must get old quickly. Along the coast in Norfolk, there's a whole scattering of towns, separated by only a mile or so, and there are old pubs and inns in almost all of them, plus the odd windmill, smokehouse, and so on. There's a farm shop that sells only real ale, a man who smokes all his own fish, and a small shop where the labels on the strawberry jam are hand-printed and the flour for sale is ground at the local mill. There are also larger towns with three ice cream stands per block and an arcade on either side of the street -- more familiar beach-side fare, at least for American eyes -- but the rest of the villages, which are still largely original in the sense that many of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings are still standing and only slightly modified, are unfussy and quiet. If you go to the village where Nelson was born (Nelson didn't always stand on top of a column in Trafalgar Square, it turns out), and go to the pub called the Lord Nelson, and ask the proprietor how old the place is, he'll tell you 1637. Almost older than the Mayflower, but not quite. The doorways are so short that you have to be careful of your head as you pass through. Not every town along the Norfolk coast boasts a naval hero, but even so, there are stone beaches and windy quays and all manner of good, unpretentious food. If you ever find yourself in Norfolk, you must, must go to Morston Hall, where you will be fed an alchemical set menu made by Galton Blackiston. All of the food comes from the area (maybe even the hedges outside!), and I can't remember a better meal. Plus some of the last steam trains run through that part of the countryside, and if you're lucky, you'll see one puffing along a bridge near the sea. The spectacle attracts hobbyists with impressive cameras who follow the trains as they pass: these are the trainspotters. I'm probably the last one to learn the origin of the term, but there you go.