England Tour, Part 2

April 6, 2010 at 2:08 am (On the Road)

Days Later, Monday March 8

Mid-1600s cottage.  We played at the Methodist Church in Holsworthy, an evening service, and it went very well though the church was chilly.  Such real people here.  Some are rustic, farmers, guys who dressed up in their tweeds to come to church, sun-reddened faces and gentle humor.  “Oh, we don’t have the Web,” they say.  Can they still get a CD later on?  We tell them to talk to Beth, the minister, and she would be able to order one for them off our website.

It was something of a scramble when we first arrived.  We sat and had tea with Beth and her husband, and decided to go to the church to set up before they led us here, about 7 miles away, to their cottage.  (They bought it just recently and will keep it as a retirement place.  We got to stay here by ourselves.)   It took so long to sort out where to set up and so forth that there was no time to come here first.  We had to bring in all our suitcases to their living room and pull all the gig stuff out in a hurry to change, get made up and ready for the gig.  I was all out of joint for a while — have to take the evening fiber!  No chance to poo all day! — but managed to get it together and didn’t even blow anything on Prayer, which we hadn’t done in a long time.  I was very pleased with the service overall.  We took communion and got ourselves anointed with oil.  I was teary, as usual, during the ritual, feeling privileged and blessed to visit and be part of a community that grew up with this.

Earlier we’d missed lunch as such because we sought it too late.  Things close by 2 and don’t reopen til dinner time.  We had makeshift car-food lunch instead.  After the gig we had to go back and reload our suitcases and then get out to the only pub/restaurant in town before they stopped serving at 9pm.  We arrived at 8:45 and were told the cook had closed up shop and left at 8:30.  It looked like dinner was going to go the way of lunch, but there was a small grocery open down the street.  We got vegetables galore and Beth had left us some eggs at the cottage.  Mark made eggs and stir fry and wonderful sausages and we had a very late supper indeed.  The eggs had dark orange yolks like at home!

We are so careful, in America, about refrigerating our eggs, and the shops never do here.  I wonder how long they let them stay out.

Then there was the morass of the laundry.  It worked out fine, but was reflective of the load we tried to do last week at someone’s house where the machine just wouldn’t progress to the next step.  She didn’t know why, but it took about three hours for the load to finish.  Then the dryer timer wouldn’t move and we had to keep checking the dryer.  This time the icons on the front of the washer were a little cryptic and we didn’t find the manual until after it had been washing about an hour.  I’d mistakenly pressed all the extra cycles — prewash, extra wash, and Do Not Spin.  We put it on something else and an hour or two later it finally finished.  No dryer here, so we hung stuff up around the gas heater in the parlor and eventually everything dried.  These front loading washers — I don’t like them at all.  You can’t open them til the program is finished.

Our Wee Cottage:

We went back to Clovelly today and had our long-awaited Devon cream tea.  The place we went last time wasn’t open so we found another one in a pub.  It wasn’t quite as spectacular — jam from a little plastic container like you’d find at Denny’s, and the clotted cream was a little too thick and refrigerated so it tore up the scones a little.  Still, I must say, heavenly.  I have not successfully been avoiding bread these last few days.  Must get back on THAT wagon if I’m going to finally lose the extra 5 by the time I go home.

Photos galore in Clovelly.  The sea was gorgeous, turquoise, with little whitecaps.  The artisan shops where I’d hoped to get everyone gifts were all closed.  I was hugely disappointed.  I must rely on serendipity now to find scrumptious yet affordable things for the family.

On the way back we found some veggies for stir fry and some locally raised free-range chicken.  Now just chilling, dopey from the walking, the cold air, the sun and the scones.

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I must report that I love my vibrating alarm clock.  No, it’s not a dildo.  It goes under the pillow and vibrates one awake without annoying one’s traveling companions.  Works very well, packs easily and there’s no worry about not hearing the alarm if one is wearing earplugs.

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Speaking of earplugs… thank goodness I bring them.  Our gig in Bungay was cancelled — they didn’t promote us well and no one knows us here yet, so only four people had signed up for tickets as of yesterday.  We looked in the program and they took the lamest blurb from our whole website, didn’t even say we were from the U.S., only area appearance, etc.  There was just nothing to draw people in.  We were meeting C&C’s friend here who is over from the States doing stories for NPR, and that had already been arranged and it was too late to cancel the room, so we drove all the way here (9 or 10 hours) and checked into what I hoped would be a scrumptious room.  Mine’s something less; lots of droning noise from somewhere, and the beds are hard with springs again.  They said the kitchen fans go off around 9:30 but something was still on at midnight when I went to bed.  I could ask for another room, I guess, but I’m all unpacked and it’s only one more night and I would assume the other beds are the same.  I go back and forth about this, as even with earplugs the fans are audible, and without them they’re downright dissonant.  It’s only one more night and I don’t feel like packing up all my shit again, though.

We went for a walk around the little town, separating almost at once to follow our individual whims.  I got a little something for Rose and some shampoo and a few tiny apples.  I also visited a nearby castle ruin.  It’s terribly cold here, overcast and a little windy.  I finally came back in to write a little and take a nap.  I’m trying to think of the fan noise as a white noise machine.  I slept okay last night in spite of everything.  It’s very likely that I’ll survive another night.

C&C’s friend comes in on the train in a couple of hours.  I can go with them or not to pick him up.  Still haven’t decided.

They do have wifi here and it’s good to be able to get email and so forth from my room.  I Skyped Dar last night, too.  We talked at breakfast about whether this technology separates us from each other (everyone head down into their phones) or connects us.  I love the meditation of it.  We create, as we go, the etiquette around these distractions from present company.

I am sleepy and willing to shut my eyes for a while.

Later

The obnoxious noise from outside (motors? construction?) went on for a long time today.  I tried to nap but things kept waking me up — Carol knocking from across the hall, pounding footsteps somewhere in the building — until I finally determined I would ask below whether they could switch me to another room.  C&C’s room is very quiet and well appointed.  The young proprietress put an apologetic smile on her cold face and suggested it was my bathroom fan I was hearing.  I told her I avoided turning on that particular light because I didn’t like the fan noise.  (Hello? Does she think I wouldn’t recognize if my own BATHROOM FAN was going, ten feet from the bed??)  That established, she then explained several ways how the noise wasn’t their fault — the kitchen fans are turned off when the cooking stops and if it’s construction that’s out of their control — and if I were to switch to a quieter room across the hall she would have to charge me the full rate.  She’d only knocked down the rate, she explained five times, because Chris had negotiated two rooms for two nights and THIS was the lower priced room.  She seemed rather resentful about it.  But since there would be more LAUNDRY to do, and more CLEANING, she would have to charge me more.  Then she looked and saw, with some relief, that the other two rooms are booked for tonight anyway,  Fully out of her hands!  So sorry, you’ll have to stay in the spartan twin with the dissonant motors going and the trampoline for a bed and all the banging kitchen noise below.  These pesky Americans, I heard her thinking.  They just want everything.

My measly consolation is that the TraveLodge we would otherwise have stayed in (all in one room, me on a sofa) would have been even more depressing, and we’d have had to drive another hour and a half today to get HERE.

I’m feeling rather sorry for myself.  Sometimes it’s fucking hard to get a good sleep.