No, I didn’t tell you that I was going, but I spent the last couple of weeks in England. Actually, I left a couple of days after my last post. It was an extended work trip that allowed me to get in a bit of sightseeing, but nowhere near as much as I wanted. I’ll post more later. Just wanted to let you know I was back.
Back from England!
Angela Benson
Welcome back! I spent a few weeks there back in 2001. Loved it. Can’t wait to hear about your trip.
Good for you!
I went to England a couple of times during “my 1970s in Europe”. One was a 2-week? tour by bus or as the British say “by coach” from London to Cullode Field and back. Up the western side and down the eastern. It was wonderful though I found each stop too short and was almost inevitably the last to get back on the bus.
I especially loved Scotland. My mother spent 6 months in Scotland in 1936, living with different families and learning English. One of her favorite faux-pas was saying “I’ve got a pickle on my nose”. The boys in the family there rolled in their seats with laughter. “Pickel” in German means “pimple”. So they gave her this to read “It’s a bricht moolicht nicht tonicht” certain that she’d fumble with that one as all the Enlish inevitably did. But she read it faultlessly. They were stunned. The “ch” sound in Scottish is the same as in German.
Then I went 2 or 3 more times to London and area, the last time on my way home from Germany back to Canada. My favorite memory of that trip was the window displays in one of the big department stores, Selfridge’s. They used the fairy flower theme by Cecily Mary Barker. That was the first book that my mother gave me after we came to Canada. She found it at Goodwill or someplace like that. Of course it contained only a few of them. Much later I tried to get the whole series. I find them absolutely charming. They also did plates of them in the 1980s during the plate craze.
That’s supposed to be “Culloden Field” where the Scottish clans were defeated by the English and the Jacobite dream died.