5011 An embarrassing story

Saturday, September 19, 2015

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."

-- Virginia Woolf --

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I was thinking about whether or not I wanted to put the cover on my fluffy down comforter before putting it on the bed for the coming winter. I keep buying duvet covers, and then I don't use them, because I like a top sheet, and then I put another sheet on the very top of the bed to protect everything from cat fur, so a duvet cover seems like overkill. Skin and kitty never touch the comforter anyway. I think it's time to give up on that idea for good.

That reminded me of an embarrassing story.

Back in the dark ages, oh, about 1987, duvets and duvet covers were a European thing that hadn't yet arrived in the US. Not among us unenlightened people, anyway. Daughter and I were wandering around England and Wales, and it seemed like the only places to stay outside the cities was in B&Bs. No hotels or motels, and few inns with unreserved rooms for drop-ins. I intensely dislike B&Bs, because I always feel like I'm imposing on a family, and it's just too "social" for me.  Plus I can't set my own schedule.  That was my first trip to England, and so very many things were very different from what I'm used to - like a spoon for tea was tiny, like those souvenir spoons, and spoons for dinner were what we'd call a tablespoon. There was nothing like what we'd call a teaspoon. A lot of things were confusing, like when I was looking for a drug store in a tiny village, and people snarled at me, "We don't do that here!" I should have asked for a chemist.

Anyway, Daughter and I arrived one afternoon at a family home and were shown to the daughter's room which they were letting out while the daughter was away at college. We unpacked, did a little sightseeing, had a little dinner, and then went back to the house about 9pm (it's impossible to get a restaurant dinner before 8pm), and were embarrassed to find that the family goes to bed at 9, and had been waiting up for us.

Back in our room, we washed, got ready for bed, and then....
we couldn't figure out how we were supposed to sleep in the bed.

There was a nice fluffy comforter, but when I turned it back there was no top sheet. Not what I expected for a top sheet, anyway. It looked like a quilted mattress cover. The comforter was enclosed in a sort of sheeting envelope, with buttons closing it along the top. Daughter said it looked like a sleeping bag. The family had long since retired and I was reluctant to disturb them.

So, uh, we shrugged and opened the buttons and slept in the "sleeping bag".

In the morning we rebuttoned the top, thus accidentally avoiding immediate discovery of our faux pas.

Several years later I learned about duvet covers, and was retroactively very embarrassed.

Oh, well.

1563 Trip Photos 3

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

More photos from our narrowboat adventure on the Grand Union Canal, England, 1988.


Daughter operating a lock. Note the "treads" on the ground to the left of her feet. They're for traction in pushing the gates open. This particular lock had quite a drop.


Pleasant scenery along the way. If it had been getting dark, and we had tied up there, we probably would have been invited in for tea.


This was a frequent scene at the locks. It's a good thing that Daughter (in red) was not afraid of large curious beasts.

After turning the boat in, we rented a car and wandered around England, headed in the general direction of The Isle of Anglesey, in the northwestern part of Wales. My ancesters had been slate and coal miners, so we visited a slate mine. Also a wool mill, several parks, a zoo (where I overheard a child ask her mother "Is that a bald eagle?" and the mother replied, "Yes. Never understood what the Americans saw in it." "It" was a vulture!), and every dolmen and castle ruin along the way.



I fell wildly madly in love with thatched roofs. Some of them are true works of art.


Traveling through Snowdonia National Park. The sheep are everywhere, and loud. Stereophonic sheep. At one point we attempted to climb a hill to look at the heather, but although it looks like grass, it's more like a wet sponge out there.


Snowdonia. I didn't lighten the photos up because that's the way it really was. Clouds were low and constant. It felt like you could wring water out of the air. The sogginess of the turf was due to mist, fog, clouds perpetually condensing on the mountains. Some of it ran down in little streams, but mostly it was a constant seep down through the turf.


A road sign.


In one of the castle ruins.
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1561 Trip Photos 2

Sunday, November 19, 2007


A narrow section of the Grand Union Canal. Under a bridge. Bridges were sneaky. We'd head for the dead center of the span, and STILL manage to hit or scrape the side.


Coming up on a town. Bigger towns excited us, because we might be able to do some laundry, buy food, and mail some postcards. But ONLY if we could cash some travelers' checks.

This was pre-ATM days. We had taken travelers' checks, and then discovered they were very inconvenient, because no one in the smaller villages would take them, because "the bank came" only one day a week, and if a shop cashed a travelers' check for us, and had to give us too much change, then there wasn't enough cash left in the village for the village to operate until the bank came again. Wow.

Over and over we kept missing the bank visits. At one point, we had a small fortune in useless travelers' checks, and we were counting coins and eating cheap, trying to stretch out what little cash we had.


Going through a lock. Daughter on the right. Locks were easy and fun. Boats tended to "pile up" at the locks, waiting to go through, and everybody helped everybody else.

One thing that bugged me - if anyone jumped line, went out of turn, it was a 100% certainty it was American tourists. For some reason, most of the people we met, local and other visitors, concluded that we were Canadian (later we were pegged as Welsh), and after exposure to other loud and rude American tourists, we let them believe it.
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1560 Trip Photos

Monday, November 19, 2007

I've been putting a selection of old photos on Flickr. Last night and this morning I scanned and uploaded some pictures from a trip to England and Wales that Daughter and I took in the summer of 1988 (or 1987, I forget...). I think maybe I'll start including more photos in entries. Here's the first:

Daughter and I spent the first week in London. The above photo was taken from a Thames tour boat, as we passed under the bridge.

Our B&B was in Kensington, where there are beautiful houses, ponds, and gardens.

I'm not certain, but I think the above may have been at Kensington Palace. That's Daughter, at 11 or 12. I'm under orders not to put her face in this blog, but no one would recognize her from this shot, so I think I'm safe. Besides, hey, I'm the Mommy!

The next week, we rented a canal boat, a "narrowboat", and spent somewhere between 10 days and two weeks, I forget, on the Grand Union (no relationship to the grocery store) Canal. This was the interior of our boat, the Naiad, looking from the front toward the back:

The table dropped down to make a double bed, and to the right in the back you can see two bunks. There was a gas stove-top and oven, an electric refrigerator, electric heater, a sink, and a bathroom with shower. Except that the rear bunks were a bit damp (so we used the double bed) it was quite comfortable, but a LOT of work.

You could moor at night anywhere you wanted along the canal. Just pull over and pound in stakes. We soon learned to avoid spending the night near sheep. Man, those things are LOUD, and they keep it up all night.

We had to clean out the screws every morning. You'd open a hatch in the back deck, and reach way down in there, into cold dark muddy water, and feel around for fishing line and weeds wrapped around the axle and screws, and that was the absolute worst job, because you couldn't see what was there, the weeds were squishy and could have any kind of beasty living in it, and the fishing line could include hooks. But it had to be done.

We had to keep an eye on the fuel and water, because the places you could refill (DIY!) were few and far between. And the motor had to run for a certain amount of time to fully charge the battery, or we wouldn't have lights or heat at night, which meant that even if it was pouring rain, you had to be out there at the tiller and controls.


The stern of our boat, moored. Cows are a lot quieter than sheep. That red bar just above the first "A" in Naiad is the tiller, and those are stool seats on either side. The boat is only 7 feet wide, and very long, and learning to steer the thing is an adventure. The canals are wide in some places, and narrow in others, and turning around is a horror.

There are a lot of locks, but the locks were easy and fun. However, there are also a lot of bigger hills, and therefore tunnels. Tunnels were scary. They were perfectly round, concrete, 15 feet in diameter, and half that is water, so a taller person standing on deck had to duck to avoid bumping his head. We were extremely conscious of all that earth above us. They were coal-mine dark. If the tunnel was short and straight, so you could see the light at the end of the tunnel, and if no other narrowboats were coming from the other direction, then it wasn't so bad. But at least one tunnel we went through was over two miles, with a curve in the middle, so you couldn't see the end. AND, in that tunnel we met up with several other boats. Sound is magnified and echos, and that adds to the weirdness. The tunnels are 15 feet wide. The boats are 7 feet wide. Do the math.

That's where you learn what "light at the end of the tunnel" really means.

We cooked breakfast, but stopped for lunch and dinner at taverns on the canal (where I developed a taste for hard cider - nothing like what you get in the states!). Several times we managed to catch festivals, Morris dancers, and other friendly narrowboaters. There are people who live on the boats year-round, and still a few people who make a living transporting goods on the canals.

More canal photos later.
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1273 The English Lady

Tuesday, May 29, 2007


Listening to NPR this morning. Some guy talking about coal, why it was used, and why it now is not, said that "we realize that God doesn't send electricity down from the heavens in a golden bowl."

I beg your pardon! God does send electricity down in a golden bowl. I'm amused that he used the term "golden bowl" - it so well describes the sun. Someday we will learn how to use it.


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Sometimes I'm not American, and that suits me just fine.

In Mexico and France, almost everyone thought I was Canadian. I didn't correct them.

In England, for some reason many people decided I was Welsh. I sort of liked that, because my mother's people came from Wales.

In Wales, and this is weird, most people thought I was visiting from England. Sometimes it was funny. I overheard a discussion between the hosts, husband and wife, at a B&B. The conversation went something like this:

She said to him, "The American woman will be checking out today, so make up her bill."
He: "What American woman?"
She: "The little one. With the daughter, the little girl."
He: "She's not American."
She: "Yes, she is. Where do you think she's from?"
He: "She's English, isn't she? Or maybe Canadian?"
She: "No. I saw her passport. She's American."
He: "Are you sure?"
She: "Pretty sure. What makes you think she's not?"
He: "She's too nice to be American."

I'm quiet. I speak softly. I clean up after myself. I accept. I say please and thank you. I smile. I don't complain about things that are different from what I'm used to. I don't take up much space or air. I guess that makes me not American.

Many of the places we stayed had other American guests at the same time, and frankly, they embarrassed me. Loud. Rude. Banging and thumping. Making messes. Complaining about the food, and the lack of mixing faucets, and the roundabouts, the dampness, and everything else. Bragging about how much better "we" do everything.

I didn't mind disassociating myself from them.

It's worse these days. It used to be my fellow tourists who embarrass me. Now it's my government, too.

I almost don't want to leave the country.

My passport is a liability.

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Blogger bug!

Ever since Blogger started periotic autosaves, it's been adding blank lines between paragraphs. Very annoying. I look at the HTML to see what Blogger has added, and nothing shows up. Anyone have any idea what's happening? Someone else has to have noticed it. Why hasn't it been fixed yet?

Ok, so much for not complaining....
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