English Tudor

No. 50: Become a Tudor

"Oh don't look so dismal," Zeddy said as he leaned on his car horn. The trip back from Hampton was taking longer than expected, and Zeddy urged the congestion of cars in front of him to move. "We call this traffic. Do you have it in America?"

We were on our way to meet Justin for pizza in Golders Green following a visit to Hampton Court. It's a major point of interest for Henry VIII fans like myself and a place I had been meaning to get to the entire time I was in London. Officially my final Sunday before going back to the states, I'd spent the last few weeks tying up as many loose ends as possible. Which meant lots and lots of last minute sight seeing.

"I haven't even been to Leeds!" I moaned as we walked in Pizza Express.

“That’s awful. You should just stay.”

“I’m being serious!”

“Well you don’t sound it,” Zeddy said. “Who wants to go to Leeds?”

I did. I wanted to go to Leeds, and to Ireland to kiss the Blarney Stone. I wanted to go to Brighton, if for no other reason than to discover why Jane Austen’s Lydia wanted to get there so badly in the first place. There was a great long list of things I had been meaning to do, and now the time had outrun me.It felt as if I’d forgotten to do something, like turn off the coffee pot or have kids before thirty-five.

Locating Justin at a table in the back of the restaurant, we said our hellos and sat down to order. Waiting for my mushroom pie to come, I showed Justin the fluffy quill pen I had picked up from Hampton Court.

“And what will you do with it?”

“Write on parchment.”

“Of course, how silly of me."

Straight on Till Morning

No. 49: Find Neverland

I prefer rain to sun, which I know is peculiar for someone raised in the sunshine state. There’s something maudlin about rain that makes me feel anything could happen, like Fitzwilliam Darcy walking across my threshold. Which is why, standing in the middle of a British thunderstorm while running through Kensington Garden, I was looking less put out than Cory.

“Don’t you have an umbrella?” he yelled over the din of the rain, grasping my arm and pulling me behind him as we raced to a cluster of trees at the gate of the park. We were looking for an oversized tent where Peter Pan was being performed as part of the area’s annual theater in the park program.

“No! Real Brits don’t use umbrellas!”

“What do they do then?”

“Suffer!” We stopped under the relative shelter of a few tree branches as the gray clouds took out their anger on the city below it. Puddles the size of ponds were everywhere and my clothes were soaked through.

“What now?” Cory asked. I looked side to side, tossing wet locks of hair against my cheeks, searching for something that resembled a classical stage production. A young man a few yards from us had lost hold of his umbrella and was tripping after it in the rain.

“I don’t know, I don’t see anything!”

This wasn’t exactly the picture of perfect tour-guiding I had envisioned for myself. Cory and I had spent the day eating Indian food and walking with no direction around Trafalgar Square. We had not, however, seen even one five-hundred-year-old portrait of an ancient English barrister. And now we were standing in the center of Kensington Garden, unable to find a tent that was supposed to be in the center of Kensington Garden.

“I’m falling down on my job,” I said. Cory took off his jacket and held it over our heads in a futile attempt to keep us dry.

“We have an hour until the show. Why don’t we go somewhere for dinner and maybe the restaurant will know where we’re trying to go?”

“But where?” I asked helplessly.

“Over there.” Cory nodded to a Greek restaurant sitting among a row of Victorian townhouses just outside the gate of the park. It was as anachronistic as the fishing line I knew would help Peter and Wendy fly later that night.

Rushing toward the place we pushed through the doors in haste, startling the waitress who stood at the front of the mostly empty restaurant.

“Nothing was going to keep us from making it here,” Cory told the lady while I doubled over in laughter, dripping water onto the room’s carpet. The waitress looked more confused than amused, but obligingly led us to a table near the window. We had a charming view of the rain hitting the glass, with the greenery from the park looming behind the splatters.

“Is it always like this?” Cory asked as I begin dabbing at my wet arms with a napkin.

“No,” I said. “Sometimes it snows.”