New Blog

The Sabbatical blog is now complete. Now that I'm back in the United States, regular blogging will resume at http://rbhardy3rd.blogspot. com

HOME

English Instructions for Installing New Toilet Seat Hardware

1. Offer up seat and lid centrally to holes in toilet. Mark edges of seat and lid to show the centres of both holes.
2. Fit the lid first. Line the right hand fitting centre upright C with the right hand mark you have made on the lid. Place the right hand arm A as illustrated against the lid.
3. Ensuring the marks are lined up as in 3, fit screws provided through the two holes in each fitting into the lid as illustrated.
4. The left hand fitting is a mirror image design to the right hand fitting so the arm A will now be on the left. Repeat 2 and 3.
5. Position seat centrally under lid and ensure marks line up with the centre upright C of each fitting, and offer the seat so that it butts up to the back of arm B of both left and right hand fittings. Fit screws provided as in (3) (screws not shown).
6. Screw the straight threaded bolts into one of the holes in the underside of the fitting (whichever is more suitable). Take care not to damage the thread.
7. Slide the washers onto the threaded bolts and offer the complete unit to the holes in the toilet so that the bolt protrudes below the holes.
8. Screw the nylon nuts to the protruding bolts and finger tighten only.

Note: I discovered that if you don't attempt to make sense of the instructions, the entire operation of replacing the toilet seat hardware takes about 15 minutes.

Curtain Call

Last night, we went down to Stratford again for our last play of the season at the Royal Shakespeare Company: Henry IV, Part II. The performance was a little unusual this time. David Warner (Falstaff) was sick, and the understudy (Julius D'Silva) hadn't thoroughly learned the part yet. It's perfectly understandable: the same 34 actors have been performing 264 different roles in the RSC's complete cycle of the History Plays. Henry IV, Part II is the penultimate play to join the repertoire, and has only been running for two or three weeks, and this was the first time that understudies were needed. In any case, poor Julius D'Silva had to come out as Falstaff holding the script in his hand for the entire play. The remarkable thing was that, in many ways, he was better than David Warner—he has a clearer, louder voice, and a greater sense of vitality. He was given a well-deserved solo bow at the end for his remarkable high-wire act.

The last play of the History Plays cycle to join the repertoire will be Henry V, at the end of October. It would be tempting to fly back to England in March, when all eight plays in the cycle will be performed, in historical order, over three days. We've seen six of the eight plays, and one of the highlights of the year for me was seeing the three parts of Henry VI in a single 24-hour period.

Here are all of the plays we've seen at the Royal Shakespeare Company since the beginning of September 2006: The Tempest (with Patrick Stewart), Much Ado About Nothing, Coriolanus, Merry Wives: The Musical (with Judi Dench), A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry VI, Parts I, II and III, The Seagull (with Ian McKellen), King Lear (with Ian McKellen), Richard II, Henry IV, Parts I and II.

Warwick Castle

Mary, Michael, Peter and Clara on top of Guy's Tower at Warwick Castle, with St. Mary's church in the background. Peter is holding ice on his head, since he didn't heed the sign warning him of a low stone doorway.

Last night, Clara and I joined Mary and Steve for Henry IV, Part I at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Another brilliant production (with David Warner as Falstaff). Unfortunately, during the first act I started to feel a sore throat and congestion coming on, and I am now in the midst of my record-breaking fifth cold of the year. These aggressive British cold germs really like me.

The exterior of Warwick Castle.

Today, despite a slight fever, I joined Clara, Mary, Michael and Peter for a morning at Warwick Castle—our last tourist experience of the year. Warwick Castle, billed as "Britain's Greatest Medieval Experience," is astonishingly expensive, but we paid for our admission entirely with "Nectar points" earned each time we've shopped at Sainsbury's this year. The castle was begun in 1068 under orders from William the Conqueror, and became for centuries the home of the Earls of Warwick, including Richard Neville, "The Kingmaker," who played a crucial role in the Wars of the Roses.

The castle was heaving with people on a fine July Saturday morning (perhaps, according to the forecast, our last sunny day in England this time around). Highlights of the visit were the firing of the world's largest trebuchet, and a medieval tournament—complete with jousting. Below are some pictures: Guy's Tower with the tower of St. Mary's church in the background; the trebuchet; two pictures from the tournament; and the crowds leaving the tournament grounds.






Tonight, we go back to Stratford for Henry IV, Part II—our last play at the Royal Shakespeare Company for the year. Meanwhile, here's a new thing for me to worry about: the Met Office has issued a severe weather warning for the West Midlands for Wednesday, when we are due to fly out of Birmingham. Gale force winds are expected for parts of the UK.

A Kensington Gardens Picnic and a West End Matinée

Twelve of us took the train down to London this morning for a picnic lunch in Kensington Gardens, followed by a matinée of The Sound of Music, Andrew Lloyd Webber's new production at the London Palladium. We had been hoping to see Connie Fisher as Maria—the role she won as the result of the BBC One programme How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? in the fall. Instead, we saw her excellent understudy, Aoife Mulholland, who was also a contestant and semifinalist on the programme. Today's show was actually quite wonderful. Now, however, I am exhausted, so let's move on to the photographs: the once-controversial 1822 nude statue of Achilles in Hyde Park, honoring the Duke of Wellington; the Serpentine in Hyde Park, looking back toward the Houses of Parliament; our picnic in Kensington Gardens; Phoebe and Helen at the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens; a sign whose advice we all followed.

From left to right: Phoebe, Clara, Peter, Will, Margaret (Maggie), Chris, Steph, Mary, Michael (not pictured: Helen, who is behind the tree, reading the first of three books she finished in the course of the day; me, taking the picture; Steve, who joined us later at the Palladium for the show)

Quiet Evenings at Home


Each evening, the unread portion of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows grows smaller and Clara's sweater grows larger.

Oxford Revisited

The Bodleian Library, Oxford University

This morning, Clara had an appointment to do some research at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD), so I decided to join her for another day in Oxford. While Clara settled down at the Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies on St. Giles, I walked over to the Bodleian Library to look at an exhibit of 15th-century manuscripts and early printed editions of Boccaccio, Petrarch and Dante. For me, the biggest thrill was seeing Petrarch's own copy of Suetonius's Lives of the Caesars, with Petrarch's own marginal annotations. There, in Petrarch's own handwriting, was the name "Cicero." Let me explain my geekish glee. Petrarch was such a fan of Cicero that he even wrote a letter to the long-dead Roman author—perhaps one of the first examples of "fan fiction" in the history of literature.

From the Bodleian, I walked over to the university church of St. Mary the Virgin and climbed the tower, which gave me good views over Oxford. Below are the tower of St. Mary's behind the Radcliffe Camera (the famous Palladian style annex of the Bodleian); the best view of the Radcliffe Camera, from the tower; and a view of the quadrangle of All Souls College from the tower.




From St. Mary's, I forced myself to resist the pull of Blackwell's Bookshop and met Clara for lunch at the café in the Ashmolean (carrot and leek soup, bread, elderflower pressé, and pear and vanilla cake). After lunch, we looked at Greek vases, then Clara returned to the APGRD while I wandered through the Ashmolean (stopping again to see the charming portrait of Camille Pissarro's little daughter, Jeanne), then walked over to the Museum of Natural History and the Pitt Rivers Museum. The natural history museum is where Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) used to take little Alice Liddell to show her the taxidermy, including the famous Oxford dodo, and tell her fantastic stories. Below are: Clara looking at Greek vases in the Ashmolean Museum; violins (the one in the center is a Stradivarius) in the Ashmolean; and the view the greets the visitor upon entering the Museum of Natural History.




The Pitt-Rivers Museum, in the rear of the Museum of Natural History, is quite cluttered and dimly lit, so it was not conducive to photography. Here's the best I could do, showing the enormous totem pole that dominates the museum. The museum contains an enormous Victorian anthropological collection, with everything from musical instruments to shrunken human heads (tsantsas) from South America.

Book Review: Stella Gibbons, The Matchmaker (1950)

Stella Gibbons (1902-1989)

In 1995, Kate Beckinsale appeared as Flora Poste in a television adaptation of Stella Gibbons’ novel Cold Comfort Farm, and in the following year starred in the title role in a television adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. The casting of Beckinsale in these particular roles may have been fortuitous, or it may have been a clever attempt at intertextuality. Stella Gibbons herself wrote an introduction to an edition of Emma (1964), and the character of Flora Poste is similar in many ways to Austen’s Emma Woodhouse. Like Emma, Flora thinks she can successfully arrange other peoples’ lives.

The Matchmaker (1949) is Stella Gibbons’ postwar take on Emma, with Mrs. Alda Lucie-Browne in the role of the meddling Emma Woodhouse. After their home has been destroyed in an air raid, the family—Alda and her three young daughters—find themselves living in a bleak cottage in Sussex, with a middle-aged chicken farmer, Mr. Waite, as their nearest neighbor. Alda’s husband, Ronald, is absent for most of the novel as part of the occupying force in Germany. Once settled at Pine Cottage, Alda immediately sets about attempting to pair off her unmarried acquaintances in the neighborhood.

It has been suggested that there is a colonial subtext in Flora’s efforts, in Cold Comfort Farm, to improve the lives of the backwards, rural Starkadders. There is a sense of the “white man’s burden”—or rather, upper class Englishwoman’s burden—in the attitude of not only Flora Poste and Alda Lucie-Browne, but of Emma Woodhouse herself. This is not to suggest that Emma is an overt critique of British colonialism, but it certainly seems to understand the frame of mind behind colonialism—the idea that a certain type of English person should be given the task of sorting out the rest of the world. One can imagine Tony Blair, blundering into Iraq with George W. Bush, as a kind of geopolitical Emma Woodhouse, confident that he can arrange a marriage between Islamic tribalism and Western liberal democracy.

Gibbons' novel is full of lovely descriptions of the Sussex landscape, of the passing seasons, and of rural English life. Clearly, Stella Gibbons was a meticulous observer of the English countryside. When she describes one of the characters sorting though seeds and placing them into labeled envelopes—“the large curved seed of the marigold; and the poppy seed small as dust; the flat yellow grain in which dwells the wallflower; and the large, blue and purple, marbled seed of the runner bean”—I imagine the seeds before the writer’s eye, spread out on the desk as she writes. The descriptions of the landscape, too, have the vivid freshness of something seen just outside the window.

It’s a shame that The Matchmaker has long been out of print. On Amazon.com, there are only three second-hand copies available, starting at just over $94. Near the end of the novel, one of the characters walks through a small meadow, surrounded by coppices, and crosses a small stream; Gibbons comments:

Meadow, coppices and stream covered not more than five acres of land and were only two miles from the main road: but they proved, as they lay there under the grey evening sky in deep solitude, how small England is, and how secret still: in spite of holiday camps, and motor coaches and the horrifying increase in our numbers, how secret still!

I have had that feeling, as I’ve walked the footpaths this year, that England is still full of small, secret places, still holding onto their unspoiled beauty. And English literature is still full of small, secret treasures like The Matchmaker.

My Last Amazon.co.uk Purchase

This morning's post brought the new CD, Eternal Light, from the young Welsh soprano Elin Manahan Thomas, featuring pieces by Handel, Vivaldi, Bach, Dowland and others. Elin Manahan Thomas is the soprano who provided the ethereal high Cs in Allegri's Miserere with The Sixteen at Tewkesbury Abbey back in March. The CD, on the Heliodor label (available only as n expensive import in the USA), begins with a short unaccompanied piece by Hildegard von Bingen that shows off Thomas's ravishingly pure and lovely voice. She's joined on the rest of the CD by The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, conducted by The Sixteen's Harry Christophers. The last of the sixteen selections on the CD—"Pur Ti Miro" from Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppaea, with countertenor Robin Blaze—is absolutely breathtaking, and leaves me gasping for more. You can hear excerpts from the CD at the soprano's website.

Farewell to the Tipperary

This afternoon, Clara's sister Mary joined us for our last walk over for a pint at the Tipperary Inn. The sun was beating down upon us, but there was a pleasant breeze, and the Tipperary beer garden was waiting for us at the end of the four-mile journey. The four miles back, after a pint of Old Speckled Hen, were the hard part!

English Summer

Today it's finally summer in England. The sky is clear and blue, and the thermometer is inching up toward 28°C (or 80°F). Yesterday, on my walk around the castle, the air hummed with the sound of tractors at work on the grain harvest. Yesterday evening, we had a cookout at Clara's sister's house—lamb and sausage kebabs, tabouli, strawberries and blueberries with cream—and this afternoon we're looking forward to a farewell visit to the beer garden at the Tipperary Inn. Meanwhile, here's a photograph I had meant to include in my post on Chichester. These lovely summery-looking light pastel houses stand on the road that leads into town from Fishbourne. If only there weren't so many cars spoiling the view.

13 Days and Counting...

A lovely summer day. I slept well last night, and today I'm lazing around reading a novel in the flickering shadow of laundry drying in the back garden. The novel is Stella Gibbons' The Matchmaker (1950), which I found on a shelf in my sister-in-law's house. Inside the front cover, the book is inscribed with a woman's name and then: "On loan to S— H— [my brother-in-law]. August 1978." I guess the loan has become rather permanent.

Stella Gibbons' only novel to remain in print is the perennially popular Cold Comfort Farm, which was made into a charming film starring the lovely young Kate Beckinsale. There are only three copies of The Matchmaker available on Amazon.com, the least expensive of which costs $94.14. The situation is even worse for Rachel Ferguson's astonishing novel The Brontës Went to Woolworths, two paperback copies of which are available on Amazon starting at $167.19. Worst of all is the $2,475 price tag for the unique copy available on Amazon of Margery Sharp's first novel, Rhododendron Pie.

What is one to do when one develops a taste for authors like Stella Gibbons, Rachel Ferguson, and Margery Sharp? Acquire their books on permanent loan, I suppose.

One of the side effects of my reading is to make me look forward to returning to England and spending more time in the south. The Matchmaker takes place in West Sussex, about fifteen miles from the village of Amberley, to which two of the characters have just made a Sunday afternoon expedition and walked beneath the walls of the castle (now a luxury hotel, then a near-ruin). The novel is full of beautiful and affectionate descriptions of the Sussex countryside. This year in England, we favored the Midlands and the north of the country, with week-long holidays in the Lake District and North Yorkshire. Clara and I have talked about coming back in a couple of years and walking the South Downs Way.

14 Days and Counting....

Clara and I packed up five boxes of books and took them to the Post Office, and sent them via surface mail for about £130. At the Post Office, a customer in another line finished his transaction and said to the woman behind the counter, "Have a nice day!" The woman behid the counter said, "I can tell you've spent time in America. Here people just grunt." As soon as the polite man left, the woman behind the counter started mocking him, repeating, "Have a nice day! Have a nice day!" in a voice like a parrot.

I woke up last night at midnight with my heart pounding. Unable to sleep, I went downstairs and found out on the internet about the collapse of the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi in Minneapolis.

In two weeks, we'll be back home in Northfield. This is what we're currently missing back home:


Today at Northfield's own English pub, The Contented Cow, volunteers will pose for a photographic reproduction of Renoir's painting Le Dejeuner des Canotiers (The Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881). Too bad I won't be there to pose as the redhead in the yellow straw hat. I love Renoir. His Les Parapluies is one of my favorite paintings in the National Gallery.


Starting tomorrow evening, the Northfield Arts Guild is presenting Seamus Heaney's The Burial at Thebes (a version of Sophocles' Antigone) on the stage in Central Park.

The Countdown Begins: 15 Days

Today, Clara and I walked to the University of Warwick through battalions of stinging nettles and returned Clara's library books. I washed and hung out three loads of laundry. I made piles of stuff on the bed and on the living room floor, and threw some stuff away, including a stack of old train tickets and Tube passes.

Another Obscure English Writer's Memorial

I blogged several months ago about the ubiquity of writers in England. At the time, I had just come across a memorial in Tewkesbury Abbey to the obscure Victorian novelist Dinah Craik. At Salisbury Cathedral, I found this monument to the late Victorian nature writer, Richard Jefferies, who was a native of Wiltshire. For anyone interested in Jeffries, there's a good website here. I bought one of his books at a second-hand bookshop in Warwick, but I haven't read it yet. (Click to enlarge the photograph and read the inscription.) On the subject of obscure writers, I was chuffed to find that John Mutford, the moderator of an online book discussion blog called The Book Mine Set, has posted a thoughtful and complimentary review of my short-short story "Kumquat," which appeared a couple of years ago in The Plum Ruby Review.

Last English Road Trip, Part 2: Fishbourne and Chichester

On Monday morning, we left the car parked at the highly- recommended Rokeby Guest House and walked to the Salisbury rail station to hop on a train to Fishbourne, Sussex, by way of Southampton and Chichester. Anyone who has reached Unit 3 of the Cambridge Latin Course will remember the ill-fated King Cogidubnus, the client king who meets his doom at the hands of the evil Salvius while helping to illustrate cum-clauses and gerundives. Fishbourne Roman Palace, about two miles east of Chichester in Sussex, may have been the home of poor old Cogidubnus in the first century AD. Today, Fishbourne is home of the most spectacular Roman mosaics in Britain.

The foundations of the palace, with its mosaic floors, were discovered in the early 1960s, when excavation was being done to lay a water main for a new residential development nearby. The find was amazing. Because of its position on England's south coast, Fishbourne was settled soon after the initial Roman occupation in 43AD, and its mosaic floors are among the oldest in the country—many of them laid by foreign artisans, since there were as yet no native artisans skilled in the art of mosaics (as there would be, later, when Cirencester in the Cotswolds became a center of mosaic production). In Fishbourne, you can see the development of mosaics from early black-and-white floors (see above) to polychrome floors such as Fishbourne's masterpiece, the mosaic of Cupid riding on a dolphin (at left). Fishbourne is also remarkable for its reconstructed Roman garden (below). The box hedges are planted in the actual excavated trenches from the Roman palace, and thus reproduce the exact design of the original Roman hedges.


From Fishbourne, it was a short walk into Chichester, where we visited Chichester Cathedral and then walked around the city walls. Chichester, like Lincoln and York, started out as a Roman military camp, built around two main streets (the cardo and decumanus) meeting at right angles in center of the city, surrounded by walls pierced by four gates at the four compass points. Chichester has remarkably complete medieval city walls, built upon Roman foundations. At left are Clara and the boys on the walls, near Priory Park, with the spire of the cathedral in the distance.

The interior (nave) of Chichester Cathedral.

Unlike Salisbury Cathedral, with its expansive close, Chichester Cathedral is pressed right up against the town. Inside, it reminded me more of Winchester Cathedral or Tewkesbury Abbey, with its earlier Norman architecture updated with later Gothic additions and ornamentations. Beneath the cathedral, recent excavations have revealed even more Roman mosaics from the Roman praetorium. (As in Lincoln, the cathedral seems to have been built over the old Roman military command center in the town.) Chichester is quite a lovely little cathedral, and is noted for incorporating some surprising bits of modern art, such as the stunning Marc Chagall stained glass window pictured below, dating from 1978.


One of the things I love about England is that poetry occasionally pops up in unexpected places. There is, for example, the Edward Thomas poem in the bus shelter in tiny Adlestrop, about which I blogged in January. There is also a little Philip Larkin poem in the train station in Coventry. And in Chichester Cathedral, there is another Larkin poem, inspired by a tomb in the cathedral of one of the early Earls of Arundel. On the tomb (carefully reconstructed in the nineteenth century), the earl has removed his gauntlet so that he can hold hands with his wife, who lies beside him. Here's Larkin's poem:

An Arundel Tomb

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly, they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

John Constable at Stonehenge


Here is a John Constable oil painting of Stonehenge, completed in 1836—the year before his death. According to information that I gleaned at the Salisbury Museum, Constable only started paining ruins, such as this, after the death of his wife in 1828. When she died, he told a friend, "the face of the World is totally changed to me." Constable (1776-1837) is one of the wonderful artistic discoveries I've made this year in England—a painter with whom I was not previously very familiar, and who is quintessentially English. Ironically, during his lifetime he was more popular in France than in England, but he refused to leave his homeland, telling a friend, "I would rather be a poor man in England than a rich man abroad." Notice in the painting that several of the large stones, or sarsens, have fallen; some of what one sees at Stonehenge today is a modern reconstruction, in which fallen stones have been replaced in their original positions.

Our Last English Road Trip, Part 1: Stonehenge and Salisbury

Even with the crowds of tourists and the A303 whizzing past, Stonehenge is awe-inspiring. Something ancient and inexplicable dwells at Stonehenge. Both Turner and Constable painted Stonehenge, in watercolors that give the impression of something elemental rising out of the landscape. In Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Tess and Angel Clare spend a night at Stonehenge, and its brooding, mysterious presence inspired Thomas Hardy to do what he did best: paint the dark landscape in words.

The band of silver paleness along the east horizon made even the distant parts of the Great Plain appear dark and near; and the whole enormous landscape bore that impress of reserve, taciturnity, and hesitation which is usual just before day. The eastward pillars and their architraves stood up blackly against the light, and the great flame-shaped Sun-stone beyond them; and the Stone of Sacrifice midway. Presently the night wind died out, and the quivering little pools in the cup-like hollows of the stones lay still.

The downs around Stonehenge are broad and lovely under a mild July sky. The ridges are dotted with ancient burial mounds, or barrows, that immediately reminded me of the eerie scene in The Fellowship of the Ring in which the hobbits, soon after leaving Tom Bombadil's house, cross the treacherous Barrow Downs. In the photograph at left, you can see the "heel stone" (with three people standing in front of it), framed in one of the arches of Stonehenge. On the morning of the summer solstice, the sun rises directly above the heel stone and shines through that arch into the inner stone circle.

The mechanical clock in Salisbury Cathedral (ca. 1386).

It's remarkable that Stonehenge has been measuring out the months, and the risings and settings of the sun, for about four thousand years. Time was a theme in our last road trip of our English sabbatical year. We were conscious, the whole time, that in two weeks we will be leaving England. And at Salisbury Cathedral, we serendipitously stumbled upon the world's oldest mechanical clock, which has been ticking away inside the cathedral since 1386. The clock, which runs on weights and gears, has no face or hands, and only strikes the half-hours and hours.

From Stonehenge, we drove down to Old Sarum—the ancient hill fort where the city of Salisbury originally stood. There was a Norman castle on the hilltop, overlooking the original Salisbury Cathedral. In the 13th century, however, it became clear that a waterless hilltop was not a perfect place for a city, and Sarum was moved downhill to modern Salisbury. The foundation stone of the new cathedral was laid in 1220, and the spire (England's tallest) was finished a hundred years later. Since it was built in such a relatively short time, the cathedral is architecturally unified, being all in the Early English Gothic style. In his Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson (an American whom the Independent has called the nicest man in Britain) says: "There is no doubt in my mind that Salisbury Cathedral is the single most beautiful structure in England and the close around it the most beautiful space."

The tomb of William Longspee, Earl of Salisbury, who died in 1226.

In the Cathedral Close, there's an "outstanding" (Bill Bryson) little museum with exhibits on Stonehenge and the history of Salisbury, including three wonderful Turner watercolors of the cathedral. One of the oddities is a well-preserved rat discovered inside the skull of William Longspee, a 13th-century Earl of Salisbury, when his tomb was opened a century or two ago. It was suspected that Longspee may have met his death by poison, and, in fact, traces of arsenic were found inside the rat! Longspee is interred in an unusual tomb with a stone effigy resting on a wooden chest. He was the first person to be buried in the new cathedral.

Also in the Cathedral Close is Mompesson House (pictured below), a National Trust property that, unfortunately, we didn't have time to visit on this trip. For me, the chief interest in Mompesson House is that it appeared as Mrs. Jennings' London residence in the superb Ang Lee film of Sense and Sensibility (1995).


After wandering around the cathedral, we headed back to the Market Square for a pub meal. I had forgotten that the pub to visit in Salisbury is The Haunch of Venison (fabulously haunted, and home to a mummified hand cut off in a fight during a card game in the pub), so we ended up eating in a distinctly ordinary pub before rushing over to the local cinema to watch The Simpsons Movie. (In case you're wondering, Louise, I had a pint of Ringwood Best Bitter.)

The façade of the Odeon cinema, Salisbury.

The movie was the boys' reward for putting up with cathedrals and Roman ruins (see the upcoming entry). One of the best things about the experience was the cinema itself, the Odeon, which was worthy of Diagon Alley. The lobby is built into a fifteenth-century banqueting hall, with much of its original façade still intact. From this medieval front, the cinema (opened in 1931) magically widens to accommodate four large screens. The website Cinematopia says: "Surely one of the most remarkable and outright spectacular cinemas in the country, the Odeon Salisbury shows both what can be achieved in cinema design and what twenty-first century audiences are missing in their modern picture palaces."

Next: A day at Fishbourne Roman Palace and Chichester Cathedral.

In fifteen days, we will be reunited with our ridiculous dog, Pippi. This dog, much quieter than Pippi, lives on a tomb in Salisbury Cathedral.

Tourists at Kenilworth Castle

Yesterday afternoon, Clara's Carleton College colleague, Jackson, took the train from Oxford to Leamington Spa and joined us for a tour of Kenilworth Castle. For those of you who don't know him, Jack spends most of his sabbaticals, and part of most summers, living in Oxford and researching Lactantius at the Bodleian. We spent a good long time at the castle, then had a couple of pints and a meal at the Famous Virgins and Castle pub on the High Street, before walking home in (yet more) rain and returning Jack to Leamington to catch a 2030 train back to Oxford. Clara was home in time to catch the last half hour of Bettany Hughes' television programme on Athens on Channel 4, featuring a brief talking-head segment with our graduate school friend Jay Samons, who is now the chair of the classics department at Boston University.

Above are Jack and Clara standing in front of Kenilworth Castle's Norman keep—begun in the twelfth century, it withstood the longest siege in English history in 1266 (when Henry III besieged the rebel barons following Simon de Montfort) and was finally "slighted" by Cromwell's forces in the Civil War of the mid-17th century.

The weather is looking better today for our trip down to Stonehenge and Old Sarum. We're spending two nights at a bed and breakfast in Salisbury, and tomorrow we'll be making a long side trip to Chichester to see Fishbourne Roman Palace. I'll report on this, our last big excursion of the sabbatical year, in a post on Tuesday or Wednesday.