The Agony and the Ectasy

That there above is an authentic English morning frost.

With frost! Genuine frosty frost!


Okay, it all melted before 9:30 and melted all over the bench I was sitting on and all over my jacket but this is England, so I keep my expectations low. It was so sad watching the little English people dance about when they thought it was snowing. I didn't have the heart to break it to them that it was only slush falling from the sky and Did Not Count.


I ambled down to the Victoria and Albert Museum (or the V&A for those in the know) to see the Golden Age of Couture, Paris & London 1947-1957 which was horrific thanks to a 1950's educational video showing women how to achieve the "New Look" by crushing all their insides.


Where does your kidney go? Wherefore the spleen? Do all your intestines just rearrange themselves on your head in a stunning up-do?

I also stopped into the see the EXTREME CRAFT EXHIBIT which mostly involved bits of string and ripped nylons nailed to a table...


... Burnt out light bulbs nailed to the wall...


... And paint stained tables and sheets.

I have most of these same exhibits laying around somewhere at home, waiting to be cleaned up. This begs the question: If I throw my garbage in the V&A, does that make it art?


I also made a pilgrimage to Witney to buy some sock wool and check out the first church where my favourite Methodist founder preached his very first sermon.


You guessed it! John Wesley who narrowly beat out Charles Wesley (who caused a street brawl between two worldly women in Georgia) by ducking out of a duel and having to sneak out of South Carolina in disgrace after promising himself to the governor's niece, Sophia Hopkey, who he then ditched after forcing her to promise never to love another (she quickly went on to marry someone with a manlier haircut), he then refused to give her or her new husband holy communion. Cold.


Witney is also home to many comically understated house signs and the only women's lingerie/wool store in creation.


Witney also boasts the law-upholding duo with the most unfortunate surnames in the history of bad lawyer surnames: Stammers and welch.*

*For those who are a bit rusty in their 19th century Wild West gambling terminology, "to welch" is to cheat or rip someone off.


And finally, to wrap up this parade of horrors, the Chapel Barbers.

Unless the tonsure is making an unforseen come back, I think the Bronte Hair Salon is a safer bet.

The Moooooooors!

Some kids dream of going to Disneyland and getting their picture taken with an underpaid employee on the verge of heat stroke, dressed as Mickey Mouse.
I have always dreamed of wandering the moors, pulling out my hair screaming: "CAAAAAATHY! CAAAATHY! THE MOOOORS! THE MOOOORS!" at the top of my lungs.


MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.


Welcome to Haworth! (HAH-WUTH) - whose entire point of existence is to be the tragic, isolated, windswept home of Charlotte, Emily, Anne Bronte and their degenerate brother (who, on top of being a drunk and an opium addict, was also a crappy painter).


The Bronte Parsonage Museum - where you too can thrill at the sight of Charlotte Bronte's reading glasses, the fireplace grate where Anne used to rest her tiny feet, and Emily Bronte's death couch. Emily Bronte romantically died of consumption after refusing to stop baking bread and/or see a doctor.


The church where Patrick Bronte preached during his breaks from cutting his wife's nice dresses into shreds because they would encourage vanity, denying permission for Charlotte to get married, being a Tory, and throwing the shoes of his small, cold and wet children into the fire because comfort was a sin.


The parsonage is located on the top of a very steep hill that is covered in dead people and the famous flat stone covered coffins which were banned in the late 19th century because the airless conditions in these coffins prohibited decomposition of the corpses leading to lots of people being weirded out and disease.


Haworth is home to many, many discos. You cannot pass a window or a street here without being informed of a hot, hot disco being held in the legion on Sunday night. Why, oh why did I leave my purple spandex bodysuit in Canada?


Then there are the MOOOOORS.



I want to live my life on the moors in a little stone cottage writing crazy novels that involve a lot on anti-heroes with bad hair and a penchant for decorating with dead dogs. I want to be buried on the moors (hopefully after dying of natural causes. There's no point in being murdered in the North since the Smiths broke up).

I love the moors.


I decided to do the 10 km hike to Wuthering Heights because if I came all the way to Bronte country without seeing the heights that are wuthering, I would never forgive myself. And it was worth the sheep dodging and the fence climbing and the rock slipping.


The moors are incredible. All you can see is wild moorland valleys and peaks and a lone tree braving the elements and all you hear is the wind through the heath and the bubbling of water in the distance.


That and the two old guys wearing red who I was tailing to make sure I had someone in screaming distance in case I was attacked by the Heathcliff.


The turret in the distance is the prettiest water treatment plant in creation.


The Bronte Waterfall (Okay, not really. But the actual Bronte Waterfall was about three hours out of my way and I had a seven hour train journey back home, so I decided that this was good enough).


The Bronte Bridge.


Mysterious rock formations.


I bewitched a horse!

More desolation.


The winner of "The Stream that Looks the Least Drinkable in the Entire North of England."


And finally I arrived at Wuthering Heights!

According to the angry plaque erected by the Bronte Foundation, this isn't actually the house that inspired Emily to write Wuthering Heights. A fact which they don't tell you until you've climbed the 10 km.

The Bronte Foundation is made up of angry old spoil sports in tatty jumpers who can take their plaque and bury it somewhere ecologically undamaging.


The road home (or at least to the bus station).


My best Jane Eyre impression.

Winchester FTW!

Thus end my dream of becoming Mrs. Corene Firth-Brown-Darcy. The lovely city of Winchester proved (after careful, painstaking examination) to be 100% Colin Firth Free. But then I read the chilling saga of It's Hard to Be Colin Firth and realized it was probably for the best.

Winchester's raison d'etre is the spectacular Winchester Cathedral that you can almost make out in the fog if you squint and cross your eyes like your trying to make out one of those ridiculous Magic Eye 3D pictures (which I suspect, weren't actually secret pictures at all but rather, a clever ploy to induce myopia in the populace sponsored by the Oculists of America).

Trust me, the Cathedral is there. All roads lead to it. All postcards feature it. All street signs urge you to go there and buy t-shirts.

Winchester Cathedral in all its Protestant glory.

When the Reformation rolled on down to Winchester, the angry proto-Protestants went around town destroying pretty things that reminded them of Catholicism to make their churches as dull as possible, like you do. And, while staring into the dead, cold eyes of the Grinning Unicorn of Sheer Unbridled Evil, I suddenly felt the urge to burn me some graven images.

If your tastes do not run in the Evil Unicorn vein, the only other reason to visit Winchester Cathedral is the grave of Jane Austen.

Jane Austen is buried under the floor and yes, I did walk over her grave several times to take a picture of this: Her tacky gilt sign that was erected by readers long after her death, who obviously spent all their good taste in literature and had none left over for the selection of tasteful memorial plaques.

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run

...Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—

While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue...

- John Keats, Ode to Autumn

While walking past the river Itchen, John Keats was inspired to write his "Ode to Autumn."
While walking past the river Itchen, I was inspired to find the nearest rhubarb pie and eat it.

And this is why I don't write poetry.

Other sites of Winchester include "Arthur's" Round "Table." This faux tableau was built by order of Henry VIII whose likeness was used to paint to the portrait of "Arthur" to convince the Southerners that he was the descendant of the mythic king and so they could all just shut up and do exactly what he said.

The Southerners, having more than one brain cell between them, did not. Maybe if Henry had looked more like this:

Things might have turned out differently.

The grossly misnamed Wolversey Castle. I would be curious to find the Winchester County Council's definition of "castle" as what they have termed a castle is not remotely castle-like.

This, my dear friends of the Winchester County Council, is a wall.

A really, boring wall.


Abbey House where Benedictine nuns waited out the French revolution, spending their time singing, dancing and snogging Christopher Plummer.


Winchester's tribute to Equus.


A slight hike up St. Giles seemed like a brilliant idea at the bottom of the hill...


At the top of the hill, not so much. I had forgotten that all important weather/sight seeing equation: Fog = You can't see things.

Narnia!

King Alfred whose only purpose in English history is as some sort of obscure reference to bread that no one can explain to me.

Beware! Old People!