England and France - Bath, Birmingham, Edinburgh
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Marseille, Cassi, Aix-en-Provence
Dover, Battle, London
Oxford and Salisbury
Bath, Birmingham, Edinburgh
Sunderland, Cambridge, London
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From Salisbury I went to Bath.
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Walking around Bath I noticed a cricket game in progress. I don't remember anything about
the church in the background.
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Just some shots walking around Bath. I needed to do laundry, and these are the sights.
At the laundromat I met a man who worked for Haliburton oil drilling company. He gave me a
place to send a resume to in Chicago, but I never got an interview.
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I found a bed and breakfast to
stay at. It was late afternoon, and I
went downstairs to the television room. A
man came in and we started talking. His name was Ken.
He previously lived in Buffalo, New York for a couple of years, and now was
back in England, living in London. It was the weekend, and he
and his pal Howard had come to Bath to go blobbing. "What's that?"
Well, they had purchased the
book "The All England Guide to Real Ale Pubs" (Howard is pointing
to it in the picture). The "All England Guide" listed by city
the pubs which served real ale. This begs
the question, what's "real ale"? It seems that if the pressure
that forces the ale out of the keg is due to natural fermentation,
then it's "real ale". Ken and Howard didn't invent
real ale, they just invented "blobbing". You get the book, you
go to a town, you have a pint of ale at one of the pubs in the
book, you make a blob with an ink pen next to the pub you just
drank in, then you move to the next pub on the list. Albert
Einstein you moron - move over and acknowledge true genius!
So 'a blobbing we went.
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| The pubs close down in the late afternoon (as I remember) and then open again, but close by about 10:30. We must have hit five or six pubs that night. Let me tell you, you can get pretty drunk when you are out with professional blobbers. Ken and Howard had been out blobbing the previous summer during the wedding of Charles and Diana. Howard (the redhead) had a girlfriend back in London, but for some reason she never came blobbing. I got the feeling she didn't approve. The last pub was up on top of a very steep hill. When the pub is getting ready to stop selling liquor and close, the barkeep rings a bell and yells, "Time gentlemen!" Walking back down the steep hill after the pub closed was pretty tough. |
We were up by ten the next morning and drove out in Ken's car to a civil war
re-enactment. When they first proposed it to me, I naturally
figured the English Civil War. Nope. The American. Hundreds
of blue and grey clad men with muskets pretended to fight a battle by firing
blanks at each other. Note how beautiful the countryside is.
We went to only one pub for lunch. That's when the picture was taken. I think I wrote Ken once when I got to the States. It's been a long time since I blobbed, but I imagine Ken and Howard still out there, only now gone global and using "The All World Guide to Real All Pubs". |
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The next stop on my trip was Birmingham.
I had some hours to kill waiting to take a sleeper coach
to Edinburgh, Scotland. I asked somebody on the street where a
movie theater was. He told me he knew and
walked me about six blocks over to a theatre. He could have
just given me directions, but like the guy in London he went
out of his way to make sure I got where I was going. I got
the impression the English truly liked Americans. I saw
a racy French movie with English subtitles. I remember the
plush seats had ashtrays in the armrests. Asking for a
fire, but what the hey.
My other remembrance of Birmingham was at the train station. On a deserted platform, one young (14, 15?) year old black teenager had come down to the station to see off his friend, who was about the same age. A rather stout policeman with a German Shepherd police dog was trying to pick a fight with these kids. He badly wanted an excuse to have his dog attack them. He butted up against one youth saying "Come on, you don't have the guts". This youth was saying "I just came to see my friend off". Pretty sad. As I watched, the one youth got on the train and his friend got away from the policeman and his dog. |
Here is the picture out the window of my room in Edinburgh showing some backyards.
I walked a good ways to
see Edinburgh castle. Also, I remember that the center of town is a sunken square.
Concerning social reserve: I was at
a pub. It was a stand-up
place - rather than everyone sitting around at tables everyone stood
either near
the bar or out in the room. A very drunk man
near me suddenly passed out and fell to the ground. I walked
over to try and help him, but everyone else, including the
pub workers, just ignored him. If he wanted to get drunk and fall
on the floor, well, that was his right. Bizarre.
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Informationhighwaytohell home page Feedback? Enter your comments in the guest book |
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4 of 5 |
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Marseille, Cassi, Aix-en-Provence
Dover, Battle, London
Oxford and Salisbury
Bath, Birmingham, Edinburgh
Sunderland, Cambridge, London
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Click on any picture to bring up the picture enlarged in a new window |
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