Amateur lichenology.

The slow process of over-accreting, which for me has always been and--despite my longing for greater speed--continues to be a crucial stage of writing, has been going on today, though now I'm well on my way to arranging what I've already gathered, trying to find the places where my ideas want to rustle with one another. I find myself facing the same problems as my subjects, which is a sign either promising or worrisome, or both. That is to say: they went out seeking to produce intimacy, closeness, liveliness itself, all with textual matter, because that's all they had left; I have gone out seeking the things they made, and how they made them, and what I fear most is the further loss of life that will be occasioned when I transfer all the unruliness in my head into the neatness of my marks on a page. I do not want to fail these people, these worthy written dead. And I vacillate between believing that I should complete this project as quickly as possible, so as to get on to the next project, and believing that I should do this work the way I believe it should be done--which might just be a trick I'm playing on myself to justify not moving more swiftly, not forcing some new words out every single day.

As the day wore on, I realized I needed a walk. I skipped my walk yesterday, knowing that I would be walking into town for dinner and the play. (That walk taught me that yes, my high-heeled boots are good for that walk through lane and over cobble and bridge.) I started to think about skipping my walk today--and knew that that was the clearest sign I'd yet gotten that I needed the walk in the first place.

I crossed Clare Bridge, which I love. Now that I have my macrolevel understanding of Cambridge settled, I'm dialing in the microlevel, which today meant the Clare Bridge's lichen. Lichen here is omnipresent, formidable. Coming back from Coton two days ago, my friend and I stumbled into a clearing (right after we saw the llamas) where a small tree was half-covered in yellow lichen. And I didn't take its picture. Which, I suppose, is why it's good that I'm going to the beach by myself this weekend.

Tuckered out.

Whenever I read Shakespeare, whenever I see his plays performed, I wonder why I don't read and study him more. At dinner, before we ran across town to claim our seats for a tremendous production of Cymbeline, our friend asked us whether Shakespeare should, in fact, be considered the greatest writer England ever produced. We each thought about it for a moment, and then the reasons started coming to us, one after the other, and we said yes. I'm not sure that I'd take any of the plays with me to the proverbial desert island if Middlemarch were there to be grabbed. But. But. For range and artistry and inventiveness, yes, I'll give it to Shakespeare. (Like he needs it from me.)

For now, Posthumus and Imogen and all the senseless suspicions and the sufferings and the revelations have worn me out.

Living in a den of thieves.

It's been such a sustenance to have today (a very grey and blechy day, weatherwise) be threaded through by the conversation going on in the comments to yesterday's post, so thank you, those of you who have been writing.

My excellent novelist friend's question about why I'm doing what I'm doing hit the mark. I have been thinking about my big project, once again, as the thing that I'm supposed to do--whether for prestige or professional advancement or approval. But, plain and simple, those aren't the real reasons to do it, the sustaining reasons that will keep me at it. The real reasons to do it have to do with my belief that what I know and what I have to say are going to help people think in more interesting ways about the period in which I specialize.

To that end, I trundled happily over to the library this afternoon to double-check the passage that formed my dissertation's opening anecdote: because I don't have my own copies of my double-decker biographies with me, I have to resort to using the library's rare books room copies. And, lo and behold, it turns out that Isabel Burton's life of her husband was even weirder than I (or any of you who have lived through this project with me) ever knew. Suffice it to say that I'd never seen the original 1893 covers. And now I have, and the Cambridge UL is working on producing photocopies for me, though I know damned well that I'm going to be paying them £48 to do 600 dpi photographs of the front and back covers before the month is out.

And when I came home, I had a sense of how to start--and, lo and behold, it turns out that it's the same starting place I chose four years ago. It's just going to take me in different directions now.

I've also taken the very bold step of declaring that Friday and Saturday will be full-on days off this week. Friday, I will decamp for Wells-next-the-Sea; Friday night, I will stay in a bed and breakfast (booking a room constituted my declaration to self); Friday and Saturday, as long as it's light out, I will be rambling about on a beach. It's been a long time since I've cordoned myself off from my work and just disappeared for a few days. But I'm planning to make it a habit.

(Tonight I'm listening to Regina Spektor; her song "Us" gives me my title.)

Sailor's delight.

I almost never post twice in one day, but this sunset was too flippin' gorgeous to keep to myself. And you know what they say: red sky at night... good time to write?

An open letter.

Dear fear of failure and rejection,

Last night, while I was still feeling lonely, before I talked first to one friend and then to another (and before I had the utterly enviable pleasure of dancing with a gleeful four-month-old and her awesome father by way of the videochatting magic that is Skype), I read an exceptional set of instructions about how to bid farewell to old fears. And though I am about to go on another long walk through a countryside that (but for the sound of the M11, which will be omnipresent for this one) will indeed afford me bits of beauty and remind me that it's safe to be honest, I will not be alone on my walk, and I don't yet know my companion well enough to perform any visible rituals in his presence. And so, in the minutes before I depart, camera in hand, to see what there is to see between here and a neighboring village, I'm going to write you a break-up letter.

I don't know when you arrived to take up residence in every corner of my life. I know that it must have been before the very thought of getting a B+ in math on my first term's report card in sixth grade was enough to throw me into a panic. I suspect that it was even before I got detention for not having been able to finish my multiplication worksheet in fifth grade, just because my first-generation Bic mechanical pencil ran out of lead and it didn't occur to me to have a spare or to raise my hand and ask my teacher for a new pencil. Thus, it was definitely before an idiot 15-year-old football player came over to the house one Friday night, giddy at his team's having won a championship game, and wouldn't leave--until his parents called, near 1 a.m., to see if he was at our house, getting me in the most (and most self-abasing) trouble I'd been in for years, even though (I now see very clearly) I had not done a single thing wrong.

It must also have been long before the piano competition I flubbed in seventh grade, the first year I'd competed in the intermediate level of that particular contest; my teacher suggested a late-breaking change to my program, tacking on a tempestuous piece that, when performed correctly, was stormy and wonderful to be channeling--but, when performed incorrectly, was an utter disaster. Remember how the first piece went fine, and how the first performance of the potentially problematic piece also went fine? Remember, then, how two of us had to have a second-round sudden-death play-off--and how that time, the second piece refused to come through these fingers? Remember? Of course you do: it was one of the times that you fattened up, growing stronger on the belief that you were right. Because I let you.

I could keep listing: the times my social skills grades were Bs in elementary school because I couldn't hold myself back from talking with my classmates; the time that college boyfriend told me, right before breaking up with me, that no one asked me to social events because they knew I was anti-social and would say no. The time I didn't get the job. The time I felt as though I knew no one where I lived.

But I'm done. You've been wrong so many times in the past few years--and, in fact, throughout my life--that I'm done with you now. I know that you're coming around to pay a visit this weekend because I have important work to do tomorrow. I even know that you think you're coming around because you think you're making things easier for me, keeping me from falling on my face, bloodying my nose, scraping my knees, twisting my ankles, cracking my fingerbones, cudgelling my brains. But this is what I realized while I was reading that post last night: I don't have to hate you for having plagued me for three decades. I don't have to recoil against you in anger or in further fear. I can say thank you for what you've tried to do, for the ways you've tried, with decent intentions, to keep me from trying something frightening or from daring my heart and my mind again. I can also say that I'm grateful, to whatever powers oversee us, that you've somehow almost always failed in your interventions: I have, in fact, kept daring, started daring even more of late. And then, having made my peace, I can say goodbye to you.

Because, see, a wise woman told me something smarter than you, my old fear, you who wish you could call yourself my true familiar. "People who can risk rejection," she told me briskly one day on her office's ridiculous couch, "have more interesting lives than those who can't, or won't."

She was right.

So, thank you, fear of failure and rejection, for having tried to protect me, but I don't need you anymore. There's better beauty afoot, out there where you are not.

Dr. S

p.s. Actually, after a day of long walks and deep thought, I've decided that what I really meant to say earlier is fuck off. Now get the hell out of here.

Unexpected snails.

The undergraduates returned to Cambridge today, and so everyone in the whole world was shopping the downtown supermarket when my friend and I ventured in for the few items we needed for our respective suppers. "This is going to be a mess," he said as we made our way through the throngs to the store. "How much do you need to get?" "Not much," I replied. And it should have gone just fine. But I lost focus in the wine aisle, and our progressings through the store fell out of sync, and I couldn't get his attention when I reached the checkout lanes. And by the time I made it through my line, the prospect of meeting up again was utterly hopeless.

Fortunately, my second outing of the day was more fulfilling. Heading out to the Path that Simply Ends, near sundown, I thought I'd walk as far as I could, as fast as I could, just to burn off steam before dinner. But then I found the snails, there in the weeds, and they stopped me cold and sent me scurrying home for my camera.

And then, beyond the snails, there were the cattle. They stared me down. It was fantastic. (Seriously, dude, look at the steer in the middle of the back; the one in the front was taking his turn staring, but the one in the back looks as though something important--though possibly not something under his control--is about to happen. Those wide, crazy eyes!)

I start to miss the sun.

O for a boat to cross these streets, this city of slosh and sluice and slip. Leaves plaster the walk gold. My umbrella does not suffice. I pick over puddles, try not to topple on stones. I watch the birds flocking westward to a field. I choose the long way home because I am now one who can. I leave the camera home when I go out to buy a biography; later when I try to take pictures again, everything comes out unclear, awash. Fat moss slides greenly down my outside walls. I read and read before I walk; then I eat lunch. I walk and walk before I read; then I come home and cover myself with cookie crumbs at tea.

Wheeee!

One of the things my friend and I collect, on the occasions when we're out walking and not getting drenched, is varieties of children's bicycle seats in this town. Separately and together, we've seen covered buggies being towed behind cycles; add-on wheels and handlebars that basically make a miniature bike for a child behind his or her parent; fairly standard sit-behind-parent childseats; seats that put a child in front of his/her parents, at the handlebars, facing away from said parent; and seats that look just like a wicker bike basket, but for the fact that children sit in them (and have a little place for their feet to drop down in), facing their parents. Today, walking to town to look for a rain jacket (something that isn't going to bankrupt me after all, thanks to the discount outdoor gear store), I was passed by a mother and child on a bicycle (with standard ride-behind childseat), and the child was calling out, "Wheeeee!" Good times.

Sometimes, walking along, I'll see a cyclist approaching me, and I'll hear a little voice (obviously not hers) talking, but I won't see a child until after the cycle passes me. Those occasions still confuse me momentarily, even after this many weeks of living here.

On my way home from my walk, I was grateful for having upbraided myself as I left the flat. Just about to leave without my umbrella, I said to myself, "Were you not there when you got soaked two days ago?" I took the umbrella. When I was still a good way from home, it started to drizzle. Then, the skies opened. The sun hadn't gone away at all; it was just pouring. And you know what that means. Here's the University Library (aka the UL), in all its weather-granted finery.

And more spells.

Today has been the England that I know: brightly, cheerily sunny and yet rainy, even when there are no rain clouds, per se, visible. When I took this picture, for instance, I was being rained upon. Lightly, to be sure, but rained upon nonetheless.

Fifteen minutes from now will see me kitted up for formal hall; twenty minutes from now will see me making strange conversation over drinks in a loud common room, waiting for the gong to ring at 8 p.m. so that we can begin strange conversation over food in a slightly less loud dining room. It's all lovely strange conversation. But it's strange. Wednesday dinners tire me out even before I start getting ready to leave for them.

Which I suspect I should do now.

Rainy spells.

My instinct was good: looking eastward from under the bookseller's tent, I could see the heavy grey clouds louring their way toward Cambridge. This would be a good afternoon to try out a café, I thought. Somehow that thought lost itself in the moments it took me to turn and find my friend. "Should we go?" is what I said aloud, and it wasn't even that I meant, any longer, to imply "go to a warm place where they'll serve me strong, milky coffee and you some rehabilitating herbal tea" instead of "go home to College." "Yes," he said, brow already furrowed. We bought our small paperbacks, packed them away where they'd be safe, and strode off. I had an umbrella packed into my camera bag. I am not the ill one, and I was the one who proposed the trip in the first place (in the high sunshine of early fall), and so I handed it over, demanded its use despite protestation. We strode and strode; I laughed to be so absurdly wet. "It's going to stop the moment we get home," I said.

And it did. Had we gone for hot drinks, we'd both have stayed dry. Sometimes my mind is mercurial at precisely the wrong moments.

My old waterproof is waterproof no more; that's why I didn't bring it along from home. But now I remember forcefully why I had no trouble finding an umbrella when I lived in Exeter: I didn't use one. I wore a waterproof hooded jacket; when it rained, I put up my hood and strode on. Such things are findable here, no doubt, but affordable? I have many doubts there.

This is how it is that I am slowly but surely assembling an entire life here.

***

Well, not quite an entire life. I'm missing some of my key characters. To wit, the one who showed up in my e-mailbox yesterday, courtesy of his very thoughtful steward:

Sigh.

But if you're reading these words because you know me, chances are excellent that I miss you even more than I miss the dragon.

What it's like here.

Things are growing in my brain, ways of being, ways of knowing who I am. I think that I am re-learning myself, those things that make my mind fizz, those things that dip me down. It's a strange thing to have this much time to spend with one's brain. Tomorrow I think I'll lace up my new Gore-Tex trainers--all-weather replacements for the old Nikes that came back out of my enormous backpack a few hours before I left home--and see how far I can walk. Maybe tomorrow I'll go west again, rather than into town.

Robert Browning knew some things, you know? Today, I'm finally getting a chance to read the nineteenth-century essays that are the background, the context and texture, of my work. In his "Introductory Essay" (to some letters of Shelley's that turned out not to be Shelley's at all), written in 1851 and published in 1852, Browning notes, "It is with this world, as starting point and basis alike, that we shall always have to concern ourselves: the world is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned." Reading that just before lunch, all I could do was say, yes, yes, and where are my index cards?

Index cards were among the things I purchased during my afternoon's walk to town.

Somehow the ends of my days come earlier here than at home, and their beginnings come sooner, too. I am still no morning person. But I do find myself up and about by 8 most mornings, an unthinkable thing where I'm coming from. And five days out of seven, I'm waking up without my alarm.

No one can even imagine the things I'm coming to know.

Fruits of the season.

Not three minutes after we step out of the windy, sunny afternoon and into the grocery store, the blueberries have caught my eye: 150 grams of Australian blueberries for only £2, and once again I realize just how much of my life here centers on small, exquisite, incredibly expensive things. I reach out for the punnet, just to get a better look, and I can see that these berries are flawless. He says, "what kinds of exotic fruits are there today?" "The blueberries," I say, "look at these." "Oh," he replies, "actually, if you want to get berries for later, we could have them with the pound cake." I slip the punnet into my shopping basket and choose one of strawberries, as well. The strawberries, at least, are £3 off, on sale: I will pay only £1.99 for 400 g, nearly a pound, long after what I thought was the end of the strawberry season.

When we return to the college, I say, "I'm just going to put these in a bowl with a bit of sugar." I am thinking, they will make their own juices for the few hours before dinner; we will have strawberries in sauce. He seems perplexed by the idea, but it's not even the most complicated recipe I could think up for macerated berries. It's just what one does, if one needs berries to be a topping.

I wash the berries in the colander I discovered only after I'd drained our pasta for last weekend's dinner. Blueberries first: and they are sugar; they are my summer come back; they are promise itself across my tongue. And now the improbably beautiful strawberries, not a fuzzed or fallen one in the bunch. They are so beyond what I know that I pack a tiny sampling: three strawberries, ten blueberries: into the single, strange glass ramekin that belongs to the flat, and I'm back out the door, tapping for my friend, who is surprised.

"Are these for tonight, or for afternoon delectation?" he says as he takes the ramekin. I laugh out loud at the idea of delivering 1.5 strawberries for each party to Sunday dinner. I leave him to taste them on his own; I know what he's in for.

After dinner we eat cake and sorbet and macerated berries and berries au naturel. And we gird up for tomorrow's work by starting to make plans for our next days off. And so I will go to sleep, belly full of sweetness, thinking of nearby cities full of medieval churches, of nearby beaches full of dunes and coves and saltmarshes and birds, of cathedrals and ancestral halls and pubs and piers, of train timetables and car hire. And I will wake up, flex my fingers, put them to these keys, and watch the words come to play.

Were this a contest, I might be winning.

The newly re-posting Four Inches of Ego has two whole exhibits of British signage and ways it might be translated. I had these on my mind when I set out on a walk late this afternoon, and sure enough, the first thing I saw was the most incredible sign I've ever encountered. Even though I was out for 2.5 hours and covered 6.5 miles (or so), I saw little that rivaled this one for sheer stagger value:

Click on the image to enlarge--and thus to witness someone's predictable but still amusing amendment to the sign's language.

Why 6.5 miles? you may wonder. Let's just say that I went out looking for something (something small, you know, like the first women's college at Cambridge) and underestimated how far away it was and how much I might need a map to get there. And then let's just say that I decided to turn my bewilderment into a chance to see more of the northwest side of my new home. And see it I did. But I will admit that, though I was never actually lost, it was something of a relief to get back to my usual bridge, in the calm of the falling day, and to see the river shining the evening sky back at me.

Back out in the world.

I saw my first in-theatre movie in Cambridge tonight, finally venturing out to see Atonement, about which I was so excited before I left that I was all, "I'm going to see it the first Friday night I'm there!" And then I arrived, and joined the cinema (because it seemed like something good to do), and proceeded to put off going to the show for two weeks.

My favorite Chicagoan friend and I used to talk about how we saw movies--because, as is the case with almost everything else in our lives, we have completely different relationships with cinema-going. I love to go to the movies alone. It's not a matter of principle: I also love going to movies with other people. But sometimes I really enjoy doing the whole process of movie-going by myself.

I suspect that my enjoyment may go up even more this year, since my local arthouse theatre is fully licensed, which means one can buy a glass of wine at the concession stand and carry it right into the theatre.

The movie itself was beautifully done, though I'm startled by the force of my reaction against it. To play out the nuances of that reaction, I'd probably need to reread the Ian McEwan novel that the film adapts, and it's not likely that I'll find or make time to do that anytime soon--not with the line-up of things I have ahead of me, like, you know, starting to write my own book (t-minus two days now...). For now, I'll simply say that when it opens near you, you may well want to see it, especially if you've read McEwan.

Today was another day of high winds, and as I walked to town--both times I walked to town--I realized something I did exactly right in my packing for this year: I brought my entire collection of scarves and shawls, even though it seemed almost excessive. I have already worn all of them but one. In weather like we've had this week--where it might be 68˚F but where the winds might be pushing 20 mph--something that can wrap around one's neck, many times if necessary, is the perfect layer. Especially for those of us still trying to capture and project just the right je ne sais quoi before the Long Vacation ends and everyone else returns to this university town.

A day inside.

Without much planning, I've ended up taking the day off from wandering about. I believe that today is thus the first full day I've passed in Cambridge without venturing out of the college. Partly, it's because there are all these small things to be done: an Autobiography to finish reading, a new keyboard (bringing my collection of ergonomics up to ... four? on two continents?) to install, new (college-owned) art to select and hang in the flat.

And birthday wishes to be doled out in greater dollops than I can handle on my own, which makes me glad that I'm not solely responsible for them.

About fourteen months ago, one of the students from my first summer group ended up stuck in my office during an awful storm. We had watched it rolling in from the west, but by the time we realized that leaving the office might be a good idea, it was too late to get out before the skies split. And so we sat around talking for another 45 minutes or so, until things calmed sufficiently for her to hurry off for dinner and for me to go make provisions for the class's evening session (in case the power came back on, which it did not). One thing this student told me during our long conversation was that her birthday is on September 20. "You're going to take me out for dinner on my birthday," she said. It wasn't a question; it was a declaration. And yet somehow it neither offended nor oppressed me. I assented. And on September 20, when she finished with her evening French class, we went out for dinner at a local steak place.

It's funny for me to think back on those early moments in a friendship that has only grown stronger over the ensuing year. One of the reasons I was so glad to get a job at Kenyon, back when I was on the market, was that I knew first-hand about the kinds of friendships the place fosters. When I was a student, the most important and lasting friendships I had were with my professors, whom I loved (and still love) like members of my family. But I didn't anticipate the depth of the joy I'd feel when I was on the other side of those professor/student friendships.

My Clevelander student has popped up in these writings from time to time this year: you know her as the person who masterminded my birthday surprise, then masterminded another surprise dinner in late August. She is a woman of formidable and ever-growing intensity and focus and generosity. She helped me move; she helped me deal with some unpleasant aftermaths; she went along when I sought out the disappeared cows; she saw me off to my seeing off to England. She is becoming quite an adept reader of poetry. She is devoted enough to Gerard Manley Hopkins that she has one of his lines tattooed on her left forearm. (I may well memorize another Hopkins poem, "Hurrahing in Harvest," in her honor this evening.)

And now she is nineteen, and all of us who know her are all the better for having her in our lives. Who knows where she'll start her next decade? Once she puts her mind to it, don't get in her way.

The bounce back.

Oh for a visit from friends: I spent the day with two übergorgeous northward-migrating people, talking and eating and wandering and talking and prowling--and then getting shut out of a college because we were too many and only one person (not me) had a university ID card. Alas. When I have an official university identity, my whole world may change.

In the meantime, I'll continue playing with changing my world one photograph at a time.

Inadvertently, I got married off to someone at the dinner table tonight. When I come to think about it, that's happened fairly frequently in my life, and almost always at meals.

Fighting for the idyll.

What can I say about today? All was going along smoothly enough--a bit jauntily, even!--until I had to go out for my first doctor's appointment. It lasted ten minutes, and by its end, I'd basically been called a freeloader on the National Health Service because I will be taking subsidised prescription medicine while I live here. Knowing that I'd achieved what I set out to do (i.e., to get my prescriptions rewritten for this country) and that I'm not trying to be a freeloader and that my doctor was only partly right in her characterization of how my home health system works when she told her student observer, "If we were to go to the U.S., we wouldn't be able to get subsidised medicines, but Americans come here on madly expensive things and we just have to fill them" (given that anyone who'd constructed a year in the U.S. the way I've constructed a year here would, I imagine, also be entering some kind of insurance scheme)--knowing all these things, I tried to let everything else go as I took the long way home after accepting the print-out of my pharmacy script.

I revisited Newnham; I walked quietly in and stole around the grounds (and found the Eleanor Sidgwick memorial, where I imagined I was saying hello); I played with fat apertures at the college's gates. But I was still angry enough that when I was almost home, I decided to extend the walk even further and headed back out the funny footpath that terminates at the M11. Witnessing the evening rambles of cows and frolics of rabbits was a balm; being greeted by an excellent dog was another; reaching my home and feeling it to be my home was a third.

I'm not sure what that moment in the doctor's office was about, really; all I'd done was to ask how much prescriptions cost in the UK, and apparently I must have hit one of her nerves. Those of you who know me in non-electronic formats know that I've done a bit of wondering about the ethics of using another country's health system while not being required to pay taxes to that country, and I suspect that that set of wonderings laid me open to feeling the sting of truth in her words. It's true that someone in this country is going to help bankroll my health this year. It's also true that, with a lot of extra effort and some extra money, I could continue having my home pharmacy issue my refills and either send them directly to me or release them to someone who could send them to me. But I'm making a choice to have my medicine dispensed here--not because it's that much cheaper (because it's not; the prices of the drugs themselves are about even, as I told the doctor when she challenged me as to how much these medications would cost at home [where, I didn't explain to her in detail, they're also subsidised--by the medical insurance for which I'm still paying]), but because (today's unpleasantness notwithstanding) it's easier.

I'm just crossing my fingers that I won't need any further medical care before next August. And I'm still trying to let go of today's part of this process.

I do feel that I should make clear that my frustration today does not and should not constitute an indictment of the National Health Service or of nationalised health care per se. Even with its faults, I still suspect that nationalised health care is more humane, overall, than the system with which we live in the U.S. I'd like to think that I'd be willing to take an occasional tongue-lashing at home if that's what it cost (emotionally speaking) for more of my fellow citizens to be able to get any care.

By the end of the day, it did seem somewhat prescient of me to have gifted myself a new copy of Sebald's The Emigrants this afternoon.

Days of rest.

This morning, as I sat musing on a story I've been wanting to tell, it decided to become a poem, and it asked to be written down. For the first time since arriving here, and for only the second time since February, I opened my poetry notebook and watched my script shaping itself right off the tip of my pen's nib. Halfway through, I switched to the computer, rattled in what I'd already written, kept on until an endpoint had bloomed before me. It is work of which I am proud, because it is work that was unforced. My lines have lengthened again as my mind has calmed here; when I finished, it felt just like the snapshot I had captured and wanted to develop.

And so I slipped into the afternoon with something happily finished behind me, and the day has felt like a gift: time and space laid out before me, room to move around in my ideas, even some moments to finish small chores like washing my tea towels and polishing my clogs and boots. I continue reading a work that bored me to tears eight (can it be eight?) years ago, and while I still don't love it passionately, I am learning things from it now. Soon, I will be fed my hot dinner in hall--and though "individual nut roast" sounds dubious to me, the recipe I turn up through Google sounds tasty indeed. And then there will be time for more reading, possibly even just for fun.

Perhaps paradoxically, the weather has helped me cocoon a little bit today: our high temperatures today are ten degrees lower than yesterday, and for the first time since my arrival, it's not sunny. The trees are starting to tip with color. We're having fall weather, in other words, and it's not a bit unwelcome.

(By the way, make sure you enlarge today's top picture by clicking on it; otherwise, you'll miss the fun.)

Let's go out walking; I know where to meet.

In five minutes, we will depart for the next village down the Cam. My rural soul leaps up: I love that I live on the very edge of town and that I could reach field or fen with not much travel. But I haven't been in a wide-open yet since arriving, other than the day I started early and had no dog to take. I looked at my camera for awhile, deciding on the focal length I want for the afternoon: the 50mm lens offers its own constraints and challenges, forcing me to frame up a shot without being able to change its parameters. But the 28-105mm offers the possibility of macro shooting, and that's what I'm missing: the closeups of leaves and seeds and flowers, of water ripple and field fold. I don't know what we'll find on our way; part of me wants to go out without the camera altogether, out of some residual embarrassment at being a constantly photographing companion. But I will regret it if I go out without a mechanical eye: I know this with certainty.

Today is our last forecast day of good warmth for a little while; soon we begin dropping to the 40s at night and only coming up to the very low 60s in the day. And it's breezy, breezy enough to bring me the smells of my neighbors' breakfasts, breezy enough to make me doubt the wisdom of wearing my silver Birkenstocks on the walk, even though they're far and away my most foot-friendly shoes, seemingly the best candidates for six miles of walking. But perhaps my clogs would be smarter. Perhaps.

The 28-105 it is. And the clogs. With striped socks, bien sur. Don't leave home without them.

***

Where we went, and what we saw:

Read Rupert Brooke's poem about Grantchester to appreciate this one more.

And I did do it: I did eat blackberries from a hedge, though I was far less well equipped to reach the ripe ones than my friend, who is so very tall. As I suppose sometimes happens, the one I reached highest for was the least satisfying of all.

And then on some other days.

On some other days, one finishes reading a novel, strolls into town to get ingredients for dinner, and feeds one's neighbor. And these days are excellent ones.