Down the river, up the meadow.

Today, I continued to show my visiting friend what this part of the United Kingdom looks like. It was the Alternate Transport portion of the trip: an afternoon on a punt, an evening walk through Grantchester Meadows. Everyone in the punt poled successfully for some goodly stretch; my visiting friend even managed, on his debut, to steer us deftly back into the punt rental company's dock.


This goose's missing beak testifies to the excitement I was expressing about seeing its baby swimming so energetically and efficiently for one so small. (I'm bummed about this one; a reshoot would be pretty much impossible, alas.) These non-Canada geese seem to have dropped in on Cambridge all of a sudden this week; there are four of them (plus the baby) hanging about in the paddocks at Trinity.


Later, these grasses made me miss my prairie, and made me know how much I'll miss these meadows when I'm gone.

Nowhere better than this place.

After my last Thursday evening concert, after the men with fast fingers took our breath and left us gasping with applause, I walked home alone in the deep blue, the dusk at 10 p.m. now brighter than the nightfall was at 7:30 the first Thursday I walked to Kettle's Yard all those months ago. During the interval, I found a massive stack of A1 paper, each sheet reading simply, "Nowhere better than this place." A stack resting opposite it read, "Somewhere better than this place." "Please help yourself," said a sign on the wall. Yes, I will, thanks. I thought this to myself. Both are so true, such hopes and such knowledge.

Glee!

My dear Chicagoan friend arrived yesterday afternoon, and so these days are about walking, eating well, searching out the baby moorhens with their preternaturally large feet, prowling around the colleges' gardens and shooting flowers. And gabbing incessantly. And calling people names. There's a lot of name-calling. So far, we're not aiming the names at each other.

Wrought wonders.

In Bath, Walcot Street is a vein of counterculture running down one side of town. Apparently, one year Walcot Street was left off of a map and responded by declaring its independence. Now, every year the Walcot Nation Day celebrates the hip weirdness of Walcot-Upon-Avon.

I walked up and down Walcot Street several times during my stay in Bath. I visited the glassblowers' shop; I window-gazed at vintage clothing; I bought fine cheese; I groaned at this shop's name:


And on my last trip up the street, on Friday evening, this place caught my eye:


Abbey Gardens, a shop full of garden accessories. I knew that I was drawing stares from passersby as I took pictures. But really, the colors were too much--and then the birdcages? Yes, please. I only wish the light had been better.

The good news, and the other news.

Tonight, a message popped into my emailbox, bearing the news that the journal to which I submitted my experimental article last month has decided that I should revise and resubmit. Revise and resubmit is not bad news, not at all; I knew, even as I sent it off, that the article had many unresolved tensions and ideas and that it still had only a shadow of the argument I wanted it to have, the idea I'm now trying to write a book to articulate.

And yet.

And yet my heart still leapt when I saw who'd sent the article. And yet I still thought to myself, "Did they like it? Did they?" And yet I still saw the criticism, as if it had been written in big ugly red letters, before I saw that it was constructive. And yet it still made me cry--

though I do think that the crying is about something else, something like the imminent end of a very long time "off" and the growing, snarling worry that I haven't gotten enough done. And something like the fact that I'm now torn between not wanting to leave this place and not wanting to be away from home anymore. This much time here has reinforced what I think I already knew, which is that this country is not my country, even if this place's literary history is one of my specializations and even if my own country's dominant culture has been pretty profoundly embarrassing to me for quite some time now. I'm an outsider here and don't particularly want to become an insider. But I still love my perch right here in this particular place-within-a-place. I need to see my home people, but I don't want to stop seeing the sights that my eye has started calling home.

I do not even slightly relish the idea of going back to having to drive everywhere again.

So: many things have been combining and conspiring to put me on edge, then even more on edge, and now even more way on edge, which means that it's time to upload some basic truths and then go to sleep on them, to wake restored.

Both the projects on which I'm working are fundamentally worthwhile and will benefit the two main scholarly communities which I identify as my subdisciplinary homes (i.e., Victorian studies and autobiography / life-writing studies).

This spring's experiment in writing has shown me a number of things; tonight, I add "need to work on taking criticism gracefully and not self-abasingly" to that number.

Going home means going back to the classroom, which will enliven and regulate me even as it also leaves me exhausted and feeling slightly crazed.

I have achieved worthwhile things for myself, and by extension for my students and my friends and loved ones, while I have been out of the classroom and out of the country.

I will not waste the months I have left here with worrying. I simply will not.

[twenty minutes pass]

As if sensing the right moment to place a call, my excellent friend has just rung up for a good long cheery chat. All will be well, and all manner of things will be well.

Fish-like.

I went to Bath for the same reason that even the Romans went to Bath: to bathe in the hot springs, in water that fell as rain thousands of years ago and now comes up out of the ground at 45º C. For the last quarter of the twentieth century, Bath had no hot baths open for business--for the first time in more than a thousand years. Then, someone built the Thermae Spa, incorporating parts of the eighteenth-century hot bath buildings.


My excellent friend--the person who introduced me to Bath in the first place, back when she taught me the bawdy wonders of eighteenth-century literature--has generously gifted me a fantastic spa package that I will be using in July (because the place is hard to book!). But last week I went down to check it all out.


One of the spa's great attractions is a rooftop pool. See the aqua glass wall at the top of the glass-and-stone building to the right of this picture? That's the wall that keeps people from walking off the pooldeck into the Bath air. By the time I changed into my suit and climbed the three flights of stairs to the roof on Thursday afternoon, the air temperature had hunkered down in the high 50s (F). The water in the spa's baths is a steady 35.6º (C), though, so I chucked my robe and towel into a little glass pigeonhole on the deck and got right into the water. It was about 4:45 p.m., and because the spa's "twilight package" had started at 4:30, the nearly empty pool slowly but surely started filling with other bathers. From the rooftop pool, one can see such things as Bath Abbey (here pictured--from down on the ground, obviously, and with a sky that conveys the greyness of those few days--with the corner of the building that houses the Roman Bath).


On the side of the rooftop pool nearest to the Abbey, those wiley spa designers installed a set of seats with air jets in them; somehow, it never failed to be amusing to watch newcomers (particularly women) discovering the jets and giggling like eleven-year-olds who've just learned about where babies come from.

All of the spa's baths are 1.35 meters deep, which was the perfect height to make it easy to submerge myself up to my chin. It was while so submerged that I had a lovely conversation, my only one of the three-hour evening, with a pair of sisters from Canterbury who had been vacationing in Bath. When they found out that I was traveling alone, one of them said, "You're so brave, you young people." Turned out she's a widow--three times over. "They call me the black widow," she said, laughing a little wryly. The latest husband died in November, after a ten-year struggle with Parkinson's. A girlfriend of hers was supposed to have been vacationing with her, but her sister filled in after the friend had to drop out. We talked about the benefits and drawbacks of our respective experiences with marriage and being single, and everything was just about right: close to the moment when I might have started feeling like being quiet again, they headed off to try some of the spa's other amenities. About twenty minutes later, I too headed off--

--to the Minerva Bath at the very base of the whole spa complex, a massive pool that reminded me of Lex Luthor's subterranean pool in the first Superman film (remember? I can't find you a picture, so you'll have to take my word for it). The brilliant thing about this pool is its currents: because of the various jets scattered around the pool walls and floor, it's possible to drift around the entire pool with no effort at all.

I kept waiting--as I drifted and drifted--for a moment when I would feel utterly loosened and relaxed. I wasn't tense about not relaxing properly or anything that self-conscious and frustrating; I was just trying to figure out the best disposition of my limbs, and the best way to drift without running into other bathers, and I was particularly hoping that I'd be able to shed the strain I carry between my shoulder blades. At some point, I drifted out of the pool and into my robe and up the elevator to the café for dinner. A post-dinner trip to the steam room was extremely short: steam rooms and glasses don't mix, but neither, really, do steam rooms (or ambulation, for that matter) and myopia. I drifted back into my robe and back downstairs to the Minerva Bath, where I spent my last 45 minutes simply puttering about in the water.

By the time I left, I realized that there had been no perfect moment of relaxation. Instead, the water had worked steadily on me the whole time I was in it. When I sat down to read myself to sleep, the space between my shoulders was supple and still.

(Those fish at the top of this writing? They're actually from the Pump Room in Bath; they're crusted in mineral deposits left by the springs' water, which people used to come all the way to Bath to drink for its medicinal benefits. It's still possible to buy a glass of the hot water for 50p. I'll admit to having passed this time, having tried it thirteen years ago.)

And one of the trip's big payoffs? Today: 1216 words. I think that having written those words early in the day is part of what's made me so leaden in tonight's post. Balances seem to be shifting, somehow, and I'm not quite sure where the Cabinet is going to be when the shifting subsides. So, for now, I'm going to keep on keeping on. For the next little while, you may get lots more pictures than words, though.

A return, a promise.

So: when I blew town early Thursday morning, I had my laptop and my camera on my back, and I fully intended to find a way to put up a post at least saying that I was going to be away for a couple of days. But then my hotel didn't have internet, and I got caught up in spa-going (seriously) and in incessant walking and in several hard-core, intense bouts of work (though still not writing--still the assembling and brewing phase, frustrating though that phase's prolongation always is to me). And I didn't pay my £1 for 20 minutes of internet time at an internet cafe, and so you didn't know where I was or how long I'd be away. I hope that I'm just flattering myself by hoping that no one was worrying; I realize that this was one of the first times I've gone away without telling you more explicitly that I'd be gone.

Anyhow: my journey to the spa town of Bath was every bit the restorative trip that I'd hoped it would be, and tonight, following a stop-off for an astounding theatre event, and some time on a double-full train (after our non-stop train was stopped at a local station and passengers from a broken-down train poured into our cars), I have returned home.

The promise is that you'll get a better dispatch about my exploits from me tomorrow.