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| "Ooh, bookshops!" |
After we left St. Martins in the Fields, the next stop on our list was the British Museum. The one o’clock service had left us feeling rather mellow, so as we walked London’s streets, we wandered inside any stores that interested us, particularly several bookshops, where I searched the shelves for the work of several English authors. I eventually found a novel I didn’t have by E. F. Benson. This prolific English novelist wrote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but his work is little remembered in the States. I had hunted down all six books in his Mapp and Lucia series. Now I had a new novel to enjoy. In Mrs. Ames, the title character dominates everyone in her small town, but when latest social triumph backfires, her previously obedient husband falls under another woman’s thrall. In order to reclaim him, she is forced to endure a painful journey of self-discovery. While it was yet another novel of social manners (I had been hoping for one of his biographies, memoirs, or tales of the supernatural), it was a still a new book to read by an author who has brought me much joy. I left the store in a triumphant mood.
After awhile, we realized that we had become lost, and consulted the doorman standing outside a boutique hotel. He directed our footsteps onward, and a few blocks later, we found ourselves outside the British Museum.
We joined the throng, and made our way inside. The lives of the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, and Greeks hold great interest for me, and here I was, where I could explore so many relics of these ancient civilizations. Yet, I suddenly realized that with the afternoon passing so quickly, we could spend the rest of the day here (just an hour or two was left until closing), or we could hurry to see the other places on our list before they closed for the day. After a quick huddle, we decided that we really needed more time to explore this building’s many treasures. So reluctantly, we consigned the British Museum to another vacation, and left in search of Covent Garden.
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| A beautiful woman poses for my camera |
It may seem odd for someone to choose a popular shopping area such as Covent Garden over studying such important historical artifacts as the Rosetta Stone, a limestone fragment from the Sphinx, or statues from the Parthenon. But my primary purpose in traveling to England was to understand how people here lived their daily lives, as well as gain deeper insight into their culture and traditions. And there was one shop in particular that we wanted to visit, one that epitomized the difference between our two great countries: Neal’s Yard Dairy. The moment we had seen it in a Rick Steves’ travelogue on PBS, we had decided that we needed to go there.
Neal’s Yard is a small area located near Covent Garden. In his book Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years, Michael Palin relates that he and Terry Gilliam were once part owners of a film studio there. I find this ironic, because if you poll any group of Monty Python fans, along with the “Ministry of Silly Walks” and the “Dead Parrot” sketch, another that is sure to be mentioned is “The Cheese Shop.” Cheese plays an important role in English culture. In shows as diverse as “Fawlty Towers” and “Yes, Prime Minister,” people are seen concluding their meals with several types of cheese. And these are not varieties that most Americans would recognize, but those that, if they are offered in our supermarkets, are almost always imported from other countries. As Stephen Fry (actor, writer, comedian, and poet) states in his book, Stephen Fry in America:
“America doesn’t get cheese. They put up with the most hideous orange melted gunk, weird vestigial descendants of Munster and Cheddar…Cheese, in the real sense of the word, along with proper bread, can only be found in special places in America, usually cities with a student and artist population.”
We wanted to discover what exactly it was that the English “got” and Americans didn’t. For this, we had sacrificed seeing the priceless treasures of the British Museum. We could only hope that we would not later regret our decision.
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