May 21, 1998 It's been a long time since we added anything to this set of notes. We have been caught up in the day-to-day business of our lives here, and the sense of novelty has been less, so though we continue to have a wonderful time we have felt less motivated to write about it. I will try to rectify that now, while we are still here! Time slips away. We just got back from nearly two weeks away from Grange- in London, Cambridge, Paris, Nantes, and Weymouth- and on our return we both were struck by the sad feeling that the end of our English adventure was suddenly much closer. We can no longer pretend to ourselves that we are living here indefinitely- suddenly we feel like visitors again. We will try not to let that feeling spoil our last seven weeks here- there is still much to look forward to, including visits from friends, and a week's vacation that we have reserved for ourselves (but have not yet decided how to spend). It is now the height of Spring. We just got home from a short after- dinner drive with the Aunties, along a narrow lane that climbed over a ridge and wound down a steep hillside into a rocky valley full of hawthorn trees white with blossom. The fellsides are splashed with white hawthorn blossom the way they were splashed with yellow gorse blossom before we left for France- a dramatic change in appearance in only two weeks. Back then, many of the trees were still in various stages of coming into leaf, giving a wonderful variety of intensities of green to the woods, and the woodland floors were carpeted in a violet haze of bluebells. Now the bluebells are mostly gone, and the crowns of the woodland trees form a solid mass of brilliant green. The weather has been almost hot, and evaporating seawater has left a white cast of salt on the brown sandbanks of Morecambe Bay. So many colours! There is light in the sky till after 10pm now, and the solstice is still a month away. Hard to believe that a few months ago I was excited when there was still a glimmer of remaining daylight at 6pm! I think we were wise to start our six months here in the winter- the long winter nights here are a lot easier to take when you know they are getting shorter every day. We've been doing a lot of stuff, too much to catalog here in any detail. Much of it recently has been enhanced by the presence of Claudia and Jennifer and Cathy, now returned to the States. Recent highlights include attending a talk by a local fisherman about fishing Morecambe Bay for shrimp, using tractors; a glorious walk over Place Fell (a Lakeland mountain that I last climbed when I was eight) with Claudia and Jennifer, ending with a scramble down the side of a waterfall and a lakeside walk through forests of silver birch in the evening light; a very long lunch in a cozy cafe in Dent, in the Yorkshire Dales, waiting for the rain to stop (it never did)*; punting past the Cambridge colleges on the River Cam with Cathy; and dashing past the Channel Islands, which we had never seen before and now have merely glimpsed, at sunset in a high-speed ferry from San Malo to Weymouth, on our return from France. Looking further back, we spent a wonderful Easter Monday with my brother Andrew, his wife Helen, and their two young boys, riding the miniature Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway twelve miles from the Cumbrian coast into the Lakeland hills. -------------- *While there, we picked up an appropriate postcard which featured the following (very British) poem, which as it was credited to "Anon" is probably legal to post on the Internet. It is not representative of the weather while we've been here, fortunately, but I've known many times like this: It rained and it rained and rained and rained The average fall was well maintained And when the tracks were simply bogs It started raining cats and dogs After a drought of half an hour We had a most refreshing shower And then the most curious thing of all A gentle rain began to fall Next day was also fairly dry Save for the deluge from the sky Which wetted the party to the skin And after that the rain set in.