October 9, 2023

The staccato pace of Dublin and London raised our spirits, the streets jammed with buses and taxis; restaurants, bars, and shops packed. Working people and students stride past 18th century architecture and skyscrapers. Cross-country trains arrive and depart day and night.

We came home to the Republicans’ war over “vacating” the speaker’s chair, following their attempt to paralyze the government, abandon American pledges to Ukraine, and regurgitate their love for Trump, who wants the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs executed.   

Midway through our trip Conservative U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak gave a speech to unveil his plan for Britain to achieve “net zero” in greenhouse gas emissions. He said, in part:

“I know the fundamentals of our great country are solid and timeless. Its people are its greatest strength. Their hopes and genius are what propel us forward, not Government. …  But what I have concluded …  is that for too many, there remains a nagging sense that the path we’re on isn’t quite what we hoped for, and that no one seems to have the courage to say so. … we do not have to be powerless … Our destiny can be of our own choosing. But only if we change the way our politics works. …

“Can we be brave in the decisions we make, even if there is a political cost? And can we put the long-term interests of our country before the short-term political needs of the moment? The real choice … is do we really want to change our country and build a better future for our children … I have made my decision: we are going to change.”

Sunak then announced he was canceling most of a big rail project called HS2, priced at 106 billion pounds ($128.4 billion), and plowing the savings into Network North, a system of roads, rail, and bus lines across the country’s midsection. So the U.K. creates authentic public policy, and continues stalwartly to help Ukraine defend itself from the Russian killers.

Now, in downtown Greenville, Falls Park glows green in bright sunlight along the Reedy River. Autumn is much like summer in northwestern South Carolina, minus the humidity. Dublin’s and London’s chilly gray skies seem like a faraway dream. The snail’s pace of this Southern suburb is either serene and comforting or remote and anesthetizing. It’s what we chose, where we are, for now.

My younger brother stopped in on his trip from Delaware to Florida. We walked through Falls Park. Old times came up, as they always do among brothers with thinning hair. We talked about the usual, family, health, future plans. We mentioned this neighbor or classmate or that one from the old neighborhood. He had the memories. I mostly shook my head.

The subject of cemeteries came up. He has a plot in Jersey, where our parents and brother are buried. We recalled an aunt’s funeral, years ago, far out on Long Island, New York. We drove from Virginia in a snowstorm, determined to be present. Seven cousins showed up, we stood for the service in our dark overcoats on frozen ground. Our last internment, on Sandy’s side, was in Tennessee last June. The subject is out there.

The subtheme is travel. He was heading to the Gulf Coast, eight or so hours down I-85 to I-75 most of the way. He’ll cut across to the Atlantic side and take I-95 home. We’ve done the trip in reverse, from the Gulf across the Florida midstate boondocks to the interstate, then north.

It’s just as easy, maybe easier, to go west. From Atlanta I-20 runs through Birmingham and Tuscaloosa. It’s then a straight shot across Mississippi and Louisiana, through Shreveport into Texas, Marshall, Kilgore, Dallas-Fort Worth, and across the oil country, Midland, Odessa, to the intersection with I-10 in the middle of nowhere. Then El Paso, skirting the Rio Grande, and more empty country to Tucson. We did that once and camped out in Fort Stockton.

This is how to see the richness of the country. The culture, the essence of a place opens. Grasp the knowable chords of life, appreciate and learn from them. Then move on. Still, Tucson is a long way. The South has lessons.

In 2017 I took two of our girls to Sylacauga, Ala., not far from the Georgia state line and a few small towns off I-20 for a running event. The town, once known for production of marble, is at the far southwestern end of the Blue Ridge. The notable landmark is Mount Cheaha, Alabama’s highest point at something like 2,400 feet, humble by Blue Ridge standards.

We explored the place, walked the downtown and the rest of it. The big business was a Wal-Mart. The demarcations of segregation showed in the layout of the streets and neighborhoods. All that is over, I thought at the time. The legacy is our political nightmare.

Across the next state line is Meridian, Miss., a modest city with a lively downtown. I once visited the Naval Air Station there. We passed through five years ago, walked Main Street and stopped in Weidmann’s, the famous local restaurant. We looked at the little museum devoted to Meridian’s role in giving birth to country music and its local hero, Jimmy Rodgers, who the city calls the “Father of Country Music.” I lived for years in Nashville but never knew that.

More history can be dredged. Meridian is the hometown of James Chaney, one of the three civil rights workers murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Philadelphia, Miss., about 40 miles north, in June 1964. In 1966 eighteen men were put on trial in Meridian, not for murder but for conspiracy to violate the victims’ civil rights. Seven were convicted.

You can explore these places, scenes of nightmares, and many others, a far galaxy from London or Dublin. Yet Sunak’s words may yet resound: “solid and timeless … hope and genius.” Some shade of truth, the truth of humanity, emerges and resonates. It is common to Greenville, Meridian, London, Dublin. Common to all.

October 2, 2023

An American living in Oxford, in England’s mid-country, told me Oxford has two seasons, tourist season and student season. Only around Christmas does the place calm down. Right now the students are arriving and, the locals hope, the tourists are leaving.

Oxford University is the oldest English-speaking institution of higher learning in the world. Records show teaching at Oxford around 1120.

To walk Oxford’s streets is to be stunned by the enduring brilliance and darkness of England’s history; of leaders of nobility, boldness, piety, and compassion, but also ruthlessness and cruelty.  It is a history of centuries of majestic achievements in art, literature, and science, but also control of a vast colonial empire through authoritarian political and economic power.    

On Broad Street an embedded stone cross marks the spot where, during the reign of Catholic Queen Mary I (1553-1558), also known as “Bloody Mary,” three Protestant leaders: Hugh Latimer, bishop of Worcester, Nicholas Ridley, bishop of London, and Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, were burned at the stake.

Lattimore and Ridley were executed in late 1555. Cranmer was forced to watch. He then recanted and returned to Catholicism, but Mary refused to pardon him. He went to the stake in 1556. The place also is marked by a plaque on the wall of Balliol College nearby.

Mary, daughter of Henry VIII, who started the English Reformation by breaking with the Catholic Church to establish the Church of England, tried to reverse her father’s policies. She failed and her successor, Elizabeth I, reaffirmed the preeminence of the Church of England.

Oxford is an easy hour from London’s Paddington Station by National Rail. The city is the university, the university, now encompassing 39 colleges, is in a real way the city itself. The city was home to great men and women of England’s intellectual life: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, P.D. James, Iris Murdoch, and Dorothy L. Sayers.

Balliol College was established in 1263, making it one of Oxford’s oldest institutions. The poets Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins studied there. Balliol educated John Wycliffe, who first translated the Bible into English; 18th century economist Adam Smith and historian Arnold Toynbee; novelists Aldous Huxley and Graham Greene; Prime Ministers Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath.

Magdalen College, founded in 1458, has been home to nine Nobel Prize winners. T.E. Lawrence, legendary British general called Lawrence of Arabia during World War I, attended Magdalen.

In “Thyrsis,” the Victorian Matthew Arnold penned these lines:

And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening, Lovely all times she lives, lovely tonight!

Gerard Manley Hopkins, who achieved first-class honors in classics at Balliol, wrote, in “To Oxford”:

This is my park, my pleasaunce; this to me As public is my greater privacy, All mine, yet common to my every peer Those charms accepted of my inmost thought, The towers musical, quiet-walled grove.

In Oxford today, tourists and local people browse the shops and sip coffee at cafes. Everyday city routines become trivial before the weight of centuries past, announced in the soaring spires of the city and university.

Oxford was established in the misty final years of the Saxon period in the 11th century. Saxon King Edward, a devout sovereign called the Confessor, later canonized Saint Edward, died in January 1066.  His brother-in-law Harold took the throne.

In October of that same year the Saxon reign ended with the last successful invasion of England by the Norman duke William, popularly William the Conqueror, who defeated Harold at the Battle of Hastings. William became King William I. Oxford was heavily damaged.

During the English Reformation Oxford became a bishopric. For more than a thousand years Oxford has been at the crux of the nation’s cultural and intellectual life. During the English Civil War (1642-1653) the court of Charles I resided at Oxford and returned during the Great Plague of 1665-1666.

In one popular story, German bombers avoided striking the city during the 1940 Blitz because Hitler wanted it as his capital after Germany invaded England. During the war the city was used for training troops. Somerville College, the city hall, and local hospitals became centers for treating wounded servicemen.

In 1953 medical student Roger Bannister, who studied at Oxford, ran the world’s first sub-four-minute mile in Oxford. After earning his degree he became a master of Pembroke College.

We walked through City Centre, heart of the University, through Christ Church on St. Aldates Street, founded by Henry VIII in 1546. We passed the Radcliffe Camera, built in 1737, now a reading room for the Bodleian Library, the second-largest in the U.K. Nearby is the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, the University’s first church, used for services since 1252 and site of the trial of Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer. The Martyr’s Memorial, just off Magdalen Street, honors 280 Protestants executed under Mary I.

The city is not all ancient history. Much of the “Harry Potter” movie series was filmed there. It’s also the setting for the three TV mystery series, “Morse,” the sequel, “Lewis,” and the prequel, “Endeavour,” based on books written by Colin Dexter, a Cambridge alumnus who worked as an administrator at Oxford.

By train, bus, and bicycle the students are flowing back to Oxford. We watched them move in, as they have in this city for 1,200 years. The tourists are leaving. We looked back at a different Oxford, to see a different England across a millennium: complex, mysterious, eternal.

September 25, 2023

I nursed a double expresso in the back room of a café in Notting Hill, one of London’s more eclectic, artsy neighborhoods. Sandy had cold chocolate. Outside, the crowds of tourists flowed by, gawking, browsing at the shops, aiming cell phone cameras.

My head buzzed from the caffeine, but also from the tourist grind. We followed directions for the London Underground to Buckingham Palace. There too, a massive crowd swelled, people pressed against the railing to get a glimpse of the place and the red-jacketed sentries of the King’s Guard walking their posts.

We had marched forward the previous day, transitioning from Galway to Dublin to London via three hours on long-distance rail, then urban taxi and low-rent commuter airline to a local train to a hotel in East London’s Stratford neighborhood. The area is the site of London’s 2012 Olympic stadium and a train and bus hub. Not much else.

The airport-to city train sped from Stansted airport through London’s rural outskirts of wide green meadows and forest, then breached the industrial and residential suburbs. We changed trains inside the city at Tottenham Hale, where the skyscrapers start to show.

London is a monster of a city apart from the tourist-magnet sites of palaces, the Tower Bridge, Parliament, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey. During the workweek the population swells from eight million to 12 million. It was, after all, the heart of an empire.

Notting Hill made our list of places to see in London. We guessed everyone in the crowd had seen the 1999 movie with Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant. The romance of the movie emerges, somehow, from the gentle eccentricity of the place: the well-kept, whitewashed rowhouses along Portobello Road, the cramped antique and clothing shops, confectioners, and booksellers, among others. Fans of the movie look for the fictional Travel Book Shop.

Getting there meant navigating the spiderweb of London’s Underground. We made the transfer from Green Park to Notting Hill Gate, patting ourselves on the back for that.

Our plan was to meet later that afternoon with Josh, daughter Laura’s friend, a brilliant artist and engineer, in the Hackney neighborhood, miles across the city. At the Notting Hill stop we lost the cellphone connectivity, meaning no navigation help. On a corner bench we fiddled futilely with the phones, then gave up and jumped in a cab. Thirty minutes later, stuck in traffic gridlock with the meter at 30 pounds (about $37.00), we paid and said so long to the driver.

At the nearest Underground station an employee patiently tracked our destination on her Ipad then explained that track repairs meant no train. “The bus is best,” she advised, and pointed to one across the street. We ran, but it pulled away. When the next bus arrived I had forgotten the stop. A kind fellow passenger helped. We got off near Hackney and hiked to 195 Mare Street.

Here we stepped off our tourist track. The address is the site of a brick house built in 1697, an enormous three-level structure in what then was a center for cultivation of exotic plants called the Loddiges Nursery. Over the centuries the place was owned by charitable and civic groups. A local family recently purchased it as a home and a gallery of local art, calling it simply “195 Mare Street.” Josh has shown several of his pieces at the gallery.

The family commissioned a Brazilian artist, Thiago Mazza, to create a three-story high mural on the wall of an adjacent building. The occasion was the unveiling. At around 6 PM local folks began arriving, artists and art lovers, old and young, longtime neighbors and newcomers. Josh circulated, greeting friends and fellow artists As South Carolina suburbs people, we didn’t quite fit this crowd. But we said hello and shook hands. It was unique, different. It was fun.

The mural was covered by a three-story black drape. The crowd edged forward. The owner talked about the mural as a celebration of “plant power,” in Hackney as long as 300 years ago, when it was a rural outpost of London. She introduced Mazza, who said a few words and thanked his assistants.

We learned how he created the mural over weeks of standing on a scaffold under the summer sun, repairing damage caused by heavy rains.

The black drape dropped away, the gorgeous colors leaped out at the crowd, who oohed and aahed and applauded. We stared in awe at the pastel beauty of the work, the intricate detail, the rich bold strokes that filled the length of the worn brick surface. The artist’s mastery of color and shading explode across the otherwise blandness of Mare Street, a place that first-time visitors like us would guess had seen better days.

We did our best to mingle. Josh introduced us to a friend, Sharon, who has supported his work, and to fellow artists. One of the hosts explained that artists have brought their work for display, open to the public, even while the new owners are renovating, essentially rebuilding the place. We joined the crowd of authentic art lovers greeting the artists and studying the art mounted on the unfinished walls.

Later we had dinner with Josh and Sharon in the glittering Hackney restaurant district. Tables everywhere were full of young people enjoying the throbbing party scene, London’s carefree weekend night, reminiscent of New York’s Greenwich Village or Tribeca. They guided us to the right bus, which poked along dark city streets, delivering us to the hotel way later than we’re used to being out.

We finished off the London stop Sunday with a hike through the white-shoe end of town: Russell Square, Piccadilly, Whitehall, St. James, Westminster.

The real world intruded suddenly on the dream world: Ukrainian refugees and supporters demonstrated along Horse Guards Road near the prime minister’s residence on Downing Street, reminding the Western allies of their moral obligation to stand against the Russian killers. A young Ukrainian girl sang a mournful, lovely ballad, her lilting tones lifting the spirits of her countrymen, and all who passed by.                  

September 23, 2023

Downtown Galway combines restaurants, bars, boutiques, still more bars. The attraction is Irish music in and around the Latin Quarter, and Guinness. The place is swimming in Guinness. Everyone standing in or near a bar is holding one. This was Wednesday.

The wind howled, the rain poured the afternoon we arrived, although the Irish sun beamed in a far corner of the sky. Stepping around the puddles and bending into the wind was the low point. Sandy and I had an overpriced dinner at the King’s Head in the Quarter, but didn’t stay for the music. We were looking at a long day.

The sun rose the next morning. We got a cab downtown then boarded the bus for the Cliffs of Moher ride, which includes a few other stops. The tourists, 98 percent Americans, an Indian, an Australian couple, and a half-dozen Swedes, piled on. The driver, John, pulled slowly out into city traffic then picked up speed. The city faded behind us—suburbs don’t exist in Ireland. Suddenly we were looking at deep-green pastures, lush meadows, cows, and sheep.

The first stop was Dungaire Castle, a 16th century fortress now reduced to a heavy stone tower and three walls, intended by the clan that built it for defensive purposes, but not known for a major role in local history. It’s outside Kinvarra along the two-lane highway, perched on a serene corner of Galway Bay. We walked through the gate and snapped a picture.

We plowed along through lovely country to Ballyvaughan, site of the Merriman Hotel, a fashionable place that now houses Ukrainian refugees. We made a sharp turn onto Corkscrew Hill, a sharp zigzagging climb to the Aillwee Cave, where, for nine euros, we could follow a guide on a half-mile hike through the narrow, dimly lit rock passageway. I bought the ticket and followed the guide, ducking at low points, and listened to his pitch on the geology of the place. It was discovered in 1940 by a local man who kept quiet about it for 33 years.

The guide talked about the mysterious drainage that created the cave. He pointed out the strange mineral-rich rock formations and the gushing waterfalls, and answered a few questions from science-minded tourists. Then we were done. I hurried along to the exit. It seemed an odd add-on to the Cliffs tour, but it’s there, so we did it.

The cliffs, nearly nine miles long, between 400 and 700 feet high, fronting the Atlantic, are spectacular. Five or six tour buses and dozens of private cars were parked below a steep path of a couple of hundred yards alongside a stone wall that borders the cliffs. Folks trudged slowly to the top, snapping pictures all the way. Since we got lucky on the weather we hung around, enjoying the crystal-clear sea air and staring at the breathtaking views out to the horizon, the surf crashing against the rocks far below.

We stopped for lunch a bit farther up the coast at the Fox Pub in Doolin. John pushed the local red beer, most of the group went along and ordered the beef stew or fish ‘n chips. Apart from cows and sheep, the tourism business is the only business in these parts. Our group took every seat in the place.

We tooled along winding roads in stretches barely wide enough for the bus and one compact car. A few times John careened onto the shoulder to avoid sideswipes. We stopped at the Burren, a bizarre, moonlike stretch of sharp rocks that extends to a steep drop into the steel-gray surf foaming against the shore. The wind roared. We didn’t stay long.

We were still miles from Galway. John, in his lyrical brogue, gave us history, local color, and his own political analysis. He talked about the famine walls, the miles of stone walls that crisscross fields and hills that English landlords forced their Irish tenants to build during the 1840s famine, trying to force them off their land. He blasted the government for permitting giant wind turbines to be built to sell power to Britain and France, spoiling the natural environment. We could see the turbines in the distance, a forest of spindly three-bladed sticks.

He pointed out an abandoned Catholic church, closed decades ago after revelations of abuses of children by Christian brothers. He added, though, he still takes his family to Mass.

The miles were wearing on all of us. But we couldn’t escape the mystical charm of this corner of the world. The highway for a hundred miles is a narrow two-lane road. The landscape across the meadows and hills is the rich green Ireland is famous for, homes are nestled in open space, no mindless subdivisions distort the loveliness of the exquisite blend of earth, sea, and sky. A few modest signs here and there advertise this B&B or that one, a bar, a restaurant. No billboards or traffic lights.

The rural Irish live in nature and are part of nature. We could feel it in the poignant music John played as he drove, the passion and humor in his stories, the greetings and smiles of the young women in their sharply pressed outfits who brought us lunch in Doolin.

We passed through Craggcorradane, Fanore, and Murrooghtoohy and back through Ballyvaughan. We also may have seen Liscannor, Kilshanny, Lisdoonvarna, and Ballyallaban, I’m not sure, they’re that small. John picked up speed as we closed again on Galway, we could see traffic increasing in the opposite direction, Galway’s rush hour.

He maneuvered through the city streets, still pointing out interesting things, famous hotels, ships in the harbor, then gave us the names of his favorite restaurants. He explained that Scotch whiskey became popular with American GIs stationed in Britain during World War II because the Irish government, trying to stay neutral, banned the sale of Irish whiskey to Americans. Jameson Black Barrel is the stuff to drink, he said.

We parked at the drop-off point. John asked us to do a review of the trip for the company’s website. We all shook hands, John patted us on the shoulder and waved goodbye. As we walked away, Sandy said he had mentioned, quietly, he was being laid off. The tour company owner had made a deal with friends to squeeze him out at the end of the month. He’ll be driving a school bus for the winter. I wondered: God’s will or the luck of the Irish? Maybe both.        

September 20, 2023

The sun burst from the overcast in Killarney, then faded. We rode around the 26,000-acre national park in a carriage pulled by a horse named Maggie and driven by a young guy, Damian McCarthy, who said he inherited the job from his father.

The park is wild and lovely, bounded on the north by a huge lake, Lough Leane, and inhabited by a unique species of diminutive red deer. We walked around the remains of Ross Castle, built in 1410, later site of a Catholic Irish defensive stand against Protestant British Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell’s marauding “Ironsides” troops during the Irish Confederation Wars of 1640-1650. Damian said he could trace his family’s roots back to those Irish defenders, a McCarthy was one of the Irish chieftains. We told him we were from South Carolina. He said, joking, “if you were English you’d be walking back.”

When the ride ended Damian and his mother gave us a lift to the hotel. They noticed Sandy’s cough.

She got hot soup for dinner. The cough, thanks to allergies, seven hours on a cold aircraft, and the Dublin rain and chill, got worse. Around 2 AM it was time to get help. We got dressed and trudged to the lobby. The night-desk guy gave us the number for a local clinic, SouthDoc. A nurse answered and asked a few questions. She gave my message to the on-duty doctor. Within minutes he called, advising that he couldn’t see Sandy without a negative covid test result. Oddly, we had brought one.

At 2:30 AM I administered my first covid test. It wasn’t pleasant for the patient, but it did turn out negative. A cab carried us through the deserted, rain-slicked streets to SouthDoc. The duty physician, Dr. Phillips, and his nurse were the only ones present. He did his exam, listened, and prescribed a few things. The nurse called another cab.

We already had paid for a bus tour called the “Ring of Kerry” that circles the southwestern corner of the country. Sandy said no way, since she had her meds she would stay in bed and get better. I stuck with the plan. The sky was overcast and threatening. The other riders were, like me, oldsters, all couples, the typical tourist pack. I had a seat to myself.

We pushed out, the tour narrated by a veteran guide with a local brogue, who pointed out interesting and beautiful sites and told stories, some poking fun at his accent and those of others. We stopped at a rural scenic point and filed out, joined a few minutes later by four or five other tour buses, all nearly identical. The crowd milled around. The place offered, for a charge of seven euros, an exhibit of “famine habitations,” mockups of the hovels the starving Irish lived in during the 1840s famine. I grimaced and passed.

After snapping a few photos of the hills I realized I couldn’t remember which bus was mine. I climbed aboard three before finally recognizing our driver. “Take a picture of the front of the bus so you’ll remember it,” a lady said.

We made four or five more stops and gawked at mountains, rugged pastures, and quaint little towns. We saw husky Irish sheep, many splashed with red paint markings by their owners. When we reached the coast near Dingle the gray sky closed in, fog shrouded the mountaintops and the sea. Finally we stopped at an inn overlooking a rocky beach for lunch. “It’s one-thirty, be back on the bus at two-twenty,” the guide warned.

It seemed a friendly rustic place, but the employees herded us to the cafeteria past stacks of souvenirs for sale, including green-tipped tin horns, earrings, postcards, shamrock coffee mugs, and Irish-green dog blankets. How many of those do they sell, I wondered.

The cafeteria line crawled forward as folks ordered shepherd’s pie and fish ‘n chips. I ordered a ham sandwich and checked my watch. It was one of those classic souvenir-stop/lunch/restroom/back-on-the-bus tourist routines. Folks gulped their lunches and ran for their seats.

 We passed through Annascaul, Killorglin, Sneem, Waterville, Caherdaniel, Cahersiveen, and others, tiny hamlets wedged against mountainsides above the sea, and tourist-seeking towns packed with bars and restaurants, real estate and lawyers’ offices. The bus stopped, here and there and we all jumped out to snap pictures until mid-afternoon, when the chilly rain fell in buckets.

Around 4 PM we turned north and entered the wilder south end of the National Park, where the forest is thick and jungle-like, moss-covered dead logs left where they fell in a tangle of rocky, vernal underbrush.  We passed through the Kissing Tunnel, when the guide urged couples to smooch, and along the spectacular “Ladies View” named because Queen Elizabeth’s ladies in waiting urged her to visit.

The rain spattered against the windshield, the guide finally gave up suggesting photo stops. The crowd got antsy, ready for their warm hotels. The driver picked up his speed, slowing on the narrow two-lane road for ongoing auto traffic (I wondered what are those cars doing here?)

We entered the busy main highway through Killarney, traffic whizzed by. The bus pulled over at a gas station. We piled out, thanking the driver and scattered. I guessed I was a mile from our hotel. I didn’t have the number for a taxi and started hoofing it. Halfway along, holding my jacket snug against the rain I heard a clop-clopping sound. A horse-drawn carriage ambled by, the sides protected by plastic curtains.

I looked up, it was Damian McCarthy, our yesterday’s driver, heading home. He looked around and waved, then pulled over to the left. That’s correct, the left, the way they drive over here. I ran and jumped in. It was an early day for him, what with the rain. We clopped forward. At the hotel I jumped down, he waved and cruised back into traffic.