I'm Back!

Hello my lovelies, and thank you for sticking around while my blog became completely boring and useless. :) As my most recent post on going to visit the site where The Prisoner was filmed seems to have degenerated into various awful puns left in the comments section, I can see my loyal readers are getting bored and itchy, so I thought I'd give you a new post. A pun-free one.

I returned before the weekend from the UK after 10 fun-filled days there... well, 5 fun-filled days, and then I had to work for 3, and then 2 days were taken up with travel. But oh well. And now, I pull out my pictures (oh NO, she's getting out the slide projector! I TOLD you we shouldn't have accepted her dinner invitation!) Sit down, sit down. I promise not to bore you for long.

As one of my readers posted as a recommended destination spot, I went to see Tintern Abbey (I think it was Scott, and I read the comment the night before going to see it and thought it was hilarious that he'd somehow read my itinerary and knew where I was going. Wait, is that hilarious? Or scary? Erm...) This place is extraordinary. I went to see Fountains Abbey when I was last there in 2003 and thought I'd never find a place that paralleled it. There's still something quite magical about Fountains: you pay at one place and then trek through a meadow and down a hill and as you emerge from the woods you see this amazing place hidden in a valley, whereas with Tintern it's right off the road. But still, I imagined what it must have looked like long ago before there was a tourist office planted outside it, selling stuffed dragons and mood rings. (Yes, I bought the stuffed dragon for my son, and the "magic ring" for my daughter, who proclaimed, "I've ALWAYS WANTED a magic ring!" She lost it about 5 minutes later.) I loved this place. They're currently doing restoration work on part of it, but I just can't get enough of the history of places like this. Good ol' Henry VIII. You deny him a divorce, he tears down the abbeys. The current monarch ain't that ballsy. Hm. It's places like this where I wonder when The Tudors will start showing Henry VIII for what he really was: a fat, bloated, awful, pig-headed, despicable man. But I guess Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is way cuter.

Next we went to White Castle, where you have to drive up this teeny-tiny road with hedges that are 6 feet high on either side of it and it winds and turns and at every corner you're waiting for someone to come flying around the corner and slam into you. Luckily we had another car in front of us, and while we crawled like a snail behind them we would watch as they'd turn a corner tentatively and then pull their car suddenly into a ditch while another car was bombing straight at them with no chance of stopping. Scary. Got to the castle, and it was nice (not as spectacular as the one we'd see later) but I saw this, and thought it looked like the hatch from season 2 or the well that John lowered himself into earlier this season. And then realized I need help.

The castle I DID fall in love with was Conwy, in the very north of Wales. This one was built in a mere 4 years by Edward I, who then only stayed there for 2 months once when he got stuck during Christmas. Nice. He was embroiled in a campaign against two brothers, one that died in battle and the other who was captured by Edward, who then ordered him hanged, drawn and quartered, disembowelled, and beheaded, with the head on a spike in the Tower of London next to his bro's. To all of my British readers: grade-school history must have been WAY cooler for you than it was for us. :)

Off to Shakespeare's birthplace. I made much fun of this in emails to friends, but the town has decided to milk everything for what it's worth in Stratford, with cafes and restaurants and bookstores and theatres all named after lines or titles of Shakespeare plays. This was one of my favourites (for its groan factor). Look closely: they make William's Shakes. UGH. Seeing his home was interesting, even if half of it had been renovated and they made you walk through this multi-million dollar complex where they said stuff like, "This reader you are looking at might very well have quite possibly belonged to Shakespeare. Maybe. Probably not." (I'm paraphrasing.) Someone found a ring in a farmer's field that had WS inscribed on it, so as you enter the animatronic area where you hear Patrick Stewart reading lines and watch Judi Dench do the "Out damned spot" speech, they zoom in on a mannequin hand wearing The Ring (which probably belonged to Winnifred Smith). Inside there's a school reader where someone has written "William Shakespeare" on one of the pages. If THAT's all it takes for people to go nuts, I'm going to take all those school readers I inherited from my Grandpa and scrawl Pierre Berton's name on them and put them up on eBay. Sheesh.

And then it was off to Blenheim Palace. I'm the English major, my husband is the history major, and has a particular interest in Churchill. Again, much is made of a small event: it touts itself as "CHURCHILL'S BIRTHPLACE" and you get there and find out his pregnant mother fell off a horse (or tripped over a rock while walking along on a hunting expedition, depending on the guide you talk to), immediately went into labour, and was rushed into the place to give birth to Winston in a room just off the foyer. He only came back a handful of times afterwards, but they had a big display of Churchill memorabilia that was pretty amazing. The palace itself is the current home of the Duke of Marlborough, and there was much history of the previous dukes (the first one was pretty awesome). I really enjoyed this one, until we got to the exhibit upstairs, where they had these animatronic people acting out major moments of the castle's life. It was quite amazing, the show, but the storyline was RIDICULOUS. Seriously, this is in ENGLAND, land of some of the world's greatest writers. You couldn't come up with a better storyline?! You go into the first room and they're talking about the first Duke, and his very outspoken wife, and it's a combination of moving dolls and film projected off one wall of actors playing the roles, and our narrator is Sally or Susan or something, who was the maid (or, in today's society, executive assistant) to the duchess, who was very headstrong and oversaw the construction of the castle. She gives us all the juicy bits as we walk through this room and the second room, where we find out about the duke's bed-hopping. Good stuff... until we move to another room where we see a later duke... and Sally pops up as the "ghost" of the original maid. Seriously? She visits the 4th duke, I think, and then the 7th, who was actually a pretty fascinating fellow who had dealings with Thomas Edison and installed the first phone lines in the area, etc. BUT, because we're dealing with Ghost Sally, at every turn she's like, 'Oh good gracious, what is THAT?" "Why THAT, my dear, is e-lec-tric-i-ty!" And we spent the first 3 minutes watching the duke bring her up to date on the world.

Hi, it's Nikki? From Canada? Um... could you just give me a more basic narrative where the actual dukes tell us something about their lives and we get rid of this ridiculous maid subplot? UGH.

But otherwise, I really enjoyed Blenheim.

And then it was to London where I had to work for the next 3 days. We stayed in this wicked hotel in Sloane Square (and then I had Morrissey's "Hairdresser on Fire" stuck in my head for 3 days... taking turns with Elvis Costello's "I Don't Want to Go to Chelsea"). I was working at the London Book Fair, trying to sell rights to our books and looking at new books that were upcoming. There was some good stuff, but then I saw this. So... after you shell out money on my Lost book this fall, make this your second TV companion. :) Wait, no. Your fourth, after the Gossip Girl and Mad Men companion guides I'm currently editing...

And then it was back home. By the way, I meant to post on this earlier and then, well, the trip got in the way, but while I was away the second season of In Treatment started on HBO in the US and HBO Canada here, and it's as brilliant as season 1 so far. I watched a lot of it on my trip and loved it. An entirely new cast of characters, a new doctor's office, same problems, guilt, anger, frustration, and outbursts. John Mahoney is one of the patients, and if you think of him as just the lovable but gruff dad on Frasier, think again. He's amazing in this. I hope you're watching!

Tomorrow: Back to Lost, with a real post on it, on time. Did anyone watch the clip show? I have it on my PVR but I'm sort of allergic to clip shows. Did we learn anything that we hadn't already known or figured out?