Mam Tor...

Mam Tor...

I've covered a lot of ground since my last post.

Yesterday I left the monastary and drove north and west to visit my friends Garth and Leeanne in Newark. Garth finished his 2 years of violin building school and is now in partnership with two other builders. I got to play two of his fiddles - one finished and the other still in the white (unvarnished). They sound great: very rich. Smooth. As new instruments, they need to be played. I suspect that with a couple years of intense playing they'll really open up. His new company gives him introductions to some of the major violin dealers in London, so I predict he is going to do very well in this new career.

They took me to the Lincoln Cathedral, maybe 25 miles from their home. We took a little tour. We also caught a jousting demonstration on the grounds of the Lincoln Castle. The demonstration was put on for families with kids, and was completely hokey: two teams, one supposedly from Lincoln and the other from Normandy, competed in jousting and other fighting type games. Nobody got unseated and the sword play was, well, not up to the standards of say the Stratford Festival. But it was all in good fun.

Except.

The last act was a mêlée, in which the 4 men from the opposing teams met in one huge mock hand-to-hand combat. Of course the local hero triumphed with wit and superior skills, just when it looked like he was doomed. (And did I mention that one on his team played the lovable drunk - spewing ail on his opponent, and only getting serious about fighting when the other sends his beer stein fighting.) We know he was the winner because he was the only one left standing.

Afterwards we climbed to the top of the castle walls, and, looking down on the crowd dispersing below, I saw several dozen duals going on among the little 6 and 8 year old boys that had been watching the competition. Somewhere (I suppose their parents purchased them) they had acquired little 2' or 3' long wooden swords, and they were facing off and swinging away. I didn't see any eyes get poked out, but it got me wondering about all the blood that was shed in two thousand years of English history, and grown ups play acting violence for kids, and the war in Iraq, and ...

Rodney King's question still haunts me: "Why can't we all just get along?"

Anyhow...

I didn't get away from G&L's until almost midnight. They had made reservations for me at a local pub. Hard bed, but the locals weren't terribly noisy. Woke up this morning and had a "Full English" breakfast. It included:

• 1 egg - sunnyside up
• watery baked beans like your mother doesn't make
• fried mushrooms
  
• sausage
• bacon
• half a stewed tomato
• toast
• coffee or tea
• juice
  
• and, how could I forget, blood pudding.

I did taste the blood pudding, and a taste was enough. I'd probably like it if I didn't know what it was.

So this morning I drove up to The Peak region, a national park just an hour north and west of Newark. I parked my buggy in Castleton, and took off on walking trails up to Mam Tor. Mam Tor is a mountain ridge, with human artifacts (including a burial site) dating to 1500 BC. One guide book says it, along with some other sites in the area from the same period, point to a sizeable goddess cult during that period.

The views were dramatic and the terrain was (sometimes) quite rugged. My map was not up to the not very well marked trails, and at one point I somehow ended up on a sheep path instead of a human path. It lead me to the edge of two very deep gullies and I had to backtrack quite a ways. I won't say I was lost, but I confess I wasn't quite where I thought I was. By 3pm I was tuckered out. I piled into my car, drove down out of the mountains to my hotel in Derby (Dah-bee), grabbed some supper and I'm about ready for bed!

I'm not sure when it happened - maybe it was after the mêlée - maybe it was after Garth labeled some of the cold reception I've experienced as anti-Americanism - but sometime today the accents stopped sounding quaint and became annoying. I'm ready to come home! Important business meeting tomorrow afternoon, and then I'm camping out near Heathrow to catch a west-bound flight early Tuesday morning.