English Summer #9 (Final) - London to Fayetteville to Home

I was fortunate to have one final great experience in ministry before departing the United Kingdom.



Carol-Jean and I traveled by a combination of car, train and subway (the Tube) from Maidenhead to Balham, where we spoke at the Rev. Dr. Patience Kudiabor's warm and cozy church, Unity South London.






After a great potluck dinner CJ & I raced by subway and taxi to make the last train northeast out of London. We had already prepositioned our baggage via rental car at the Guest House of the RAF/USAF Mildenhall Air Base, but the trip back to the base by train took several hours and involved expensive taxis at both ends.

Then we learned that the space available flight which we expected for the next morning (Monday) was actually scheduled for Tuesday. I don't know if Monday being labor Day had anything to do with it, but we had a day of foot-travel around the smallish base and to the nearby Bird-in-Hand Pub for meals.

Tuesday Morning we were required to be at the Terminal--baggage in hand--by 4 AM. (You did not read that wrong. 04:00 hours. O-dark-thirty, as we used to call it when I was active duty.)

We were told the flight to McConnell AFB Kansas was full. Sorry. There would be four other flights, but none to the Midwest, unless you count Fargo, North Dakota, and there weren't any seats on that one, either. So, we opted for Plan C--Carolina. There was a flight leaving shortly for Pope AFB, Fayetteville, NC. They had room. Instead of leaving us an easy day trip from McConnell (Wichita to KCMO), this hop would deposit us 896 miles from Unity Village. We took it anyway. (See picture for CJ's reaction to my strategic planning.)

OK...now I have good news and bad news. The good news is this plane was a lot more comfortable and less crowded. The bad news is that we had to rent a one-way-drop-off car and drive home. We crunched the numbers and found that the combination of taxi fares and add-on charges for same-day airfares made it less expensive to drive. Besides, it gave me two more days of vacation and a chance to decompress from a whirlwind tour.

Driving through the Great Smoky Mountains, I kept thinking that, like Dorothy, I'd left Kansas and gone over the rainbow to a magical land full of strange and wondrous sights, warm and friendly people, and no wicked witches. Now, just like the story, I am even more convinced that there's no place like home...
[Last photo from Online Source.]

English Summer 2010 #8 - Bard and Bailey

Carol-Jean and I still wanted to explore nearby Windsor Castle (see picture, round tower), so we dedicated a full day to the enterprise. Needless to say, by the time we got going it was afternoon, but thankfully Windsor was less than an hour's drive from Maidenhead where we were staying. I don't have any inside pictures of Windsor; photography within the buildings is prohibited. These external shots are nevertheless some of the best I took on the trip, IMHO. Windsor is an active residence, the Queen's primary abode, and you don't get to visit when she's at home.

The previous time we were at Windsor (2008) she was in residence and we only got to look inside the compound through an iron gate. Fortunately, this time Elizabeth II and the royal family had gone to Scotland for the summer, which apparently is their custom. Windsore Castle has several baileys, inner courtyards. Inside the stone walls we discovered the England of old--art treasures and suits of armor. There was even a huge room with swords and polearms literally papering the walls to a height a vaulted ceiling.


In regard to the art, there were three--count them--three Rembrandts side-by side in a room where every wall surface was covered with priceless paintings. I kept seeing images that I remembered from history books, to include the portraits of rulers like Queen Victoria and King Henry VIII. Kings and Queens, living and immortalized--No wonder they had soldiers patrolling the grounds!



We had one more mandatory stop-spot on our English summer 2010. As a writer, I wanted to make a pilgrimage to the town where a youthful William Shakespeare courted a well-to-do Anne Hathaway, Stratford-Upon-Avon. (See full picture of Anne Hathaway's house, top of the blog.)

This would be our last full day of unrestricted sightseeing. We drove to Stratford-Upon-Avon with a more-or-less minimum of loss time, due to map-reading goofs and endless games of "Which Exit Do We Take?" at the ubiquitous, dreaded, left-side-driving, clockwise-flowing roundabouts.

Parking at a pay lot and boarding an on-and-off tour bus, we managed to see most of the main Shakespeare-related sites, narrated by a great, pre-recorded, plug-in system in every bus. Anne Hathaway's cottage is a mandatory stop. (Heck, how many of you had to BUILD a model of the thatched-roof country farmhouse in high school? Show of hands,please? Ah-huh. Thought so. Me, too. In 9th grade, I think. At least I recall working on something in class.)

You probably didn't include this view (inside window), because it was taken surreptitiously from inside the second floor of Anne's house. They said no pictures inside, but this actually looks OUTSIDE. (No flash, just available light, so it did no damage. And I didn't get caught.) I remember wondering if Wild Bill made it up here alone with Anne some Saturday afternoon when Mr. Hathaway was in town marketing his produce. Maybe this part hadn't been built yet.

In those days, families slept together in the one room with a fireplace. CJ and I had visited this well-preserved historical bulding twice before, and not surprisingly it had not changed much.


The drooping, thatched roof and time-worn wooden rafters are still there, still evoking the real presence of a flesh-and-blood mortal who gave the world such treasures of the pen and stage. Here an 18-year-old Will Shakespeare walked across open fields to court 26-year-old Anne. His mental scent lingers in the flowers and vegetables of the garden surrounding the house of Anne's father and mother and many siblings.


Shakespeare didn't need to travel to exotic locales to study with great masters--although those who feel the call to seek guides and gurus are equally wise for their endeavors. However, the small-town youth who became the greatest author in English history found inspiration in the winds of May and the stories taught at ordinary schooling, even though formal education was far from ordinary unless, like Will, your parents had "the chinks" (coin).

When we boarded the tour bus to continue our circuit of Stratford it was late afternoon. I wanted to visit the Bard's grave, but he is buried inside Holy Trinity Church in the town, along the banks of the Avon. We retrived our rental car and followed tourist maps, but by the time we arrived the old stone parish had closed for the day. I was intensely disappointed at first, then we found the church property included a lovely park by the river.
I sat on a bench in the shadows of old trees and communed with Shakespeare's presence. (Leave it to a Unity minister to find a way to transcend four hundred years of history and a thirty-minute tardy arrival.) I closed my eyes and did a self-directed guided meditation, imagining Brother Will on the other end of the bench. We had a nice talk, and he suggested a few plot lines for my new sci-fi novel. He's a Trekkie, by the way.

Then it was back into the rental car and navigate the traffic circles and country lanes back to our apartment atop Silent Unity-UK's building at Maidenhead.


As I write this I am sitting at the kitchen table of our Maidenhead flat. (See picture. If you've been following my wife's blog, you might recognize this as a view from within CJ's Window. ) This will be our last night here... Sunday I speak a London South, and Monday we attempt a Space-Available return flight on military aircraft. Not necessarily a done deal, but we feel so good about this summer that we are open and receptive to whatever comes our way. Carol-Jean and I are filled with the joy for this time in England, but we are ready to come home...

English Summer 2010 #6 - From the York Minster and Shambles to Herriot's House to Hadrian's Wall

We drove north from Huddersfield in a hired car--that's Brit-speak for a rental. About an hour later we reached the ancient city of York. If Manhattan, Kansas is the "Little Apple" and Manhattan, NY, is the "Big Apple" then this walled town must be the old apple tree. We wandered down the Shambles, a cobbled footpath between a row of shops and tea rooms, some of which were built before Columbus sailed. (Note the irregularly shaped stones in the street behind Carol-Jean.)


The interior of the York Minster is vast. The photo shows only one wing of the complex. A "minster" is a church that was considered a missionary post at one time, which includes even London's Westminster Abbey as a Christian outpost in Roman times. If some of my students are considering the option of pioneering a new church, I guess they could call it a minster... which is not too far removed from the common Unity practice of calling all centers of spiritual service a "ministry".

After dodging raindrops at York we headed northwest to the small town of Thirsk, made famous by its best-known citizen, the veterinary surgeon J. Alfred Wight, best know by his pen name, James Herriot.



Nice doggie...







<-- --->


Upon entering the surgery, I was fortunate to be able to say hello to Mrs. Pumphrey –whom all Herriot fans will instantly identify as the owner of an obese Pekingese named Tricki Woo. Apparently, she stopped by and refused to leave until Uncle Herriot himself attended to her pampered darling.



This was one of my favorite stops. CJ and I are great fans of James Herriot, who practiced veterinary medicine in the vicinity of Thirsk and other Yorkshire towns until he retired. We sat in a cafe eating scones, then walked the streets he traveled not many years ago before going to the building which served as the model for "Skeldale House" in Herriot's books. We were actually able to book a B&B across the street, so for one night the Herriots were our neighbors so to speak, a few decades removed.

In the evening we ate at the Darrowby Inn (see picture), a nod to fantasy by the tourism-savy locals, who recognized the benefit of identifying their village with Herriot's conflation of several Yorkshire locales into the fictionalized town of Darrowby. The food was basic pub fare, wholesome and tasty and bad for you, but the highlight to the evening came when I began casually chatting with a few older gentlemen sipping beer at the next table. They knew Alf Wight the vet, and you could tell they were respectful of this man who had so much money yet continued to work in the profession he loved. "Aye, that man were a gentleman," one of them said gravely.

During our tour of the Herriot House that afternoon we had seen a clip when Alf Wight was interviewed on American network TV at the height of his popularity. At that moment several of his books were on the New York Times Bestsellers List, and his BBC/PBS TV series was wildly popular. The interviewer asked what Alf would do now that he had all this money and noteriety. He said there wasn't time to do anything special, because he was a veterinarian, and that was a 24/7 job. It was the life he loved, and he never gave a thought to abandoning it just because he had wealth and fame.

I thought--what an fantastic prospertity lesson! Here was a guy who already had everything he wanted, so he was already prosperous. It isn't about quantity of stuff, or the amount of money in the bank, or how many admiring fans you have. Happiness and prosperity are about balance, about quality, not quantity. What fool would abandon a perfect life for mere money?

The next morning we visited the Thirsk church where Alf Wight and family worshipped and were treated to an impromptu pipe organ concert as the musician practiced for Sunday. Then we drove north to Hadrian's Wall (see pictures, below).


Carol-Jean and I have always wanted to see this 70-mile-long attempt to keep the Scots from conquereing Roman British towns. It was a masterful achievement in its day, built by soldiers and not by slaves or abducted locals. The guidebook says there were "Romans" stationed along the wall that came from every part of the Empire--Germans, Spaniards, even a detatchment of Arabs from the marshlands of the Euphrates valley. I stood on the wall at one point, near the ruins of a Roman fort, and said a silent prayer for the soldiers on both sides of this line who faced the terrorism of their day.

The Scots saw the Romans as foreign devils; the Romans saw the Scots as barbarians at the gate. Good thing we don't think like that any more, now that we're spiralized and civilized.

We've got minsters of consciousness to build, my brothers and sisters...

More later, from Windsor Castle.