Cheltenham was a lot of fun but ghostly with it. You know what it's like, you walk the streets of a town you used to know well and it's familiar, you recognize it, but memories crowd around like shades seen through the corner of an eye or an overlay, making the place weirdly unfamiliar, or something like that. Whatever, a few nights in 'Nam over it was time to ride the rails back to London.
It's not hard, just get on a train and go, then set up at the conveniently central and priced Tavistock hotel; I like that place, it's cheap and walking distance to everywhere. From there, hang out at the Lamb by Covent Garden. The pub used to be known as the "bucket of blood," thanks to bare knuckle fights, and sits next to an alley where assassins tried to kill Dryden but failed. Clearly a rough place back in the late seventeenth century.
Today it's a popular pub, and its cobbled courtyard is pretty much full. I like it a lot and it's a convenient staging post for drinks and dinner at the NatLib, not so far away on the Embankment. But whatever, the last week of London was good in a Lamb, Reform, NatLib kind of way and then it was time, all too soon, to return to Texas. So wheel your suitcase out of the Tav, stop for a refreshingly foamy coffee drink outside Russell Square tube and head underground to Heathrow.
Ten hours later you're in Texas, DFW, and everything's different. How so? Big question, and I'll not attempt an answer here and now but there is this, you can carry a pistol in Texas and you can't in the UK. Free men, you see, can defend themselves, slaves cannot. And here endeth the exeat.
More anon,
LSP
