For those of you who wondered or cared, the quotation in the header is from the The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy. It is surprisingly good, and I enjoyed it more than a lot of the others that I had to read as part of my degree requirements in English. One day I keep promising myself I will reread it just for fun. However, my reading list just keeps getting longer and longer. I don’t think that I ever met a library or bookstore that I didn’t like and could find something to buy, take home, and tell myself that I would read it next…just as soon as I finish the book I am on now.
Kathy and I just returned from a three-week tour of Paris and London. She called it my post-graduation “enlightment” tour. The early American graduates from the universities were usually sent to Europe by the parents as part of their graduation. They said that it was to broaden their horizons and such, but I suspect that it was just a way (expensive as it might have been) to keep those unemployed lugs out of the house for just a little longer. Anyway, we went to Paris for a week and London for two weeks. Coming back, we got out of Gatwick Airport in London a couple of days before all the latest terroisom stuff occurred. Even then, it was a three-hour effort to get through security at Gatwick prior to our flight. I can’t imagine what it is now.
Whn people ask me if I enjoyed the trip, I answer yes. I enjoyed England more than France, but I think that is because of the French-the language not the people. The people were friendly–they had their own way of doing things (don’t we all?) but all-in-all they were friendly and helpful. especially the guy at the laudromat who taught Kathy how to use the very strange facilities on a rainy morning the day before we left.
Anyway, it was enjoyable. I got to see Stonehenge, a bunch of cathedrals, and the Lourve and British Museum–took a lot of pictures, lost a lot when a camera memory card malfunctioned (I always want to put a dash in malfunction for some reason), and walked a lot of old streets with old buildings and more history and people than I could really comprehend.
It was great to get back home, though. I learned why people don’t fly from Atlanta to Augusta, that the world is a small place again-meeting a professor in the airport in Atlanta trying to get home. That meeting places second to meeting a fellow Camden High school graduate in a Kentucky Fried Chicken place in Seoul, Korea–recognized the classring on his finger as he waited for his order. I also relearned just how good a good American hamburger really is.
Great to be home, and now I have to get to work on the reading list. After reading The God Delusion by Dawkins, I am determioned to finish reading Mere Christianity by Lewis. Really, I mean it–this time all the way from front to rear. It seems everytime I start to read that book I get sidetracked. I bought the Dawkins book at the British Museum–I didn’t see the Lewis book, wonder why? Anyway, it is just a long rehash of a lot of things he has written in other books. I am glad that he is so sure of Evolution and god. The capitilization of those two words was on purpose as far as Dawkins is concerned.
Well, off I go..Kathy had some surgery and I am doing the nurse and homekeeper thing.
