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Today we travel two hours north from London to Bury St Edmunds, to stay with my cousin Sally. We'll also be visiting my 91 year old Auntie Beth, my mother's sole surviving sibling, who lives in a nursing home near Sally. We're being driven by another of my cousins, Barbie, who's Sally's sister.
It's a sunny day, so Barbie says we should take the scenic route through some of East Anglia's small villages. Apart from being very attractive, they're also notable for their quaint names, Great Dunmow and Steeple Bumpstead amongst them. Many of the older houses have thatched rooves, which despite appearances to the contrary are apparently very waterproof and provide good thermal insulation. The downside is that they need to be replaced every now and then, which Barbie says is becoming increasingly difficult as skilled thatchers are becoming a rare commodity. Some of the houses have distinctive patterns stamped into the external walls, which Barbie tells us is called pargetting. The roads are windy, which Barbie says is a hangover from medieval times when paths between villages snaked between properties. I ask Barbie what a town needs to do to earn the title "Great". She says that for
a town to be called, for example, Great Dunmow, there must also be one called Little Dunmow. The larger or more important of the two becomes the Great one, and the other one is left as Small. I ask her whether they swap names if the Small one later becomes the larger of the two, but apparently not. I think this is probably just as well. It could get a bit confusing for postmen, and well as making a lot of work for cartographers and the installers of road signs.
Sally has kindly offered to do some washing for us, which we hang on the line on her back lawn. It seems however that we may have overdone it just a tad - our clothes are too heavy and they break the line. We try to ease our guilt by fixing it with some carefully constructed knots, but we're still feeling unhappy that our careless actions mean that this once pristine structure will never be quite the same again. It seems, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the clothes dry a lot more quickly on Sally's line than they did hung over the bath at the hotel. We have tasty homemade soup
and fruit for lunch sitting out in the garden. It's extremely pleasant.
We set off to visit Auntie Beth. The last time I saw her was three years ago when I was here on a business trip and she was in a different nursing home then. Sally and Barbie warn us that she's deteriorated quite a bit since, and that we shouldn't be at all surprised if she doesn't respond to us, as she's often unresponsive to them. Sally did say that she seemed to understand that we were coming, and she certainly seems to brighten up when she sees us. She clearly understands everything we're saying, laughs at some of our stories, and says ''yes" appropriately in response to our questions. After we leave Sally says that this is the most responsive she's been for several months, which is nice to hear. I've always been very fond of Auntie Beth. She and her late husband, my Uncle Geoff, were always very good to me, and I particularly remember them having me to stay with them almost every weekend when I worked in England for three months back in the winter of 1989.
Next stop are the ruins of the Abbey of Saint Edmund and the St Edmundsbury Cathedral. The Abbey was built sometime around the year 1,000 AD and was once one of the largest in Europe. It was destroyed by the local townspeople in 1327 when they got a bit upset with the rules it had imposed on them. It seems however that they didn't stay upset for too long; parts of it were rebuilt almost immediately. The gardens around it are beautiful. Some of the houses in the grounds have incorporated parts of the ruins of the Abbey's walls, which looks slightly strange. We stroll through Bury's ancient streets between medieval buildings and enjoy a superb meal in one of the town's restaurants.
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