Countryside and cream tea.

---

After two amazing but frenetic weeks in NYC I was exhausted. So when booking accommodation in London, I decided to splash out.

One private room, please.

It was tiny, a little dingy and quite expensive, but I had a nice view of some backyards and a room where I could sleep, Skype and watch movies without disruption.

Before long, I was very glad to have made that decision. Along with monstrous jet lag, I woke on my first night feeling very sick indeed. I had to stay in bed for the next 24 hours. The next day was my train to Bristol, where I was to be picked up by Jemma Heseltine (my first cousin once removed or something???) and taken to their lovely house in the country. The walk-tube-walk with all my bags to get to the bus was a nightmare with my queasy stomach, but I did it! Unfortunately, in my disoriented state, I left my ukulele on the bus when I got off. Not a great start to my first few days in the UK.

But things got better very quickly. The Heseltines have a beautiful house in the countryside, in between Bristol and Bath. Although I had only met 2 out of 5 of them, they soon felt like family (and not just because of the ubiquitous red hair). They set me up with my own bed and proceeded to pamper and spoil me, and generally show me a lovely time. We discovered our mutual love of talking a lot and spent hours and hours chatting, catching up and generally yabbering on. We are definitely related.

We took things very slowly, mainly due to the fact that I kept accidentally having enormous sleep ins. On one day Sophie and Jemma took me for a look at Bath, which is a gorgeous old city. All the buildings are made of limestone and everything matches and looks so ancient. It is rather bizarre to see shops like KFC based in such old buildings. We saw The Circus (some buildings, not a show), The Royal Crescent and lots of gorgeous houses that we would love to live in but will never be able to afford. We wandered past Jane Austen’s old house and peered over the fence at the moss-covered elegance of the Roman Bath’s. We went to Sally Lunn’s and had cream tea (my new favourite snack: a pot of tea with scones and cream) and a Sally Lunn bun, which is a weird cake thing that kind of tastes like sweet toast. It was a gorgeous little café that was built in 1670. I suddenly realised that people were drinking tea and eating buns there more than 100 years before the First Fleet came to Australia. Everything in England is so old!

Sophie also took me to a tiny little town called Castlecombe, where all the tiny little houses are also matching and look like they are out of a period drama. In fact a number of movies, including War Horse, were filmed there. It had an amazing church and old hotel, and we enjoyed a pint at the local pub.

Much to the horror of every person in England, the UK spring is being unseasonably cold and rainy. When the icy wind blows through those narrow lanes, it makes your skin hurt and your bones feel like huddling up close inside your body. But when the sun comes out, even if it isn’t very warm, everything seems lighter and shinier. On one positively balmy afternoon Sophie and I went for a walk in the gorgeous English countryside and woodlands. The sun was so radiant and made us feel so content that we didn’t even mind that most of the crops around us were being spread with a layer of pungent manure in preparation for planting.

While I was there, the Heseltine girls showed me great demonstrations of English culture. I saw one end of the spectrum while watching the show ‘The Only Way is Essex’ and then saw the other while watching the annual jumps horse race, The Grand National. I put a quid on the horse ‘Tea for Three’ which appropriately came third, leaving me with 5 quid!

On my last night in town I caught up with my Quit Coal friend Jo in Bath. She took me to a great pub called The Bell where we danced to old soul records and freaked out her new Italian housemate who had ‘never seen dancing like that before’.

The next day I met up with my friends from Melbourne, Dom and Maya, and we started our journey out to Cornwall!

---