1) Today’s plan of action featured a bit of a pub crawl, an informal and intimate tour of the London Road Cemetery, and my very first viewing of the Eurovision Song Contest. It’s a lot to take in!
2) Unsolicited, Paul provided me with a comfortable teal cashmere sweater. The day was beginning gray and shivery.
3) We rode into the town at the top front of a double decker bus into Coventry. Riding high up and near the front, one is unsure just how an intersection will be cleared. This didn’t keep me from enjoying the views of houses ornamented with roses, azaelas, and rhododendrons.
4) Our first stop was the Old Windmill, dating from 1451, for a pint of cider in a tiny front room that could barely squeeze four into it. And four we became, as we were joined by Elizabeth, a friend of my hosts, charming both for her knowledge of Coventry and, most importantly, for herself.
5) From there we headed to the Golden Cross for lunch, where I enjoyed the rhubarb cider and black pudding and gammon hash as directed in the front room. It was hearty and quite good. The rhubarb cider I would describe as delicate. On the other hand, something stiffer at midday would not have been a good choice for me.
6) For someone interested in history the way I am, the afternoon was particularly fortunate in providing me with three companions who knew a lot about what I was seeing, and enjoyed sharing it. En route to the cemetery, bits of the original Coventry wall were pointed out, and other things, including a marvelous medieval ruin discovered after the bombing of Coventry. Other buildings had been built around it, making it sort of the center of an architectural onion.
7) But the London Road Cemetery yielded incredible wonders to me in its state of dilapidated, overgrown charm. Elizabeth, it turns out, had done a great deal of research on prominent permanent residents, which was evident on plaques throughout.
7a) Walter Wright went down with the Lusitania. There were also quite a few young men throughout the cemetery who died at the Battle of Ypres, as well as elsewhere in France.
7b) Other notable forms of death included someone who was attacked by an elephant, that person’s cousin who was later attacked by a tiger, and one man who was scalded to death by a vat of beer he was brewing at home.
7c) Elizabeth pointed out to us a new gravestone, shaped like a book, erected by the descendants of a woman buried there believed to be the child of George IV and Mrs. Fitzherbert.
8) From the cemetery, we walked to our last pub, Triumph Brewery, where we drank cider outside on the blazing sun. I had to go Zouave and hang a handkerchief behind my cap to protect my neck. We all broke out laughing when a young woman at the next table took a sip of something and blurted out “This is disgusting!”
9) We parted from Elizabeth at her bus stop and continued on our way back to ours, passing interesting buildings both ancient and modern, the statue of Lady Godiva, and the market cross of Edward VI.
10) And in the evening, I had my first-ever viewing of the Eurovision Song Contest, a sparkling panoply of high-energy showmanship and more than a little camp. I had been tired and wrung out the previous two evenings, but this really kept me going until the voting ended about midnight. I was sorry the UK didn’t do better; “What the Hell Just Happened?” was the only number that gave me goosebumps, but not the only number I loved.
10a) Throughout I kept thinking of this from a production standpoint: allocation of backstage space, scheduling tech rehearsals, transportation, etc.
11) I was so hyped up afteward I couldn’t get to sleep until after 3 AM. I had to pass some of the time reading Chasing Beauty to bring myself down.
In fact, Askew in every way.