All of a sudden, it’s days later, and I realize I haven’t written a thing! So this is recollected a few days later. Apologies.
1) The most notable thing about the morning was the rain. I had been looking sort of balefully out the window and at the weather app, wondering just how damp it was going to be — knowing all the time that the only place I could pack my panama hat was on my head.
2) Well, the time came to check out, stash my big suitcase with the front desk staff (they have been so nice), and head off for the Tube to go to Paddington Station. It was only a block away — or two blocks? — but being me, the journey wouldn’t have been complete without a wrong turn that led me back to Euston Station.
3) I still got to Paddington with plenty of time until my train, ideal for people watching, and pigeon avoidance.
4) Lucky me, I scored a table for four all to myself all the way to Bristol. And I started making some FOMO notes about what and how I was feeling. (Looking back at that notebook, I asked myself “Have I so little imagination?”) But a direction did come out of it.
5) Briston Temple Meads Station is a Late Victorian Pile on top of some very modern underground concourses. After a wee bit of confusion, I found a cab and made it to my hotel — which was draped in scaffolding.
6) My fifth-floor bedroom was an actual room-sized room, and I began to think that spending the past week in my tee-tiny Room That Was a Bed may have made my thinking less expansive than it might have been. Here was plenty of room to stretch out, hang things, and store them — and even an odd leather hanging pouch where I could put my morning pages notebook. I felt at home at once.
7) I got to connect with a local friend, after which I just had a burger at the hotel bar. I needed some sleep to formulate my new plans.
8) Thursday dawned, and laundry needed to be my priority. The nice young man at the desk directed me to the Happy Laundrette about a ten-minute walk away. I got change at a nearby gas station (the hotel is a cashless facility — very fashionable and practical, I suppose, but not always helpful). My local friend had told me that I was located at the “unfashionable” end of my street, and as I continued on my way, I could see his point. Passing a small building with a lovely mural on the front with the legend LOVE YOUR COMMUNITY, I found the laundrette in a run-down building that was . . . locked.
8a) I left my laundry with the front desk to take care of.
It Had Better Be Good One Day It Will One Day It Will.
9) By midafternoon, after working on some travel plans, I needed to investigate what looked like it might be a pretty little church behind the hotel. The building now seems to be some creative center, but it was locked up tight. A neighborhood park with some interesting art was in the back.
With some prominent Pre-Raphaelites, The Briar Rose by Burne-Jones and La Belle Dame Sans Merci by Dicksee.
10) Then I set my sights on the local museum, about a half hour walk away along streets named Upper Maudlin. I got there in its final hour of being open, plenty of time for me to see what I wanted to see. They have a little bit of everything in a spacious old building. I was especially taken with a Kehinde Willey, a couple Pre-Raphaelites, a Tuke, and a few other things.
10) But the best part was chatting with the Nice Young Lady in the shop, where I did buy a book.
YES!
11) Another nice conversation took place with another Nice Young Lady in another bookshop, Last Books, between the museum and the cathedral. All titles were £5 or less — how could I resist? I came away with His Majesty’s Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World’s Largest Flying Machine and The First Celebrities: Five Regency Portraits.
12) Quite unexpectedly I ended up at evensong at Bristol Cathedral, one of maybe a dozen attendees. I had thought just to have a look around. On entering, though, when the nice young lady asked “Are you here for evensong?” I responded “May I please?” before I could stop myself. And the service of five choristers with a cantor and brief readings was moving in its simplicity, its spare sonorous harmonies, and the enormity of the cathedral lit softly by an evening’s stained glass.
After evensong, in front of the cathedral.
13) Afterward I ankled back up the hill to an Italian place that had been recommended to me, Moltobuono! After an embarrassingly long time with me standing in the way of people coming and going, one of the waiters confirmed that the one reservation that had not shown up was not coming, and I could have that table, but only for an hour and ten minutes. I was conducted up a flight of stairs into a crowded white-walled mezzanine floored in wide pine, and ended up with a succulent meal of a burrata with tomato, and then a dish of cacio e pepe that could have been larger, but was too dreamy and savory to quibble about. I’m such a glutton anyway.
If you’re going to vandalize an 18th-century building, you might as well use an 18th-century typeface.
14) And then I walked back to my hotel, unashamed to have an early night, and to continue to consider my newly forming plans for . . . Paris and Vienna.
Sunset at Sea after a Storm, by Danby.