Postcard Villages and Manor Houses

It has been a while since I posted last. I've been a bit under the weather with a cold which has rendered me fatigued. Each day I feel slightly better, of course, but in the meantime, I get very tired very fast. We haven't been venturing out in the mornings while I build up some steam.

Besides my not feeling tip top, the weather has been not been playing nice. Almost every morning there is evidence of rain overnight, sometimes even lingering into mid-morning. The ground has a permanent case of spring mud which is fine for driving, but not for walking.

None the less, every afternoon we venture out to someplace of greater or lesser interest. 

Here's a review of some of the places that we have been in the past few days.

Jared and Evelyn left for an overnight jaunt to Cardiff, Wales, and then back by way of Bath and Salisbury to see Stonehenge. While they were away, we went to a historic home maintained by the National Trust called Snowshill, just a short drive from our cottage.

Tuesday, March 20

Snowshill Manor (the house and the small village) was purchased by an "eccentric" named Charles Wade in 1919, just after returning from the Great War.  He inherited a fortune from a sugar plantation that his father owned in St. Kitts. When a young man, he trained and worked for a few years as an architect.

However, he was one of those men who had inherited a fortune and had no desire to work. Instead, he spent his time collecting.

First, Wade set upon a rehabilitation project for the manor house which was apparently in derelict condition when he bought it. He added some out buildings for gardening, like this one.

Then he started putting "things" into his house. The house was so full that he made his home in the adjacent priest's quarters which were very, very spartan.

According to the talk by the docents, he collected only those things that he thought had merit based on workmanship or craftsmanship. I totally failed to see that aspect of his collection. Most items were very work-a-day, ordinary items that would have been found in a family home. He did have some specialized exhibits like this one for musical instruments.

and

You can see that this little nook interested me, whereas most of the rest of the house left me cold -- with the exception of the fascinating display of Japanese armour (English spelling because we are in England, after all):

As is often the case (or actually almost always the case) visitors were allowed to take photographs, but without flash. Therefore, these photos taken in a darkened room are a bit, well, dark.

I counted a dozen suits of armour on display and a docent told me that there are two to three times that many in storage. He bought them bit by bit at local second hand shops and put them together himself. They are fashioned out of strips of something that looks like ivory. Each strip has a series of holes that are for fabric to be woven in and out to hold the whole piece together. I think that the steel armour of Europe looks a lot more protective than this construction. The Japanese were fierce warriors, so they probably had a way of making this armour do the trick.

Often, eccentric collectors like Mr. Wade were what were euphemistically called "life-long bachelors" meaning that they were either just a bit too balmy to be married or were homosexual (at a time when that was illegal). So, when I inquired from a docent about Mr. Wade's marital status, I was a bit surprised to find that he had married a younger village woman (read: not wealthy like him) when he was 62. Before he died in 1956, he gave his property to the National Trust. In his later years, he spent little time at Snowshill and instead spent much of his time in St. Kitts with infrequent visits to England. 

Before leaving Snowshill completely, I must add this notice that I saw on the steps leading to the garden. It is so very English.

Wednesday, March 21

It was a somewhat bleak day (no surprise) as you can see in this photo of Upton House, near Banbury.

Upton House was begun sometime in the mid-1550's and, of course, was much more modest then than it appears to be now.

These houses are so large and linear that taking adequate photographs of them is difficult. To get the entire width of the house in one shot, one needs to be so far away that the house becomes tiny. Instead of being built up, most of these houses were built out, since they had so much land on which to build.

Upton House is another property in the care of the National Trust. This house, like so many others, was gifted to the government in lieu of estate taxes. Like many heirs, the widow gave it with the proviso that the family be allowed to live in part of it for as long as they wished. Generally, when property is given (one might even say "surrendered") to the government, it is maintained by the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty, or, commonly known as the National Trust. 

We are members of the American branch of the Trust, called The Royal Oak Society, which gives us free entrance to all of their properties. When we visited England the last time, in 2014, we went to a total of 33 properties -- many, many more than the average Briton. (Just as we have visited more places in Italy than the average Italian or more places in France than the French.)

So, about this house; Upton House. It had many additions, demises and alterations over the centuries. The latest iteration removed a couple of towers and added a couple of second stories, all of which appears seamless from both the inside and the outside. The Trust has chosen to reconstruct the interior design of the house according to the renovation done in the 1930's, so while it is still extremely grand, it is also stripped down from its ornateness of the previous periods. As an example, the decorative plaster ceilings were replaced with plain ones, although the Trust displays photographs of the "original" ceilings for visitors to grasp the difference. This is one of the rooms that received the 30's treatment. It is a very peaceful space and I can easily imagine spending evenings here after dinner.

This house was full of artwork by masters of various centuries and countries. There were some by Tintorello, Tiepolo, Francesco Guardi, Canaletto, Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Jan Steen, Hieronymous Bosch, Bruegel the Elder, Hogarth, and El Greco.

If you look closely, the large painting over the sofa in the previous photo is by Canaletto, entitled "Bacino di San Marco, Venice".  Here is a somewhat better photo of it.

There was also a collection of English fine porcelain including Chelsea, Derby, Bow and Worcester, as well as some French Sevres.

I don't know much about china/porcelain, therefore, this collection -- there were lots of cabinets like this one -- pretty much was lost on me. I suppose that there is no time like the present to educate myself about valuable porcelains, but they just don't interest me. Even Larry, the collector of souvenir china from eBay, wasn't much interested. I'm sure that these porcelains are worth a small fortune, or maybe even a large fortune. None the less, I passed them by.

In the bequest of a manor house to the Trust, the owner often makes conditions. In one house that we visited, it was that fresh flowers must be in every room of the house (a nice touch, though pricey in perpetuity). I believe that in this house, Upton House, the condition was that the porcelains must be on display.

Thursday, March 22

Jared and Evelyn returned the night before, so we are all together again and off for a day trip to Oxford.

Oxford is a wonderful, rather small city with a plethora of university life. Everything about Oxford centers around the colleges, of which there are a mind-numbing 36 (or, 38 depending upon which source you choose). 

Without any advance research, we simply chose the first one that we came to, Balliol College, which is one of the oldest, being built during the 1200's. The other two oldest colleges are Merton and University, all established at about the same time.The newest college, Kellogg College, was founded in 1990. 

Balliol has that look quintessential to Oxford.

Here's a view of their dining hall, which could easily be used for a movie set.

Their dishes and table mats had the college insignia emblazoned on them. These tables in the foreground were set up this way, I suspect, for photographs. The students had just vacated the hall and their tables were cleaned off. Portraits of past presidents lined the walls, including one of the recent presidents in a decidedly relaxed pose. I forgot to take a shot of it, but it made for quite a jolt in juxtaposition to the more formal portraits.

Oxford is also famous for the Bodleian Library. As was the case on our last visit, there was a literary convention in the city, so most of the Bodleian was closed to the public.

Another noted place in Oxford is the Ashmolean Museum. 

I was hoping to go to see the new exhibit on American art "From O'Keefe to Hopper" because I am an unabashed fan of Hopper. Unfortunately, the show opened the following day. It is a bit of a jaunt to Oxford (nearly two hours due to construction and what not), so I doubt that we will get there. No matter, I can picture in my mind most his paintings.

We didn't spend a lot of time in Oxford, but enough for Jared and Evelyn to get the flavor of it. We had a planned evening out to visit a rehearsal of Morris dancers. This is not the season for them to be out at pubs in the evening, but we were fortunate to be invited to watch a group of them rehearse.

We were invited to join in on the last dance. We enjoyed the evening quite a lot. I was surprised that the majority of the dancers were of, let's say, retirement age. This is a very energetic sport and I got winded just doing one dance. These dancers had been at it for about two hours and didn't seem any worse for the wear.

This group, called "Happenstance" is dressed in the Border Morris fashion, meaning tatters. They represent the poor farmers who, during the non-farming cold months, would go out in their tattered clothing (and coal-blackened faces) to beg from the landowners and merchants. More recognizable and what we think of as typical dress is the white pants and shirts, red sashes, hats with flowers and bells strapped to legs of the Cotswold Morris dancers.

http://www.cotswolds.info/blogs/morris-dancers.shtml

Friday, March 23

Jared and Evelyn left the Cotswolds for a long weekend in London before returning home. We had a very enjoyable visit from them.

We took the day off from being a tourist because my cold settled in for the day. We spent a quiet day at the cottage, reading emails and getting updated on the news from the States.

Saturday, March 24

We hadn't planned any particular trip for the day, so we decided to just take a ride around the countryside to see some villages that we hadn't seen before. We followed an itinerary on a map that Jared gave us. 

We went through some lovely little villages, like Guiting Power, that we had been through the night before but hadn't seen because it was dark. Now we could actually appreciate them. Our trail led us to Cheltenham, quite a large city, where we stopped to see the Pittville Pump Room, in a suburb of the city.

The interior is a lovely space that is used for private parties and concerts. When we were there, there were several people in discussion about the placement of tables and chairs for an upcoming event.

On our little road trip, we stopped at an English Heritage site called Belas Knap which is a burial mound. I am not necessarily game for a walk in the mud, and not knowing how far the walk would be, I declined to accompany Larry on his walk (tromp?) up the muddy hillside. While I was waiting for him to return, I looked up the satellite map. I was very surprised to see that there was quite a fair amount of walking because it was far off the parking area (and did I mention UPHILL?). No wonder it took him so long to return.

The Belas Knap is thought to be the oldest and largest and best preserved Neolithic long barrow, dating from about 3000 BC. That would make it around the time of the earliest known Egyptian kingdoms.  

It is about 65 feet wide and 165 feet long. I like this description of it in the Rough Guide to The Cotswolds "this best preserved burial chamber in England, stretched out like a strange sleeping beast cloaked in green velvet".

This view shows the large false entrance thought to have been put there to fool potential grave robbers. But, who knows?

We returned to Cheltenham, but not to the Pump Room, in the evening for a concert of the Bach B-Minor Mass, by the Cheltenham Bach Choir.

Sunday, March 25

Today marks Daylight Savings Time in England, so we lost an hour of the day, not that we felt inclined to get up any earlier, but that we were short an hour by the end of the day. It has been very nice, though, to have more sunlight at the end of the afternoon and drive back to the cottage in daylight instead of dusk, or even darkness.

On the schedule for today: Sudeley Castle, just outside of Winchcombe, a half hour's drive from the cottage. Sudley is not a National Trust property, in fact it is still privately owned by Lady Ashcombe and her adult children, Henry and Mollie. The family name is Dent-Brockelhurst. Lady Ashcombe married Baron Ashcombe after her husband Mark Dent-Brockelhurst died and left her in debt due to renovations and the estate tax due upon his death. Baron Ashcombe was evidently wealthy because he funded the rest of the renovations to the castle, making it possible to open it to visitors. Unlike most castles and large manor houses, Sudeley was not given to the government in lieu of taxes.

Sudeley was originally begun as a small manor house in the 1200's. By a century later, it was enlarged and made into a small castle by a chap called Ralph Boteler. He had inherited the property as a result of being victorious during the Hundred Years' War. He then fell out of favor for choosing the wrong side (the Lancastrians) and was punished by having the castle taken away from him (even though he had paid for all improvements) by Henry VI who gave it to his brother, Richard Plantagenet (later known as King Richard III -- you'll remember him as being the king found buried under a car park in Leicester).

When King Richard owned it, he enlarged it again and added what must have been an extremely grand Banqueting Hall. Unfortunately, during the Civil War almost two hundred years later, the castle was under seige and the walls were bombarded with cannon. That put an end to the stained glass windows and most of the ediface. There was then a period of another couple hundred years when the castle lay in abandonment and decay.

But, before the Civil War, the property was handed around from king to nobleman over and over for many generations until  it came to King Henry VIII, who used it as a summer escape. His sixth and final wife, Catherine Parr used the estate to get away from court. After Henry died, she married Thomas Seymour and made this her permanent home and died here in 1548 shortly after giving birth to her daughter, Mary Seymour. She is buried here in the chapel, the only Queen of England to be buried on private property.

A year later, Lord Seymour was executed (oh, how fast one can fall out of favor!) and the property again became owned by the crown.

And so it went, in and out of royal hands for the next few centuries. Due the rule of primogeniture, properties get handed down through a sometimes winding path (remember Downton Abbey?). So, after a few son-less families it came on the market and was purchased by the Dent-Brockelhurst family.

That brings us to the current day with Lady Ashcombe and her family. They have kept up the formal gardens, maintained the ruins from further decay and opened the castle to the public to help support the ongoing financial needs of running such a property. Apparently, most of the income-producing lands were sold during a previous estate tax problem.

It really doesn't take much over-thinking of the situation to realize that the English government should revise their punitive estate tax system. The result of paying huge taxes often leaves the family poorer than the tenant farmers who rent their lands from them. Eventually, the government will end up owning every estate, manor house, castle, and the like. No wonder that there are such high income taxes in the UK.

Well, more about Sudeley. The gardens could use a fresh clipping, but otherwise are lovely to look at from a distance.

Not many of the rooms are open to the public, since the families (mother, son and family and daughter and family) still live there.

This charming little spot, an oriel, would make a nice little reading nook. It was in a passageway between buildings. As you can see, on the day that we were there, it was drenched in sunlight.

In the evening on Sunday, Palm Sunday, we attended a concert in Chipping Norton by a group called the Adderbury Ensenble. The first half of the program was quartets and the second half was a Schumann quintet.

We enjoyed the concert even though we had heard another concert the night before.

Monday, March 26

On Monday, we had another sunny day and we went to Packwood House in Warwickshire, not far from Stratford. 

Packwood House was not large, but it definitely was interesting. I always say that in some ways, all of the Trust houses are the same, and yet they are all different. This one was one of the smaller houses, but interesting because although it was originally built in the mid-1500's as a modest farmhouse, it had been modernized over the centuries and ended up looking nothing like it started.

It had a very nice exterior, in very good condition.

This building was interesting because the last owner had set about "restoring" it. His father a very wealthy industrialist (glove maker, I think) bought this house which is strange given his wealth because it was a very modest house. The son, Baron Ash (Baron was his name, not his title), grew up there and apparently loved the house. When his parents moved, Ash started his work. He was yet another wealthy "life-long bachelor" who had plenty of time on his hands and he made his life's work the renovation of this house.

He spent a lifetime collecting architectural details from buildings being sold or demolished to put into his house. The result is just astonishing.

He remodeled a cow barn into a great hall with a spring floor (the flooring literally sits on springs attached to the floor beams) for dancing. He apparently loved to entertain and used this new room for holding large parties.

Then, he built this hallway connecting the great hall with the rest of the house.

He collected tapestries, floor boards, fireplaces, beams, furniture, windows and all sorts of pieces that he had architects engineer into the house. 

Besides the renovations on the house itself, he reconstructed the formal garden of giant yews, some of which were very old when he got there.

Not only was it a lovely, sunny day but the house turned out to be wonderful. I am so glad that we went there.

By the way, the main road (two lane, so not huge) goes straight through the gates of the property which takes up land on both sides of the road.

Tomorrow, we plan to go to Blenheim Palace.

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Time Stands Still in the Cotswolds

Monday, March 12

We had a rather tiring drive from Heathrow airport where we picked up our car. We were fine while on the highway, but then when we had to navigate the town roads, things slowed down to a 5 mph crawl. I couldn't really figure out where the problem was because we never saw any road repairs or accidents or even detours (called "diversion" here). None the less, we had pretty slow going for what seemed like an hour.

We eventually arrived at our cottage in Upper Slaughter later in the afternoon. This is one of the rentals where the owner has left the key, so it didn't really matter when we arrived: there would not be anyone waiting for us to arrive. After settling in, we found our way to the Tesco about four miles away in Stow-in-the-Wold. Leave it to the Brits to have such unusual town names!

Tuesday, March 13

Our son, Jared, and his wife Evelyn arrived today for a two week stay in England, partly with us and partly to see some of the country. They had an even longer trip to get to the cottage than we did, with traffic backed up at the same places, but just longer backups.

We did not plan to do anything in particular on this day, not knowing when they might arrive. Not every day has to be filled with sightseeing. In fact, I rather enjoy the occasional day when we don't do much of anything. That is one of the reasons that I wanted to stay in one rental for an extended period of time. We will be here in our cottage for nearly four weeks, time enough to find our way around and feel comfortable here before moving on to a new place to get accustomed to.

This cottage is plenty spacious for the four of us. It has two bedrooms and a full bath upstairs and one bedroom and a full bath downstairs, plus a big-enough kitchen and a comfortable sitting room.

The little complex of cottages was rebuilt from the original (probably they had fallen into disuse and, therefore, disrepair) in 1906 by the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens. In English architecture, Lutyens is considered to be the late Victorian equivalent of Christopher Wren of the early 18th century. He was the chief architect for the building of New Delhi. 

(New Delhi was constructed from the ground up when the capital was moved from old Delhi. The cornerstone to the new city was laid in 1911 and the original buildings were completed by 1935, after Lutyen's death.) 

The whole village of Upper Slaughter, and also Lower Slaughter, is composed of buildings that look like this, which is our view from our front door.

These cottages would have originally been built as housing for the workers and tenant farmers connected to the manor. In fact, this entire tiny village would have been built to support the manor.

At the end of our road, a few hundred feet away, the road ends for regular vehicular traffic because there is a ford to cross. The footbridge allows pedestrian traffic and horses with wagons could get through easily, but cars are a no-go. You can't really see the ford from this angle, but it is just to the right of the tree and just before the footbridge.

This is such a typical scene of the Cotswolds that it could be used as part of a costume drama set. Can't you just picture Judy Dench in a period costume walking over the footbridge with her market basket in hand?

When the iconic British phone booths were no longer needed, a lot of them were repurposed to house defibrillators. This is the one opposite our sitting room window. 

On the first morning of our stay here, I saw a male pheasant walking down the center of the road just in front of the call box. Naturally, I did not have my camera ready.

Wednesday, March 14

Wednesday turned out to be a rather cold day and we had little incentive to do anything that required us to be outside. However, we did go to Stratford-upon-Avon for a play. We saw a really awful production of "The Duchess of Malfi" at the small, Swan Theater, which is the older part of the building where the Royal Shakespeare Company has its home.

This is the whole theater complex, which to my eyes looks like a repurposed industrial building instead of the purpose-built building that it is.

Thursday, March 15

Time for a country walk. There is a walking path just about everywhere one looks, one of which goes past our cottage. We decided to all go for a walk that promised to be less than a mile in each direction, thinking that it would be mild.

Well. We started out just fine, the weather was clear enough to not threaten rain or too much wind. There had been snow here for the past two weeks with some still on the ground, and then we had some light showers. Needless to say, we had some tough slogging through the muck in the path. Oh, and one more thing: there was the last day of the hunt season the day before and they had used this combination walking path/bridle path. The pathway goes through a sheep pasture with manure piles here and there. The horses had dropped their own manure as they went along and stirred the whole thing up with their hooves. Then there was the general dampness of early spring.

Oh boy, did we have muck. None of us had packed big room-hogging Wellies, so we made our way through in our shoes. Yuck.

We got to the road and quickly realized that we had gone the wrong way from the beginning! There was nothing to do, really, but to return the same way that we came. As usual, the way back seemed shorter than the way out.

We were all rather happy to be back to the cottage. I banned the shoes from the house until they were cleaned off. I brought out a brush and many pitchers of water in an attempt to clean them. We did a fairly good job and brought them in to put on the hearth (no fire in the fireplace, though).

It is a good thing that we are not expected to have some level of productivity on this trip, because we would fail that test. No matter.

Friday, March 16

We often don't go out in the morning, what with late sleeping, leisurely breakfasts, catching up on email and the news (sometimes I wish that I had skipped that part). So, after lunch, we venture out to some place that we haven't seen before or that we haven't  been to in a long while. 

Bourton-on-the-Water is one of those places. The last time that we were there was in 1985 when our sons were elementary/junior high school age.

It is one of those little villages that would be ever so charming if only the flocks of tourists would stay away. Of course, if there were no tourists going there, the town would fall into disuse, the economic base would dry up and the housing stock would start to look a bit scruffy.

As it is, the locals put up with tourists because they keep the village alive. This row of oh-so-typical Cotswold attached houses is mostly "holiday lets" nowadays. Even in this shoulder of the shoulder season, there were quite a lot of tourists strolling around town on this blustery day, but none in my photo because I always patiently wait for everyone to move on so that I can have a people-free postcard photo.

The plan for the afternoon was that we would all go to the village, have some time to stroll around, and then we would go different ways. Jared and Evelyn would walk back to the cottage through the countryside on one of the many walking paths. Larry and I would drive back to the cottage and maybe stop at a grocery store on the way and pick up some scones to have later in the day with some tea. Alas, before we got no more than ten minutes out of town, the rain started coming down quite seriously. I wasn't quite sure what to do next, but the walk for Jared and Evelyn was about three miles and I really thought that to be too far to walk in the rain.   

My judgment told me to turn around and go back to pick them up. I figured that we would probably see them along the road on the way out of the village. They had stopped at the miniature village in town and therefore were not far along the route, making it easy to spot them. They seemed a bit glad to hop in and ride the way home. Not having a UK SIM card, they could not call us, so their plan had been to duck into a pub and wait it out. 

We got quite a bit of rain, but being tucked into the cottage with a cup of tea made it not such a bad afternoon.

Saturday, March 17

St. Patrick's Day today. I remember when I visited England in the mid-90's, I happened to be here for a couple of weeks in March, including St. Patrick's Day. There was still at that time (maybe even now, but I don't know) a deep unrest between the English and the Irish. It was not far off from the "troubles" in Ireland, at least in the mind anyway.

I was in London and I was quite concerned about any disruptions during the day. I had purchased tickets to a concert at St. Martin-in-the-Field, which is just across the street from Trafalgar Square that evening and I wasn't sure if it would be safe to go or not. It turned out that at that time, St. Patrick's Day was a total non-event. But, now, all these years later, it seems that St. Patrick's Day is observed here in much the same style as in the US; not with parades, but with a lot of beer being consumed. We, however, were experiencing a lousy day of extremely cold, windy weather, so we stayed in the entire day. It was a good time to play Scrabble. (I won!)

Sunday, March 18

We can't just stay in the cottage for our whole time here, so we decided to go out for lunch at a brewery in Hook Norton. 

On the way, we stopped to see the Rollright Stones, a very modest ring of stones from prehistoric times. This ring will never overshadow Stonehenge!

Again, the cold wind kept us from really wanting to spend much time there. So, on to the brewery.

We skipped the official tour because it seemed a bit pricey and simply went to their little museum on the history of their company and its beer making process. But first, lunch.

Not a bad way to spend an otherwise lousy Sunday afternoon.

Monday, March 19

After lunch, we had a nice drive through the countryside on our way back to Stratford-upon-Avon for an evening show.

We saw the signs for the Broadway Tower, which is apparently thought to be iconic because it is featured on the brochures for the Cotswolds.  Though it features a crenalated top, it was not built as a defensive structure, but as a "folly"; one of those useless structures built strictly for the enjoyment of its owner. This one apparently had some living areas in it because William Morris (remember him?) spent some summers living there.

It was a bitterly cold day, with the wind at the top of this hill just piercing our clothing. By the time that we had climbed up the hill, I was too cold to even think of climbing up the stairs to tour the tower, so I took it on faith that there was something interesting to see. I was just happy that there was a gift shop that was open where I could get a few precious minutes of warmth (well, sort of warmth) until facing the wind again. 

Then, we made a slight detour to walk through the center of Chipping Camden. Nothing has changed in a few hundred years: just the names on the shops. Chipping Camden is a market town. I doubt that the traveling market stops here anymore in modern times, but in centuries past having a market day made a town an important town for commerce. In the center of town is the ancient sheep market with its rough, uneven stones on the floor. The drainage ditches coming out of the market makes me think that not only was wool bought and sold there, but also some butchering perhaps. Or, maybe the drainage ditches were simply to drain off the rain water. 

After spending some time in lovely Chipping Camden, we drove to Stratford for the second time in a week. This time we arrived in daylight because we were attending a director's talk before the  performance. 

We were greeted by these swans which are ever hopeful that the passing tourists will feed them, so they queue up along the water's edge looking for handouts.

The play was Macbeth. I've seen many iterations of Macbeth over the years. This was not one of the better ones. 

It was interesting to listen to the director's vision of the play, but I never would have connected her thoughts with the performance. Her vision might have been clear in her head, but it didn't translate very well. It was done in modern dress, which in itself is fine, but I didn't care for the commando style costumes for the play's heavies. And, really, why did the director think that the three witches could be represented by children? I didn't get that part at all. Not to mention, that children are hard to hear, even when miked, because their voices are pitched so high.

It's nice to see Shakespeare at Stratford, but I do expect a high level of performance and interpretation.

After the Duchess of Malfi last week and Macbeth this week, I wish that we were going to be around a little later to see "Merry Wives of Windsor" because I could use a little bit of levity. I've had enough  of murder most foul.

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