Under an English Heaven

Hullo all!

This is the end of week 5 and I'm sensing that this will all be over way too soon. This weekend Elaine and I are having super-relaxing country time here in England while a lot of people went off on a 9 hour bus ride to Edinburgh. On Friday we walked to Grantchester. It's a short 2-mile walk across Cambridge and through a bunch of fields full of cows along the river. Really, you walk RIGHT THROUGH fields full of cows! You end up in the orchard where a LOT of famous people used to take tea, people such as Rupert Brooke, Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, AE Housman, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, King George VI, Prince Charles, Alan Turing, Maynard Keynes, John Cleese, Eric Idle, etc. So we took tea there in the orchard and it was absolutely amazing. It is so incredibly peaceful. I am absolutely in love with the English countryside! I can't wait to take the walk again and sit in the orchard with my tea and a good book or my writing. In order to get the best idea I can give you, here are some lovely pictures of our walk to the orchard. Really, you can't imagine how moving it all is and how calm it can make you. We also went and saw the nearby church and Byron's Pool. The church had a very cute cemetery which bordered some magically huge fields. It was all really really beautiful.
Then today I tagged along on the Bloomsbury class field trip and we visited the South of England. We went to the Charleston house of the Bloomsbury group where Duncan Grant, Quentin Bell, and Vanessa Bell lived and decorated the house. It's absolutely fantastic and like no other house in the world! You must learn something about the Bloomsbury group - they were completely fascinating. I was so inspired I wish I had a country house I could go home and paint. We also visited Berwick Church which the trio decorated with murals - probably one of the most unique churches in all of England. And then we visited the less-decorated Monk's House where Virginia and Leonard Woolf lived. It was rather interesting and had a beautfiul, spacious garden. I really enjoyed looking at all of the bookshelves owned by the group; books always tell a great deal about the person and there were some impressive old volumes of poetry and books on history. You can find the Bloomsbury pictures too! They include our trip when the bus dropped us off and we made our way down to Brighton to see the beach and the pier. The rest of Brighton wasn't really alive this late on a Saturday but I had chicken and chips on the pier and a crepe and we watched the sun going down. I do miss the beach atmosphere and it reminded me of home but with a slight twist - all the sea sounds were exactly as I imagined them and yet different from home. The beach is all a bunch of big rocks so I coudn't imagine swimming there but it's nice to walk along. We took the train all the way home which takes about 3 hours, though it was a nice ride all the way back through London and everything, it worked out really well.
So, that's my country adventure so far. I leave you with this Rupert Brooke poem because well, I think it really fits:

The Solider

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.



all of my love, friends <3
amanda