LOVING the wonderful things you're putting in here, Barbara, THANK you!~
And especially THANKS to you, Rosemary Kaye. What a wonderful gift it is to come in here and see your thoughts on, for instance, Bryson's take on the parking. Do you mean you have to pay that amount yearly to park your own vehicle? At your own home? Does that guarantee you a parking space all your own?
And if those folks who remove their front gardens drive the car up where they were, that is considered their own property (there's no back yard?) and they can skip that payment? Well if that's the case, it's no wonder then. that they are removing their pretty little gardens.
I couldn't understand it otherwise, but I should. Parking is tight in many US cities, too. I am not sure however that they have to pay for curb parking unless there is a meter, I am simply too far out of the city life now to know. Anybody here live in downtown Manhattan who can illuminate us? I know I have some in the Latin classes, I may write and ask. In NYC many people in "the City" don't have cars at all.
As a child in the War years (WWII) we lived in Philadelphia in what was called a "Row House." These are quite popular now in some parts of the country, much gussied up, as "Town Houses." They are attached. I remember very clearly having a small bit of lawn and garden in the front and a "stoop" or front steps upon which neighbors sat and talked to passers by. The daily washing of the stoop was very important. An unwashed stoop was a sign of sloth. For ALL to see!
I do recall my father having to walk around the block with the lawnmower if he wanted to cut the back grass, the house (which is still there!) was attached on both sides, but had no back door. The back had a small yard. I have no idea where he parked the car. I can't remember. But he had a car.
OH I remember. Gas lights and lamp lighters, horses pulling milk trucks, ice boxes which served as refrigerators and to which ice wagons would suspend blocks of ice up to the second floor. Philadelphia I believe was one of the last towns to let go of the gas lamp. And I remember Don McNeill.(sp).
I was shocked in one of my face to face classes when nobody there had ever heard of Don McNeill's Breakfast Club on the radio. . McNeill would say March Around the Breakfast Table, he'd play music and everybody would get up and walk around the breakfast table: a forerunner of the new don't sit anywhere for more than 20 minutes.
Is anybody old enough here to remember Don McNeill and his Breakfast Club?
And thank you also Rosemary for that lucid account of what's happened to the pub and why.
I think on the 3 miles to and then back from a destination that I need to get back out and moving. There was a time that meant nothing to me. I guess that's why I enjoy reading anybody's tales of walking to interesting locations.
Bryson himself does not appear athletic or thin. Yet he's always walking. I once stayed with a friend in Carlisle and she was a great deal older than I, but after dinner, by gum, out we went with this gigantic dog and we walked what seemed to me to be 20 miles and it was all I could do to keep up with her. The British Walk is the idea I brought home and it seems if you think 3 miles one way is normal, that's still in vogue.
Am half way thru the Bryson. I may have to read it again. It's about going back to places you once loved and how they have changed. And how you shouldn't go back. He says Stonehenge is better, tho, than it was, and I agree with that, I like the new Visitor's Center, and am sorry about the now prohibited stones, that you can't get close to any more, tho I have never been that it wasn't full of Hippies or Flower Children or whatever they are...I need to go in other times of the year. He tells the normal day trip itinerary of the tourist from London: Windsor, Bath, Stonehenge and something else in one day, hahahaa, and 10 minutes of the normal visitor at Stonehenge spent in the gift shop. What a hoot.
Nobody likes change. We all want it the "way it was," sort of a fairy land of imagination and myth. I think your comments here on the parking alone and the pubs themselves are worth a book, no joke. He didn't add the reasons, he just doesn't understand.
Please don't go anywhere, your insights are invaluable. (I didn't know you worked in a cathedral, I have a funny true story about the Gift Shop at the church at Stratford.
