Vicarious Travel

Today some friends and I set out for the Tate Modern, there to see various cool modern things.

Now me, I do not feel fully clothed walking around cities without my backpack, in which I have money, bus tickets, bottled water, mints, chocolate, an MP3 player, pencils, my notebook, some other light reading material in case I get stuck on a desert island by accident, etc., etc., etc.

On this particular occasion my backpack also contained some other stuff which I had not bothered to put away in my regular luggage, which were still in there from the plane flight, such as for instance toiletries.

It turns out that when you walk into the Tate Modern, after the guys who open your bag and look at all your stuff and go “hmm” and say “that’s fine, miss”, there is also a metal-detector of some kind. And when I walked through it, it went off, thanks to something in the backpack.

Whereupon the guard sitting there called over another guard, “to figure out exactly what set it off”, so that they began going through my entire collection of not-cleared-out-since-1982 rubbish; laying it out neatly on the floor; passing it through the detector to see if anything interesting happened; and commenting, mostly politely, but occasionally with a faint note of incredulity, on the fact that, yes, I do inexplicably have in my bag old candy wrappers and expired bus transfers.

I’m here to tell you that you haven’t lived until you’ve had a burly British man say “maybe it’s this, then?” and pass your deodorant through a metal detector, in full view of the smirking masses.

Here’s the kicker: we never did figure out what was responsible. After a full-scale inventory of my stuff, they put everything back in the bag and passed it through again and the detector DID NOT GO OFF.

“Sorry about that, then,” said the older guard. “It’s amber alert, you know.”

Exeter is a lovely place, if you’re looking for a sleepy cathedral town with a pleasant close, and affordable lodgings (by the standards of England), and general restfulness.

But the pub where I had dinner — the Ship Inn — turned out not to be a great haunt of locals, despite the guidebook’s assurances. The other diners, with disarming frankness, left their guidebooks out on the table beside them. But in any case they would have been given away by the circumstance that they were all speaking loudly in Italian.

The waitress, of course, did speak English, but it was an English sufficiently mumbled that it was hard to make out over all the subitos. She explained in a low voice that she was out of lamb pie, but did offer mince pie and steak-and-owl pie. Astonished, I studied my menu for a while; then asked for another recitation of the pie options. Yes, she repeated it: mince, or steak-and-owl. Well! I’ve been served meats in England that I don’t think of as edible under normal circumstances; maybe the pub had taken to shooting birds in the cathedral attic?

Nervously I ordered “the steak one”. It arrived, and tasted… like steak pie. There were no demonstrably owl bits forthcoming. I wasn’t quite sure what I expected — not obvious wings, not in a pie; but perhaps a sort of gamy flavor? Sort of tough and mice-y? I eavesdropped on her explanations to the Italians, but they seemed to take steak-and-owl pies in stride. Everyone knows about steak-and-owl but your under-cultured American, apparently.

Finally a man came and sat at the next table, and cleared up my confusion by ordering STEAK AND ALE in a ringing voice.

Thank goodness, because without his intervention I might never have figured it out.

Leaving London for a few days, I did my usual thing of selecting a target location more or less at random. Which turned out not to be Rye (too hard to get to by train) or York (too far to go only for a day; perhaps over the long weekend I’ll get up there) but Exeter, about which I hardly knew what to expect. There was a long wait at Waterloo Station during which I began to wonder whether this was wise — the train ticket was not cheap — but the train trip itself was lovely and green and began to make me feel better. And on arrival I found that the cathedral was visible in the distance and wandered in that general direction, towards the close, while the streets got narrower and the buildings more medieval, until I came out onto a green lawn and honey stone.

I think it is already too late to go inside, but the Cathedral appeals to me: square towers on the sides, and it doesn’t look like there’s a central crossing tower at all; the towers are almost Romanesque, and the rest of the place looks like a fairly young Gothic, before the concept had gone to anyone’s head. All in all it’s strangely homey and accessible-looking. And there are tudor houses and teenagers spinning fire on the front lawn: shirtless teenagers who unexpectedly look pretty good at it, though personally I would be disinclined to spin fire while not fully dressed. The trees are greener than the trees at home, thanks to some distorted perception, to the very late sunlight, or to the fact that they’re all deciduous; and I couldn’t ask for a place more peaceful, while the bride and groom of a recent wedding kiss and climb into antique cars, and an old man in red-purple robes carries the wedding gear away, and people talk to each other in such a friendly sane way that one wishes one knew them.