me and yew and everyone we know : hammersmith + west sussex,

“While spending Christmas at a hotel in Lewes in 1910,” Non Morris writes in a blog post at The Dahlia Papers, “Virginia Woolf declared herself – rather splendidly – to be ‘violently in favour of a country life’ – and when the lease on a previous country house was not renewed, the couple were determined to buy Monk’s House.”

Sunday, May 12, 2024: Do you remember the last time Christine and I came this way? [part one here; part two here; part three here of our 2018 trip] And this time we brought the kids. We landed 5:30am local time after a six-hour flight into London (out of Montreal, optimistically leaving our car in their lot), where Christine's brother Michael was good enough to collect us from the airport, and we spent most of the day hazy at their wee house in Hammersmith. The kids, of course, were delighted to spend the day with cousins, especially given they hadn't seen them in a while.

Hammersmith: where we do not tell our secrets to the birds, as they whisper to the rats.

Hammersmith : where Christine preferred I stop attempting to compose new lyrics to the classic "U Can't Touch This," prompted by my chant of "Hammersmith time!" Please stop that.

Christine and I were able to get a bit of a wander (we didn't want to take the children away from cousins, but inactive in the house would have knocked us both out), landing at The Dove, a curious wee pub with a history that includes "Rule Brittania" being composed within, and visits by Charles II, where he would woo one of his mistresses. It also had the honour of holding the smallest bar-room in the world (according to Guinness), now the second-smallest, after some other establishment somewhere else decided to deliberately build one smaller. Such cheek. Such cheek indeed. At least it is still the smallest in England. A good place, also, to catch the annual Cambridge-Oxford boat race.

Ottawa: Didn't you have a Trucker Convoy out your way? asked the waiter. Ah, good, I thought. That's how you know us. We talked about mandates and lockdowns, and how he was in Spain when the Covid curtain fell, and how there were curfews on movement, and residents were barely able to leave their homes.

Hammersmith: where Christine caught a plaque for the printer who created the Dove Type, next to the pub; the type infamously dumped into the Thames and salvaged during contemporary times. The same area where William Morris did his magical business (of which I'm sure you are already full aware).

Monday, May 13, 2024: We made the train for Chichester, south of London, down there in West Sussex, so Christine could begin her two day course at West Dean (where she hadn't been since graduating, nineteen years prior). Her old school-chum Ruth met us at the train, and took us around a few hours of adventuring through the area, which was quite lovely.

Ruth took us along to Weald & Downland: Living Museum, a medieval gathering of salvaged, restored and relocated medieval buildings from the area into a single village. It really was delightful: a medieval version of Eastern Ontario's Upper Canada Village (where buildings from the 1800s were salvaged, restored and relocated into a single village near Morrisburg), both of which host reenactments by staff and/or volunteers. We saw a blacksmith!There were even a couple of Traveller wagons, which was pretty cool.

Rose, of course, latched on to a particular Tudor building, presenting herself as some kind of power-mad Tudor Lord of some sort.

It was curious also to encounter staff/volunteers at the space, all of whom were more than willing to present information on buildings, sites and what-not, almost without prompting. Ruth and I caught a gentleman who was working a lathe he'd built out of logs and branches, showing how tradesmen would make table legs out in the woods, and further, how horses would bring up water for industrial use, including for the creation of a cement known as 'pug,'

And then a break, for tea and a bitter, at the Horse and Groom, a small pub on the side of the road that was once a farm, and later, housed horses and travellers. The children drew, made a puzzle, relaxed. Christine got some good time with Ruth, as I wandered the building, seeking out what I could. There was a curious document on the wall, which I inquired about, but none of the staff specifically knew what it was, until an older gentleman in the pub said, oh, i know about that, I'm a solicitor! Not knowing my Old English, I wasn't sure what it was or why, but he explained that it was a land deed from the 1700s, explaining all the title from and to whom, and how such a document is considered rather rare now, as most were thrown out after the creation of any subsequent document. And oh, he knows where Ottawa is; his sister was born there! Apparently he was a lawyer for years in West Vancouver. What are the odds?

Further on, we made for Kingley Vale, a preserved walking trail and Yew trees some hundreds of years old, as well as an ancient burial mound (although weary children meant we never quite made it to the burial mound, which I would have liked to see). The trees looked akin to depictions of trees from Jim Henson, whether Labyrinth or other depictions. I hadn't realized that trees actually had faces. I hadn't realized the reference.

Curious to see all the holly, and holly blossoms.

And from there, Ruth dropped us at our hotel, where the children drooped and I attempted to forage some later dinner from Chichester take-away.