We were two weeks in. Two weeks of travelling, taking in the English and Welsh atmosphere, reading, and trying to find myself. We now had two weeks left. Want to know what they were like? Read on!
After we’d leave Wales, there were only two campsites remaining. Our penultimate campsite was located in the Cotswolds, near a village called Bourton-on-the-Water. Towns like this one are the reason I’m unable to write a normal travel post like everyone else does: according to Google and many, many travel blogs, Bourton-on-the-Water is the quintessential Cotswold town which everyone must visit. This, we found out, is code for: it’s bloody swarming with tourists. We left after twenty minutes.
I much more enjoyed Stratford-upon-Avon, birthplace of William Shakespeare. It’s a lovely town, and we loved walking around and pointing at all the old buildings and Shakespeare relics. We visited the house where Shakespeare was born (which still exists because famous writers such as Charles Dickens saved it from being torn down in the nineteenth century), had a walk around the house he lived in until his death, created some Shakespearean insults, and managed to get free tickets for a Royal Shakespeare Company performance of Checkov’s play The Cherry Orchard, starring, amongst others, Kenneth Branagh. I still can’t quite believe our luck.
I didn’t buy any books there, but now we’d visited two plays. I was feeling happier every day, and was falling back in love with literature. I started to think I’d found myself again, and being in such close proximity to the Bard must definitely have helped.
The next day, we went to Bath. I heard it’s a beautiful historic city, but the main reason I wanted to go there was because I wanted to visit a bookshop/publishing house called Persephone Books. They specialise in mid-century forgotten novels, mostly written by women (and this one). I had read so much about them, and I told my partner we definitely had to go there. We went on a walking tour first, and ended at the bookshop. Jazz music was softly playing, the books were ordered neatly on their shelves, and each of them was introduced by a short summary. I made sure to read all of them so I could make a well-informed decision on which books to buy.
This is when it happened. At that moment, I felt my body relax. I knew I’d finally found a part of me that had been lost for a long time, perhaps even years. I felt excited and was filled with a feeling I’m not very familiar with: optimism. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and envisioned a future there, in Bath, working at that bookshop, hosting meetings, giving lectures and living a life entirely devoted to literature. I bought only three books in that tiny bookshop, but left a small part of my heart there.
Just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, it did. Our last campsite was located near Oxford, which we visited for two days. We went on a walking tour, saw the door where C.S. Lewis first imagined his Narnia books, visited a huge bookshop, went on another tour, this time in the Bodleian libraries, sat down at the bench where Lyra and Will meet up every year in His Dark Materials, drank a pint at the pub Tolkien used to frequent and devoured a Sunday Roast at The Trout, a pub where Colin Dexter’s Morse and Lewis could often be found and where Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage is set.
I couldn’t stop smiling by then. I felt completely and totally at ease with myself and the world. I had finished two more books, bought two more, and I never wanted to leave. I was not feeling very lost anymore, and although it had to do with the fact that the weather was nice, the cities were so great I want to live in all of them, and my partner and I were very happy together, I know the major reason why I was so elated was because I had finally been reunited with literature. We were a team again.
After Oxford, we went to London. I bought two more books, both set in the capital. We had great food, great drinks, visited two museums, walked around a lot, and went to a musical, Cabaret. I don’t know how to describe it, but it was perfect. My partner always says he doesn’t like musicals, but he still, after four weeks, keeps telling everyone that they need to go, too.
The first book I packed and the last book I read was Christopher Isherwood’s novel Goodbye to Berlin, which Cabaret was based on. It’s set in 1930s Berlin and shows the change from a roaring, bustling city into one ruled by the Nazis. I started reading it the night after the musical and finished it when I was back home. That means I finished eight books during these four weeks, and bought, oh I don’t even know how many.
But we’re not quite back home yet. The reason we decided to go to the UK in the first place was because we had tickets for Nick Cave’s homecoming concert in Brighton. We met up with a friend of ours, waited all day at the front of the stage, and were definitely rewarded for our patience. We would leave two days later, but for those two-and-a-half hours, the thought of home never even occurred to me.
Let’s just say this concert completely summed these four weeks in the UK. I laughed, I cried, I smiled, I cheered, I danced, I was happy, I was at peace, and I enjoyed every single minute of it.
I had well and truly found myself again.
Do you think you could go on a similar trip in the UK? Where would you go to? Which of the books I’ve bought are you most curious about? Which play or musical would you visit in London? Please let me know in the comments! Also, don’t forget to follow me for more book-related posts!
The Open Book 