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In England, American French fries are called “chips,” and our potato chips are called “crisps.” Both are made from potatoes, of course, but somewhere and somehow the words got turned around. The English do an excellent job with chips. Such an excellent job that I order them almost every day. I’ve tried to be on a one-chip-a-day diet, but resistance is quite futile.

American French fries can vary from skinny McDonalds fries to the wonderfully lumpy Dairy Queen fries to thick-cut potato wedges. The English, however, seem to have perfected the lightly fried, thick-fingered chip (not to be confused with fish fingers, the American “fish stick,” a staple of my California childhood).

In public houses (pubs) and in most restaurants here, you’ll usually get offered mustard, vinegar, salad dressing, brown sauce, and ketchup. I’ve provided a short course in typical and not-so-typical British condiments.

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Corn flakes, coffee, curtains

My space, her space

Breakfast for me on a little table with fine china

Hers in the kitchen on paper towels

First class, economy class, first class, curtains

Our space, their space

Complimentary Diet Coke for me, complimentary wine for them

Tolerance for us, importance for them.

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In the 11^th century, the tradition started of Benedictine monks eating bread with cream and jam at Tavistock Abbey in Devonshire. A proper Devon cream tea has a scone split in half with clotted cream and jam spread on both halves.

One of my guidebook smirks that older “blue-rinse ladies” are the ones most interested in cream teas. The cream tea set of the London blitz, and then those of my baby-boomer era, might take the market for scones and clotted cream along with us when we all die. But, before we go, we’ll remind the world of British colonial might with every afternoon repast. Teas and sugars were only grown in British colonies, and Crusaders first introduced exotic dried fruits, which are now found in so many British baked goods. Tea and scones bring martial, imperial, and glory days of Britain to even the most modest of daily tables.

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I walked through the Coventry Transport Museum that October

Exhibit after exhibit of what the German bombs had done those November nights in 1940;

Old newsreels of the dazed, the smashed, the burned

Firestorms having wiped out most of the city center

800 people dead, thousands injured and homeless

Different rooms had piped-in air raid sirens, people yelling, explosive concussions.

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It seemed to all be going on at Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon. And perhaps its most famous going-on was the graves of Anne and William Shakespeare. I paid the “concession” (senior citizen) price of one pound to get up to the chancel (in front of the altar) with the tourist crowd to see the stone slabs under which the Bard and his wife are buried. Well, part of the Bard. After recent radar scans, scientists say his skull is probably missing. The church also hosts concerts and plays.

In front of the church is a lovely, shaded cemetery with benches and mostly unreadable moss- and lichen-covered tombstones, providing respite for travelers and the genealogist I met looking for his Morris family names.

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Is breakfasting at Starbucks when abroad really traveling? I ask that myself when I enter one. Believe me, there are plenty of reasons not to enter one. Number one for skipping a Starbucks is that they don’t have scones, at least not in the British Starbucks establishments I’ve been in so far. But, despite this sconelessness, these are my reasons for frequenting this American franchise.

10. Like it or not, Starbucks is usually there. In London and Paris, certainly. In smaller cities, yes.

8. It’s open early. Like many Americans, I like an early start to my day, my lunch, and my dinner; yet, for instance, some of the coffee shops in Bath didn’t open till 10 a.m. 10 a.m.! That is late for Americans—even Americans on vacation. On this trip in the UK, the Starbucks opened at 7:30 a.m. By American standards, that’s still kind of late. And, maybe it’s the American working people and commuters who drive the 5:30 a.m. opening time in the U.S. Tourists tend to be out and about when museums and other tourist sites start to open, often about 10 a.m.

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Viewing the exquisite craftsmanship of the Four Gospels of Kells

Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruptions in March 2010 caused all air traffic in the vicinity to be delayed, including my own flight back from Dublin to Salt Lake City. That delay allowed me three glorious extra days to explore the Irish capital’s cultural landscape, including Trinity College (Coláiste na Trionóide in Irish Gaelic), where I could examine some world-famous ancient Christian manuscripts. These illuminated manuscripts, now bound into books, attract hundreds of thousands of visitors every year because they represent an exquisite pinnacle of artistic calligraphy and illustration.

The Book of Kells, each page measuring 10 inches tall and 13 inches wide, was written in iron gall ink, purple-black or brown-black ink made from iron salts and tannic acids from vegetable sources. The “paper” was vellum, a specially prepared calfskin (scholars speculate it would have taken around 185 calves), in 340 leaves or folios and 680 pages. These were all trimmed and bound into four books in 1953.

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But there I was in remote and gusty western County Clare

Picking my way along the glaciated limestone pavement of the burren

Stepping over the vertical grykes, block to block, clint to clint

Remembering lines of escape and solitude from Yeats*

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

I’d felt the sense of self-sufficient hermitage, the greasy clay in my hands

Pulling and cutting wood into wattles in four-foot strips

Daubing the clay in my slimy hands, adding straw

Forming the inverted basket of a small cabin, a hat of a home.

Nine bean rows will I have there, A hive for the honeybee, and live alone in the bee-loud glade.

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On my trip to England in 1997, I was enthusiastic about visiting the town of St. Ives in Cornwall. I wanted to walk down the path to the little village just like the man in the Mother Goose riddle my mother had read to my brothers and me so many years ago. I had also read that St. Ives was an artist’ colony. So, as we rattled along the hedge-lined motorway to the northwest coast of Cornwall, I envisioned myself poking around quaint little village shops and tiny art galleries.

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