Right now I am watching the Red Nose Day telethon on BBC, which alternates between comedy sketches by British celebrities and heart-wrenching videos showing where the money raised for Comic Relief goes to help people in need, in the UK and abroad. And some live music performances thrown in there. Throughout, there are pleas to donate money for the cause. Continue reading
Well, it’s March, so I better finish my posts about Christmas before Easter.
I just spent an hour and a half on this post, only to hit publish and somehow it disappeared without saving any of it, so I’m feeling P R E T T Y frustrated with WordPress right now.
So this will be an abbreviated version of what I originally wrote, because I’m so mad I spent so much time on this already. Continue reading
{Beth’s Note: We interrupt my very sporadic coverage of Christmas in London 2018 to bring you this guest post by M that takes us back to last summer.}
The Summer of 2018 will be one of those things that, 42 years from now, kids will roll their eyes about when their English grandparents regale them with the same stories they’ve heard a dozen times before, just like I rolled my eyes when all the English reminded me about how great it was in 1976.
But those future grandparents will tell these stories for good reason. It was sunny. And hot. For weeks at a time. And England made the semifinals of the World Cup! They even won a knock-out round match on penalty kicks. This summer was so great, my grandkids will probably roll their eyes when I tell them about it, and I grew up in that magical land (America) where summer is sunny and hot every year, just like summer should be. Continue reading
{Read An English Summer Seaside Holiday, Part 1, here}
On Tuesday of our week in Cornwall, we visited St Michael’s Mount. The thing about visiting this island is that when the tide is low, a causeway appears and you can walk over from the mainland in Marazion. But when the tide comes back in, the causeway completely disappears under water, and you have to take a ferry.
So we waited for the causeway to open that morning, and walked across.
At the end of August, we took a weeklong family holiday to Cornwall, which E had been excited for all year. I was a bit worried it wouldn’t live up to her expectations, since she’d been asking when we were going to Cornwall since before Easter. But as it turned out, it did; she had a fantastic week filled with kite-flying, sand castle-building, fish and chips, and ice cream cones.
Our cottage in the town of Marazion was a Saturday-to-Saturday rental. Because driving there takes at least 5 hours (with no traffic) and there’s always traffic in London, we left at 4:30 a.m. Which was the best decision we could have made. We were sitting in a café in Marazion, ordering breakfast, by 9:30.
We passed Stonehenge right at sunrise, and there wasn’t a tourist in sight!
