I have decided to go to England this autumn and spend a week visiting stately homes and manor houses. By myself. I'm not going near London where 99 percent of my British friends live. I'm going to hire a car at the airport and whiz off into the countryside as soon as I arrive. By myself. Oh, I said that. Well, it's an important part of the trip, you see. I always arrange my travel plans around other people and I always put off going to see places that only I want to visit. When one travels with someone else one must inevitably compromise. Somehow, I always seem to do most of the compromising, but maybe this is unfair of me. The fact is, I was not raised to insist on my own way, and I have a real horror of being thought pushy and selfish. Somehow, I've never managed to take in more than three stately homes in all my dozen visits. Well, the heck with that. I'm going to do this because I couldn't bear to die without having done it.
While part of my decision was spurred by my recent wallow in Jane Austen adaptions for film I'm not going merely to see film locations. I'm going to find what's left of the 18th century in England. I love discovering traces of it surviving the worst depredations of modernity. For instance, there's the most charming little alley in central London that retains an air of the Regency with its bow windows and whitewashed walls and narrow iron railings. If you wander through Mayfair to the west, there is an archway leading to a small plaza with a maze of tiny pubs and tinier shops, and its streets are laid out in such an ambling way that it's clearly the remnants of an old market town. It reminds me that London was still tiny in Jane Austen's day, and Chelsea was surrounded by hay fields.
I don't know why I'm so besotted with 18th century England but I am. I am really passionate about winkling out traces of the past when I visit. That's why I want to go see some of the great homes of the aristocracy. I love seeing the Palladian and Classical ideals crafted in the vernacular of houses, the handsome and inspiring proportions soaring like a song made manifest in stone. I want to examine minutely the beautiful furniture and paintings that filled them. I love looking at what people wore, the china they ate off of, the colors they painted their rooms, the graceful vistas they looked out on as they took their leisure in their salons and breakfast rooms and parlors. I want to understand what life was like during the long, sunny afternoon of the Georgian period, and I want to do it by being around the things they created. And I don't want any interruptions from travel companions who don't care as deeply as I do.
So I've decided. I will not only travel alone, I will do so elegantly. I usually stay in cheap bed and breakfast places, which is fine when one is a student, but not this time. This time I will arrange to stay at the Royal Crescent Hotel in Bath which is one of the finest small hotels in Britain. I'll eat in famous restaurants with famous gardens. I'll take as much time as I want in the bath. I'll meander along the back roads and take wrong turns and go the long way and seek out views whenever possible. I will be self-indulgent and expensive and change my mind three times a day. And I will be happy.
By myself.
