Day Off

Today, Saturday, I took a vacation from my vacation.  I drove up to Petworth to visit a stately home there run by the trust.

On the way, I heard a very funny radio program which purported to be the coverage of an academic life time achievement celebration for a professor who, in spite of his drunkenness, philandering, and intellectual negligibility had managed to fashion a career as a notable authority on the history of merrie olde England.  It was done absolutely deadpan with interviews of people at the event who had known or worked with him all saying absolutely appalling things, but in the language and cadences that people usually use on such occasions to praise the great.  Very amusing in a kind of over intellectual way, so it appealed to me. 

Petworth House was a fun place to visit.  They’ve got a big park with herds of deer running around.  I was finally in a place landscaped by Capability Brown.  When you read guidebooks, you get the sense that this fellow was riding around England landscaping gardens of estates at the rate of about 3 per day sometimes without a commission or even permission (much like Olmstead in the US), but I’d never knowingly walked around any of his work.  It was very nice.  I also learned what a ha ha is – viz. a flooded ditch around a part of a garden to keep wildlife in or out without breaking up the view.  Presumably it gets its name from what the householder says when a careless guest falls in.

I spent four hours there, but I can’t come up with much more worth writing about it.  There is a sort of sameness to these stately homes.  It’s probably a good thing one doesn’t usually get a chance to visit so many of them in as short a time as I’ve done on this trip.  They lose a lot of the specialness that they honestly merit.  Petworth House, and the village hanging off it, are very lovely and fun to wander around, but mostly in ways it would be repetition for me to write about now.

There was an interesting exhibit in one room on the servants’ wing that had been refitted into a little museum.  It described the role of the owner of Petworth House in encouraging and even funding emigration to Canada.  For some reason, they called in “Northern Canada” even though it was mostly around Niagara, and you can’t get much further south than that.  I’d seen lots of information over the years about the reception of immigrants into North America, so it was interesting to see the story from the sending end. 

After a nice ramble in the grounds, I drove on to Chichester where I had a ticket to Midsummer Night’s Dream back at the festival theater.  I’d intentionally gotten to Chichester well before show time, so I poked around the shopping district for a while, people watching and scouting a restaurant for dinner.  There was a big do at the cathedral where they had apparently decorated with tens of thousands of flowers, but they wanted 7.5 pounds to get in.  I figured I’d seen plenty of flowers in the wild already.  I had a seat on a bench for a while and watched four guys playing croquet on part of the green.  This also positioned me well to see and hear passers by detect the price of admission and call out in alarm. 

I only saw the first act of the play.  It was a fine production, but I was only willing to drive back in the dark for a great production, and it wasn’t quite that.  I am spoiled for this particular play by having seen a tremendously creative and charming production at Washington Shakespeare Company year before last.  I think I have to take it off my list for a while.

I came back to do this journaling and of course enjoy the concert.  Had a nice conversation with a woman who saw my computer and started bemoaning the difficulty she’s having getting through her A levels with Microsoft Access.  She wants to make a career in web design.  I reassured her that you can make a perfectly successful job of web design without having a firm grasp on databases, as long as you’re willing to get good at subcontracting to database experts at need.

I think I’ll post this, then hope the concert, which is going on just below my room fades out soon enough for me to get some sleep.  They’re singing a few lines of the “Show me the way to go home” song, so that may mean something.