kent: Cousin Miriam

It's Monday evening, July 7. The first week of my trip is gone. Eeek! Come back, week. I want to have you again. Except I would probably spend less of you in London. I am beginning to tire of it. Doctor Johnson can say what he likes, I'm not tired of life. Just London. It's noisy and stuffy and despite being infinitely varied it is actually all the same, after a while. 

On the weekend I saw my cousin Miriam, who moved to Old Blighty in the 90s and never came home. We couldn't agree when we last saw each other - was it in 95, or 97? It was a long time, anyway. She now lives in Falconwood, an Eastern suburb in Kent that I had never heard of. We went walking on Fooots Cray Meadow (again, never heard of it) and played Cluedo with her family, catching up on 20 years worth of news and sharing our love on fantasy literature, especially children's books. It was good to see her, and amazing how auickly we related on so many things. 

The next day we went to Oxlea Wood, and a craft market at 'Severndroog Castle', neither of which  I knew anything about. Then we went to Eltham Palace, which I had heard of only vaguely. These were places in Miriam's local stomping ground, places in which she had often taken her daughter for walks and playdates with other Eltham kids. It was a beautiful day, and I felt a bit jealous when comparing all of this to the dull parks of Glenelg North where my kids grew up. I had to remind myself that it probably wasn't that nice for much of the year.  

I only knew about one thing in the area before I arrived: on Shrewsbury Lane in Eltham there is a Bronze Age burial mound, one of many that once stood in this area, but the only one to have survived the Blitz, and the housing developments. It was wonderfully ordinary, a small grass covered hummock you'd play on as a kid and never know. Miriam and I discussed this as a prompt for a spooky kids book with an urban setting. ("The old mound had stood undisturbed for millennia, until....)" It was nice to be with someone who got it, because I suspect most people would have wondered why we had traipsed all the way there to see something so obscure and visually unimpressive. 

I went back to London and have been in departure mode ever since. Today was all about resting up, op shopping, and having a few last halves of bitter at the North London pubs. The major decision point of the day was whether I should pay 10 pounds to see the tomb of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery, and I decided the answer was no. Bye London, I won't see much of you again. Small Towns, here I come.