Travelling England (4)

Sunday, July 18, 2010:

Chester

Cold and rainy again. No weather to make a trip. I thought of taking a train to Llandudno or Conway, but I'll leave it until another time. Had dinner at The Gate of India last night. Not bad, but I had a better meal at India Corner in Haarlem. I went rather early, around six thirty. When I entered it was almost empty, but half an hour later people were queuing up to get a table. Afterwards I went straight to the hotel. Somehow I felt it wouldn't be wise to go out this evening. Maybe it's nonsense, but the atmosphere seemed a bit threatening, with just too many rowdy young men grouping together. Maybe I got the idea from John Burnside's book Waking Up In Toytown which I recently read. Coming back at the hotel I sat down in the garden with a pint and a pipe. The wind was a little too sharp and the temperature not really pleasant, but I felt like smoking. Smokers have been reduced to pariahs and separate smoking rooms, like the larger pubs in Holland have, seem unknown phenomena in Britain. I smoke very little, mostly pipe, never any cigarets, but I detest this non-smoking hysteria which is becoming ever more annoying in most of Europe. When it became too chilly I went to my room to read Elizabeth Speller's The Return Of Captain John Emmett.

Walked for over two hours after it stopped raining. Slowly the temperature rose and every now and again the sun came out. I took a lot of photographs, particularly of places that brought old memories. The Roman Garden, the walls, which were actually too slippery to walk, the cloister of the cathedral. I couldn't find the pub though where Wendy and I saw each other for the last time ever, somewhere in August 1970. Maybe it doesn't exist anymore. I haven't heard from her since the end of 1970, I don't even know if she's still living in England, if she's still alive. I always kept the letters she wrote me in the two years we were lovers, she on the Wirral, I on the Island of Dordrecht. We met in 1968 in Corwen in Wales, mere children yet. I sat down on a bench by the river Dee to smoke my pipe, remembering our walks on warm summer evenings when I went to stay in Redvers Avenue, Hooton, and our trips to Liverpool from there, taking the Birkenhead ferry. I remembered the way she kissed, the way we loved, sometimes even her smell, her wonderfully exciting smell, came back to me. The tide was out. A rusty dinghy in the mud looked like a stranded baby whale.