Kathleen, Queen of the Desert

“Rejected suitors take to roaming as naturally as unhived bees.” It’s a phrase from English poet and novelist Thomas Hardy (1840-1938) and refers to Diggory Venn, perhaps my favorite of the Hardy characters.

If the hive is Wessex (Hardy’s partly real, partly fictionalized Dorset county in south central England) and Venn the bee, then he does indeed take to roaming to become a red-hued nomad. Venn has been rejected by Thomasin Yeobright, who is told to pursue a more “professional” husband, and quits the world of dairy farming to become a wandering reddleman, a reddish powdery dye (“reddle”) used by sheep farmers to identify their flocks, and living in a small, horse-drawn camping trailer.

If Hardy, a native of Dorset, had joined me on my bus ride, he’d have still see exquisite, emerald-green hills strewn with popcorn dots of sheep. If he’d continued to rattle along with me through that country recently as I journeyed south, he would have enjoyed the sunshine in Weymouth, a seaside resort Hardy visited from time to time.

I also visited Dorchester to see the Hardy collection amongst the fossils and manufacturing memorabilia at the chock-a-block Dorset County Museum. That collection includes a recreation of Hardy’s study, complete with pens supposedly used to write his different rural soap operas, where tragic characters struggle against passion and social circumstance. It helped that, after viewing the museum, I enjoyed (wolfed down, more like it) a chutney-dotted ham-and-Stilton-infused ploughman’s lunch at The Old Tea House, where Hardy himself supposedly took tea numerous times. (Continued)

I was a small girl in California when I’d first heard of the ichthyosaurs. My mother had read me Isabel Frances Bellous’s poem “The Ichthyosaurus.”

There once was an ichthyosaurus,
Who lived when the earth was all porous,
Be he fainted with shame
When he first heard his name,
And departed a long time before us.

My mother might have mentioned that Mary lived on a beach like I did. She mght have mentioned that Mary was not taken seriously like I sometimes thought I wasn’t. That Mary had tremendous energy and intellect. I do remember looking at the black-and-white sketch of an ichthyosaur that was in the book. From when I was very small, I’d loved black-and-white illustrations. Later, I’d even considered becoming a scientific illustrator, such as Beatrix Potter had been.

But the memory of that poem and my reading of Tracy Chevalier’s historical fiction book, Remarkable Creatures, had now led me to spend a week in Weymouth, a slightly faded seaside resort on the Jurassic Coast in west Dorset. From there, I then took the X53 bus from King George’s Statue station and traveled 95 miles northwest along Chesil Beach to Lyme Regis. Among other sites, Lyme Regis is where you find The Cobb (a harbor wall poking out into the Lyme Bay), made famous in Jane Austen’s book Persuasion, where Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliott go walking, plus where Meryl Streep’s French Lieutenant’s woman character does some fashionably mysterious turns in a heavy cloak. Lyme Bay is one bay west from Weymouth Bay on the English Channel. But right now it is perhaps most famous as the setting for Mary’s inchthyosaur finds.

I had waited for a sunny day to make my visit, even though I knew that Mary had never been a fair-weather paleontologist, and she had in fact made many of her most important finds after winter storms. In December 2001, UNESCO listed the “Jurassic Coast” along Dorset and East Devon beaches, cliff,s and headlands one of the most significant Earth Science sites in the world. It is the United Kingdom’s only natural World Heritage site, and the only place in the world where 185 million years of geology in a near-continuous sequence are revealed in the cliffs. A walk along the coast is like walking through the Triassic, Jurassic, and Ceatceous periods. (Continued)

Spotted dick is a traditional British pudding made from mutton fat mixed with other ingredients, such as baking soda, flour, molasses, corn syrup, or nutmeg. You add raisins or dry fruit to this dough and you have “spots.” The dish is steamed or boiled and served with a custard sauce.

Like Scottish haggis, Spotted Dick is kind of a joke food, especially to Americans. Like haggis, you can also find Spotted Dick in a can (Heinz),making it  a not infrequent gag gift (again, especially for Americans). Unlike haggis, though, in this American opinion, Spotted Dick is really good.

Why such an unappetizing name, then? “Dick” has been described as an abbreviation for dictionary, a policeman, an apron, a riding whip, a corruption of the “ding” in pudding or “dough,” a referral to the German dich (“thick or viscous”), and, lest we avoid it, male genitalia. Americans will usually most certainly turn up their noses at ordering something with that last meaning. After all, at least US restaurants offering Rocky Mountain oysters have the decency to label bulls’ testicles “oysters.”

But, the Spotted Dick I ordered recently was really just a sweet little spice cake with lots of raisins. As I happen to really like spice cake and raisins, I was enthusiastic about this dish at the friendly King Edward Restaurant by the sea. The waitress took my order with nary a smirk. (Continued)

One might ask if breakfasting at Starbucks when abroad is really traveling. I ask that myself when I enter one. Believe me, there are plenty of reasons not to enter one. Number one for skipping an English Starbucks is that they don’t have scones, at least not I the English Starbucks I’ve been in so far. But, despite this sconelessness, here are my reasons for frequenting this American franchise.

10. Like it or not, Starbucks is usually there. In London and Paris, certainly. In smaller big cities, yes.

9. Counter people are friendly. This is a big plus in famously snooty Paris, where ordering a café au lait at a small bistro can be an exercise in indifference.

8. It’s open early. Many Americans like an early start to our day, our lunch, and our dinner, yet, for instance, some of the coffee shops in Bath didn’t open till 10 a.m. 10 a.m.! That’s really late for Americans—even Americans on vacation. On this trip in the UK, the Starbucks open at 7:30 a.m. By American standards, that’s still kind of late. (Continued)