Murder Ballad Monday

For those of you who don't know, I've spent the last almost three years expanding my musical instrument arsenal. I'd consider myself a vocalist more than anything else, but I play guitar well enough for accompaniment and piano well enough not to be shouted at by my family.  But I've always been jealous of the real musicians.  Long story short,  I started taking fiddle classes and going to the weekly jam sessions at the glorious Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago (an amazing, one-of-a-kind, organization) in the summer of 2011.  About a year and a half later, I became the proud owner of a 1913 Vega Fairbanks Banjolin, which I had restored and tweaked (went from 8 to 4 strings and tuned it up an octave), so that it now has a lovely, unique sound. The guys who restored it called it "dirty."

 When it came to hitting the road for a year,  I didn't think I could manage without an instrument at all.  At the time, I was head-over-heels in love with my banjolin, but I was hesitant to risk damaging it on the flight or, worse, having it stolen.  It's sort of irreplaceable, especially since it had recently acquired the signature of Dr. Ralph Stanley.  So I took my fiddle, my brother's first good violin that I inherited, which had a sturdy case and was fairly light.  Unfortunately, the hall of residence where I was living didn't allow tenants to practice instruments in their rooms.  We were supposed to go down into the "Club Room" where all the boys in the building played ping-pong.  I'm not super shy, but the violin is tricky.  I've come a long way really fast, considering that I was starting from square one and that the violin is very unforgiving, tone-wise as a beginner instrument.   I'm much more comfortable playing in an ensemble or at a jam.  I did eventually find this kind of group at The London Fiddle School, but I couldn't actually practice in my building.  Even with a mute on, it is hard to cover up the fiddle.  I would occasionally go to the park to practice in a corner, getting itchy from the grass and grass-dwelling critters, but then one day I walked by The Hobgoblin Music Shop (a folk instrument emporium) off Tottenham Court Rd. and saw the answer to my problems gleaming in the window: a cheap (~$120) little Chinese mandolin.  I tried to talk myself out of it, saying (rightfully so) that I had neither the money nor the space for such a frivolous purchase, but then I sat down and started to play it.  It is such a quiet, unassuming instrument, and this particular one seemed to have been set up well.  It has the same fingering as the fiddle, so I could presumably practice what I was learning at the LFS on it.  So I bought it with the intention of selling it on Gumtree before I left the UK.  But I didn't.  I chucked out a few pair of shoes and some books, wrapped it in T-shirts and tights, and took it home.

Since I didn't see much in the way of fiddle-y opportunities here in Sydney, I decided to go for my lightweight option, the mandolin, even though it is the instrument that I know least how to play.  So I've been trying to rectify that, not only learning how to pick a bunch of the fiddle tunes I know, but also trying out some chords.  Once you've learned chords on one stringed instrument (i.e. the guitar), I think chords become less basics on the new instruments.  If I see G or Em or C7 on a piece of paper, the muscles in my hands remember exactly what to do, but not on the mandolin.  It's taken me a frustrating few months just to be able to play six or seven chords on the mandolin.  I'm not crazy about the sound.  The mandolin really isn't a strumming instrument in the way a ukelele is.  It kinda sounds sharp and clunky like I'm playing guitar capo-ed at the 14th fret.  But it'll have to do.

I've been in a mood lately, craving Southern Appalachian tragedy. I have a real soft spot for Appalachian murder ballads (death ballads are okay too).  This first video is of a song called Omie Wise that I first heard on the Smithsonian Folkways project a few years back.  I think Doc Watson did a truncated version of it as well.  It was written in the late 1790s after an incident in Randolph County, NC where the orphaned Naomi Wise, taken in by the Adams family, was knocked-up by John Lewis, who then drowned her.  He supposedly confessed on his deathbed many years later.  There's a long tradition of drowning murder ballads, the most famous of which is probably The Banks of the Ohio, but there's also The Twa Sisters (which has Scandinavian roots, I think), Knoxville Girl/Oxford Girl, etc. Most murder ballads involve a keen knife to the pretty white bosom of some adolescent girl (Pretty Polly, Tom Dooley, Down in the Willow Garden, etc) .  The moral of the story is: if you are a girl and you court a man that your parents don't approve of, you WILL end up at the bottom of a river or with a knife in your heart.

I also have a very special place in my heart for songs about the evils of moonshine.  I've heard this song a lot over the years, but most recently heard Chris Thile and the Punch Brothers do it.  I thought it a good song to test out my new mandolin skills on.

An Ache Compounded and The Birds of Paradise

I write this post from a kneeling position, nursing a very sore posterior--my punishment, I suppose, for playing hooky from the library not one, but TWO days in a row. Let me explain.

I became the proud owner on Friday of a gently-used, glorious beach towel at church basement sale.  Towel is not even an adequate descriptor....it's more like a blanket.  Here it is drying on my balcony (you can only see half of it).

The procurement of such a towel means that spending extended periods of time on the beach has become a much more tempting enterprise. Being somewhat fair-skinned, I am very diligent about sunscreen, but on Friday (perhaps in my excitement over finding the perfect towel), I neglected the backs of my thighs in a big way. Long story short, I came home on Friday night to find a large swathe of lobster-red on my upper thighs where I had missed.  Yowtch! In the absense of Aloe vera, I got the brilliant idea to apply Voltaren gel (a potent N-SAID gel, normally used for muscular pain) as a kind of salve, failing to read the fine print that says "AVOID SUN EXPOSURE ON TREATED AREAS OR YOU WILL DIE."  So while Voltaren is very effective on sunburn, if you then expose that area to the sun, it basically causes your skin to fry at an alarming rate.

So today, when I went down to Cronulla Beach, after a generous dose of Voltaren, I ended up doing something I rarely do:  sunbathing.  Generally I am lukewarm on this activity, but today just happened to be the day when 1) I started a really good new novel and 2) all the seaweed and kelp in the Pacific Ocean decided to wash up on shore.  I tried to swim several times, but kept getting stuck in big floating forests of seaweed and was sufficiently weirded out.  So I have now arrived home from my would-be pleasant day at the beach, with an ache compounded: a Top-Notch Burn on top of a Really-Quite-Bad Burn.  And to top it all off, I have a long day of Archive Sitting at The Royal Agricultural Society tomorrow.  Joy.

So to take my mind off my woe, I'll now talk about how awesome the birds are here.

My room has a large set of French doors that opens onto a balcony overlooking some woods by the train tracks.  I live in Cronulla, which is about an hour south of Sydney's CBD.  It's a quiet area, about half a kilometer from the Cronulla shops, half a kilometer from the Bundeena Bay, and about a kilometer from Cronulla Beach itself. From about 4pm to 8pm every evening, and again from 5am to 9am in the mornings, the avian population comes alive.  It took a while to get used to, in the same way that it took getting used to when I lived next door to the Hyde Park Fire Department my first three years in Chicago.  It's that loud.  For the first week or so I was here, I would awake every morning at around 5 am thinking that I had been transplanted to some Guatemalan rainforest filled with howler monkeys and scarlet macaws. I didn't think that Australia had wild monkeys, native or naturalized, but every morning in my half-awake grog, I began to doubt.  "I need to Google this," I would say, and then drift back to sleep, and then forget. But one day, while indulging in one of my very frequent Archive Mindwanders, I did look it up.  There are no howler monkeys in Australia.  There are, however, Kookaburras, which sound exactly like howler monkeys.

The Kookaburras are the loudest, but more common are the lorikeets and other parrots that hang out in the adundant supply of gum and bottlebrush trees in my neighborhood. Look at this video, and you'll see what happens when you leave out some bird seed on your porch.  The little green guys are the lorikeets, and the big-headed fuzzy ones are the kookaburras.

Here's what happens when a kookaburra "laughs":

Then you have the Sulfur-Crested Cockatoo, a giant bird that makes an awful racket and wreaks havoc upon City garbage bins (they an empty one in its entirety, black bear style).

Then you have the more run-of-the-mill (but not really) Australian Ravens, which sound, depending on their mood, like bleating sheep, crying babies, or (a somewhat dark thought) the piteous wails of this woman who was in the Alzheimer's ward with my grandmother. : /

I've never really been much into birds, but I'm kinda into them now.  I suppose it is in my genes.  My dad used to sit out on our front porch for hours looking at birds with a pair of expensive binoculars (though not recently, I've noticed), having a particular affinity for woodpeckers.  And my maternal grandmother (and grandfather) found profound joy in the robins, bluejays, and cardinals in her back yard.  She would watch them intently from the little windows above the kitchen sink.  So as I observe all these new and raucous birds of paradise, I think of the avian enthusiasts I've loved.

Oh Hai!

Livin' in a land down under

(Can't you hear? Can't you hear the thunder?)

My first week (and a half) in Australia has been characterized by the following:

Beaches
Burns
Birds
The Mitchell Library's Liberal Policies (Pens!!!!!)
Miranda Westfield Mall where All The Things are
The alarming rate at which my bank account is leaking money.

My little bedroom and private balcony...before I wrecked it.  

On my walk to the train station

This is my new Airbnb home for the next two months (or so) in Cronulla Beach.  Cronulla (kruh-NULL-ah not kruh-NOOL-ah, as I had it in my head) is a bigger, but less glamorous, beach than Bondi, about an hour by train from Sydney's CBD (Central Business District...Australia's version of "downtown").  It's a bright little suburb with a weird mix of leafyness and early 70s architecture.  Basically, I live at the top of a very large hill that dumps into the train station.  It serves my purposes well enough, and has the added benefit of being a 15 minute walk from the beach.

I live with a 65 to 75 year old man, a semi-retired hairdresser with three adult daughters and nine beloved grandchildren who tend to be in and out of the apartment.  He's a bit hard of hearing, so sometimes our communication is somewhat muddled, but he's a very nice guy.  He's gone out of his way to make me feel welcome. Living in an airbnb place is always a bit awkward at first.  I have my own room and balcony, with use of the bathrooms, laundry, and kitchen. I should have asked a few more questions before shelling out the money that I did, especially in regards to the non-existent air-conditioning (there is an AC, but it is a dormant window unit in the main room, which does e little good), but all in all I'm pretty satisfied.  I couldn't have found anything much cheaper.  Cost of living in Sydney is INSANE. More on this later.

I have explored three beaches now: Bondi, Manly, and Cronulla.
My first day at Bondi was quite eye-opening.  I went on a "moderately good" surfing day, which meant I was bashed around by waves the like of which I have never before encountered in all my body-surfing days in the Atlantic. Maybe 10 feet tall.  It was exhilarating and a little terrifying. I hung out around seasoned looking parents who were coaching their children on how to approach each wave.  You have to go under them when they are breaking or else you'll be tumbled around washing-machine style.  It felt quite dangerous.  I'll definitely not be caught swimming anywhere except "between the flags" (the portion patrolled by the surf guard).

There are all sorts of things that should discourage getting in the water:
1) Bull sharks
2) Bluebottles AKA Portuguese Man-O-Wars
3) Various other "Stingers"
4) Giant Waves and Rip Currents

But, then there's this crystal clear water at the perfect temperature, 71 degrees (bracing, but not frigid).  It calls to you.

The guy I live with goes for a swim every morning and has never been eaten by a bull shark, but I'm not quite to that point yet.  I still have a healthy fear of sea critters.  

I have, however, already acquired the kind of tan (read BURN) that takes me a whole summer back home.  The sun is punishing here.  You can get a sunburn in the shade on a cloudy day.  I've already been through a large tube of sunscreen and still manage to get one really painful burn and a couple of minor ones.  I'm hoping that in a few weeks I'll be less sensitive.  

The avian life here is something else.  My dad (the family bird watcher) would just die.  So many interesting looking birds, but even more interesting SOUNDING bird.  I think I will need a whole post on this.  There are birds that sound like crying babies, bleating lambs, howling monkeys, moaning children, etc.  There is never a silent moment.  

And the parrots!!! I got a picture of these little guys....

But even more amazing was the giant white cockatoo that was just hanging out at the train station bold as brass. I haven't seen birds like these except in sad cages or on TV.  I may become a fan of birds.

The Mitchell Library AKA The State Library of New South Wales, where I'm doing most of my work here, is far superior to its British counterpart.  It's got just enough Old World to be charming, and enough New World to be very relaxed and easy to use....so far.

A view from the outside.  

And the surrounding area (Macquarie St.)

 Best of all:  PENS!  They treat you like an adult and allow you to write with pens! I feel like this changes the whole outlook of the place.  As seen below, there is still considerable academic angst, but shoes, evidently, are not required.  This is something you won't see in The British Library or the Bodley.

Here are some requisite views of the harbor seen from the various ferries I've been on, "free" with my public transport pass.  

Harbor Bridge (with the blinking eye from the NYE festivities).

Lovely salt spray that used to ruin Joseph Banks's botanical samples. 

The biggest boat I've ever seen.  Makes me want to try a cruise.  

I was a little obsessed with it....

A little. 

My favorite ferry fair: Frozen yogurt (healthy) in Red Velvet and Cheesecake flavors (unhealthy), with sprinkles for festivities.  

 And finally, a picture of Australia's very pretty money.  Note the little window through which the photographer can be seen.

 

I knew that Sydney's Cost of Living was 30-40% higher than London, but I didn't really believe it until I paid $35 for a small pizza and a 2 liter diet coke my first night in town. Groceries are out of this world.  A 1kg tub of yogurt is $6.  A half gallon of non-organic milk is $4-5.  A box of granola is $7.  A can of diet coke and a slice of banana bread at the Mitchell Library: $6.50

There are actually Australian dollars, but the exchange rate only take off about 8% of that price at the moment.

Unfortunately, I have also found the one-stop location to spend these prodigious amounts of money:  The Miranda Westfield Mall, which contains every chain store in Australia.  Mainly, I've just been to those beacons of familiarity, Aldi and Target, and this nice little "cheap" (relative) store called The Reject Shop, but should I desire anything else, this is where to get it.

Happy spending!

The Long Haul

And she’s back!  While I hope to at some point chronicle my last six weeks in England (and my bonus road trip to California), I’m back in the saddle again and am going to try and stay relatively current.  Current as in: I’m in Australia! 

Granted, I haven’t actually seen much of Australia except for the airport, a very clean train, and the immediate vicinity of my motel (that’s motel, not hotel) in Campbelltown, NSW.  I have already acquired a slight sunburn, despite having put on sunscreen.  I don’t exactly know why the sun is stronger here (scientifically speaking), but it is. 

Because of some very poorly thought-out travel plans, I arrived in Sydney on New Years Eve (Australia’s biggest, wildest holiday).  All hotels in the city and most of the suburbs jack up their prices to 3 or 4 times their normal ridiculousness.  I couldn’t find anything under $250 or $300 per night.  NOTHING.  All reputable-looking airbnb places were booked already.   So I looked at the train map, to find the outer suburbs that were directly linked to the airport train lines, and ended up at The Colonial Motor Inn in Campbellstown/Macarthur, which reminds me of one of those sort of sketchy 60s-era one-story motels outside Myrtle Beach, for a mere $130 a night.  There is a vaguely interesting historical story about this motel (which is a converted 19th century barn and stables), but I'm too tired to care about it.  

After a 42 hour travel day, with a total of about 2.5 hours of sleep involved, I would have slept on straw pallet in a snake-infested outhouse and probably not have been too unhappy.  When my head finally hit the pillow last “night” at 2:30pm, I slept for 15 hours straight. 

I thought I had been very clever (and I actually even paid more money) in booking a flight with only one stopover.  No, sir.  Do not do that.  The next time my Afraid of Flying Self tries to win an argument with my Reasonable Self, I will remind it what a horrible idea it is to sit sleepless in a cramped chair for 15 and 12 hours respectively.  In an effort to lower my number of take-offs and landings (“WHICH IS WHEN MOST PEOPLE DIE!!!!!!” says Afraid of Flying Self), I basically undid 6 weeks (and many many dollars) of physical therapy on my back, not to mention the normal tedium and restlessness of long haul flights.  This was not helped by the fact that the entire upper deck of my planes were filled with rich assholes with their *@#&$% charts and graphs and frequent flyer miles in FULLY RECLINING MINI-SUITES.  I could hear their smug snores.

I don’t sleep on planes.  1) If I fall asleep then the plane might crash because I am not able to guide us to safety by the force of my will. 2) I just can’t sleep on a plane.  I’ve tried ALL THE DRUGS.  Things that would normally knock me out cold for days were I in a prone position, just make me tired and irritable in an upright position.  I drank nearly a whole bottle of Children’s Benadryl and tried to find serenity.  I might have lost consciousness for about 2 or 3 hours if you add up all the times I was nearly asleep and some of the times when I was having strange out-of-body experiences.

I thought that first flight from Atlanta to Seoul would never end.  Never.  Ever.  I obviously don’t understand the 3D aspect of world geography, but we went to Seoul via the North Pole. Seriously.  In the footsteps of my ancestors, we crossed the Bering Strait into Siberia.  My Afraid of Flying Self informed me that this was to avoid an emergency water landing. My Reasonable Self was just trying to sleep. 

They also tried to kill me with warm orange juice and Korean Food.  I don’t know much about Korean cuisine.  I had some decent beef/noodle soup once at the Café Corea in Hyde Park, and I used to eat those seaweed strips when I was a nanny for a half-Korean baby, but that’s basically the extent of my Korean food experiences.  I was in the very backseat of the plane, so I got served last, and both the times they fed us, they had run out of everything but the traditional Korean option. “Well, I guess I’ll have the traditional Korean option,” says I.  I was slightly worried when they brought me a “How to Eat” pamphlet, and I didn’t really read it.  In a bowl, there was a dollop of cold, tasteless ground beef, some bean sprouts, something that looked vaguely fungal (mushroom?) and something that I hope was eggplant, and some pickled something.  No more than a teaspoon of each.  There was a tube of red chili paste (by far the tastiest thing on the menu).  Then there was some luke warm rice, and to the side a cup of seaweed soup.  This seaweed soup, I could have gone out and prepared myself by getting a bit of kelp and a cup of ocean water, and mixing it in a container that had just had some dead fish in it.  Seriously, it tasted like a wharf. 

The second meal, they ran out of everything except the low sodium chicken meal.  Let me tell, you I had my hopes up, only to have them dashed when I was brought a container of rice and pulverized, tasteless, boiled chicken.  This is the sort of thing that you give your dog after it has been throwing up for a few days.   Fail, Korean Air, Fail. 

Bad food was the least of my worries when on my second flight from Seoul to Sydney, where our plane very nearly crashed into the rainforests of Papau New Guinea.  I hate turbulence.  I feel like the wings are going to snap off at which point we will plummet to our deaths.  Or we are going to be flipped over and have to do an emergency landing while hanging upside down.  Or we are going to be sucked into a vortex and spat back out to then plummet to our deaths.  My strategy in dealing with turbulence is to grip my seat until my fingers turn purple, tighten my seatbelt until my legs turn blue, recite Bible verses and prayers from my childhood, and sometimes the Pledge of Allegiance and the French poems I had to memorize once upon a time, interspersed with whimpered, involuntary obscenities.  And most of the people beside me are looking bemused or….ASLEEP. Don't they know that we are about to plummet to our deaths? Even when the captain tells the flight attendants to strap in, I seem to be the only one quietly freaking out.  For nearly an hour, we were hurtled around with only brief breaks.  I was just praying, perhaps irrationally, that we make it to Papau New Guinea (at the time, we were in the middle of nowhere, east of the Philippines) until I realized that Papau New Guinea is mostly mountainous rainforest, which is a bad place to attempt an emergency landing (with my mind, of course). 

So, needless to say, I was giddy (and totally crippled) by the time we landed in Sydney—a happy, hot, bright place. 

A week in a wet and cold paradise

In an act of unprecedented self-care, I took a week off from my grueling research schedule.  Well, I didn't so much take off as take advantage of a gap in my archival plans.  I had tentative plans to go up to Hertfordshire and investigate some local archives, but 1) I was skeptical of the actual payoff my efforts and expenditure would bring to the project and 2) I was just bone-tired and road weary.  I'd been in archives for five months straight, my back was killing me from all the sitting, my skin had turned translucent from lack of light, and I thought if I had to spend another week bent over a yellowing volume, I might just die.  I wanted to take full advantage of my 3 weeks in Scotland (where, in my last archival trip, I had been too exhausted to really dig into the rich resources in Edinburgh), so I knew that I needed a recharge.

I had a bit of trouble deciding where to park myself for a week.  I really wanted to go back to the lovely Dartmoor National Park where I'd spent a few days back in 2008, but I also really wanted to see something new.  The Lake District was an obvious choice, but even at the beginning of October was a bit out of my price range, because I didn't just want a change of scenery, I wanted a retreat.  I wanted a place all to myself, where I could do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.  An archival research trip like this can be really painfully isolating, but I had also been staying in places that weren't "my space."  Shared kitchens, shared bathrooms, shared lounges, etc.  I wanted to sing loudly as I did my laundry.  I wanted to cook real food in a real kitchen without worrying about monopolizing the space.  I wanted to take a long, luxurious bath while reading a good book.  So I wanted a little cottage.  I found the perfect place in the Peak District National Park, a place I knew very little about, but with which I am now in love.  

But first.....Meet my little 60mpg Cerulean Chevy Something-Or-Other.  Isn't she beautiful.  Even more beautiful is the fact that I drove it around for a week on the elusive left side of the road without once crashing. 

The hardest thing about driving on the left side of the road isn't right turns or roundabouts, or even shifting gears with your left hand. These things require a lot of concentration ("Left, Left, Left...."), but are surmountable.  What was much harder was retraining my brain's spacial reasoning.  I always felt like I had plenty of room on the left (curbside), when in fact (as evidenced by several side mirror incidents) I had no room at all.  I was continually running off the road and nearly (and sometime actually) hitting stone walls, parked cars, and any number of other things.  I did get better at this as time went by, but it was a bit disconcerting.  However, it was an absolute joy to have a car and be able to explore the Derbyshire country side without walking holes in the soles of my shoes and waiting hours on country buses.

I went to a bonafide American-sized grocery store where I filled my cart with all the delectables that living in London without a car had denied me.

Milk in a Bag!  It isn't just the Canadians anymore.

I didn't actually buy any pulses, but I was very amused
by the use of the word, which I've only really heard in farming
manuals and scientific journal articles.  

A cartful!  More than what can be carried in your two hands!
Also note the existence of Dr. Pepper Zero, something we most
definitely do not have in the US (I would know).  

Now meet Bumblebee Cottage on a twisty little road between Darley Dale and Stanton Moor on Warren Carr Farm.  It was an old 17th century barn, converted into a one bedroom cottage.  It was the perfect place.  Just what the doctor had ordered.  Kitsch and Cozy.

An old school vanity (I think).  This was the only place in the house where you could get the wifi signal from the Big House.  

The lovely bathroom window.

The even lovelier deep bathtub (with a little door) where I took

at least 10 baths in a week.   

The AGA is somewhat of a cultural icon of middle class country living in Britain.  I'm not sure why this is, since it certainly isn't the most convenient or easy to cook on or energy efficient.  Essentially, it works like a wood stove.  The whole thing heats up when you turn it on. So if you want to cook on the stovetop, the oven is going to be on as well.  It was, however, deliciously warm, which was important during this wet, cold week in early fall. 

Living in a place where 12 people share a kitchen means that you rarely have the luxury of a long culinary production (or a short one for that matter).  The kitchen in the floor where I lived was also usually pretty disgusting. So this was the first time I could really go to town.  First thing on the menu, hearty chicken soup with egg noodles, with a right smart of fresh thyme and cumin.  I've never tasted anything so good.  

A view of the kitchen into the living room.

The hideously ugly living room, with French doors opening into the garden and views of the hills beyond.

The Garden view.  

Best of all was curling up on the floor and watching Downton Abbey a whole four months before it was bestowed upon my American brethren.  (*Gloat*)

Thanks a lot, Obamacare!

Ha! Got your attention!

While my day has been somewhat less than a no-good-terrible-horrible-very-bad-day, I nevertheless have found opportunity to wallow in a little self pity, as I have in the past 24 hours:

1) Sprained an ankle and fallen flat on my face into a gritty puddle in front of no less than half the population of Edinburgh at a popular bus stop, where two very nice gentlemen helped me from my Prostration in the Puddle as I spit out bits and pieces of Edinburgh rain, dirt, and rubbish.  

2) Fallen into the grips of a nasty Scottish chest cold.

3) Been forced to throw out seven pairs of washed socks because after five days hanging on my radiator rack, they are still soaking wet and starting to grow mold and smell terrible.  Ain't nobody got time for that. 

4) It has rained for 14 days straight.   

I, of course, blame Obamacare for these misfortunes which have befallen me.  

So to cheer myself up, I will write of happier days: my week in Eastbourne, "The Sunniest Spot in Great Britain."  

You really can't appreciate it in this picture, but I'm very close to the edge of a cliff with a 5,000,000 foot drop.

I'd always wanted to visit the South Downs in East Sussex, where some of my very favorite British mysteries (Laurie King's Mary Russell novels) are set, and walk along the white chalk cliffs.  I had a few local archives to visit, but needed to be relatively close to London, so I took the chance to convalesce by the sea. 

For a long time, the seaside was considered bad for your health (too damp), but by the early 1800s (as cities were becoming grosser and more densely populated), doctors began singing a different tune about the health benefits of the seaside.  So little fishing towns all over the South of England were revamped (or created anew) into fashionable resort towns for the upper and middle classes to escape to.  In Eastbourne's case, the soon-to-be Duke of Devonshire, William Cavendish, poured a bunch of money into building a town "for gentlemen by gentlemen," complete with huge sandstone mansions, pavillions, bandstands, promenades, and big creepy pier.  

The whole town is very Victorian, and a little other-worldish.  I can't really explain it properly.  Sunny and Eerie.  

Demographically, all the gay folks went to Brighton (England's version of Provincetown) and all the elderly folks went to Eastbourne.  I'm pretty sure the average age of an Eastbourne resident is 60 (I hasten to add for the benefit of my 60-year-old father that 60 is not in and of itself "elderly," but as an average is quite high). It's the warmest place in England.  It's relatively cheap to live in.  And it became a popular spot for convalescent hospitals in both World Wars, hospitals which have now been converted into retirement apartments.  Every other house, it seems, is either a guesthouse or an assisted living home (Unlike in the U.S. where assisted living facilities are almost exclusively run by non-local corporations, in the UK, assisted living facilities tend to be family-run in small buildings or houses, overseen and with costs paid by the government.)  The charity shops all deal primarily in used bikes and used Jazzy Scooters.  As you walk down the Promenade, you can always hear the hum of a Jazzy Scooter. There are even Jazzy Scooter recharging stations throughout town.  

Here's me on the Hop-On-Hop-Off bus (the only way to get to Beachy Head by public transport):  

I'm obviously very bad at selfies, but you get my point.  

I rented a bike from a really nice old couple, which made getting around a bit easier.  Except for BeachyHead, which is practically up in the clouds, Eastbourne is pretty flat. The pitiful lock it came with wouldn't have lasted a night in Hyde Park, but it held up in Eastbourne.  There were some junkie types and angry youths about, but, like I said, mostly geriatrics.  

They have little bike seatbelts on the trains.

Beachy Head is Britain's highest sea cliff (or cliffs more like), rising at some points, nearly 600 feet above sea-level.  The White Cliffs of Dover are more recognized because they are always pictured in WWII movies, but Beachy Head and The Seven Sisters are much more dramatic.  

You really need people in the picture to give you a frame of reference.  

The angle of this shot makes it feel like everyone is about to slip off into the ocean.  

Nothing but sky and the deep blue sea.  

These cliffs are actually pretty scary since until you are right at the edge, the landscape looks like this:

Looking across the Downs to Birling Gap (the only place you can access the beach below from without falling to your death). 

But, the first time I went, there was a fog so heavy that it was hard to see ten feet in front of you at times.  At one point, as the bus made its ascent, you really just had to trust that the driver could see the road, because it felt like we were barreling along into a cloud as the guide recording told us about the dramatic cliffs we were supposed to be seeing.  

  

So if you weren't really paying attention, you could conceivably just walk right over.    

And as a bunch of crosses on the edge eerily remind you, Beachy Head is a very "popular" suicide spot.   One of the crosses marked the place where a 13 year old boy jumped off.

Creepy in a different way was Eastbourne's entertainment pier, which has been standing (without much renovation, it seems) since the 1860s. This isn't a fishing pier like we have dotting the coastline of South Carolina.  It's more like Navy Pier (except more rickety) in Chicago. It has a huge pavillion, a theatre, a few shops and restaurants, a camera obscura tower.  Now, I have a kind of phobia of big metal things in water, so I felt quite brave walking on this contraption.  

The Pavilion in the mist.

A little rickety looking, right?  It's not just me.  

A view at sunset.  My guesthouse was only a block away from the Promenade, so I caught a few sunsets.  

A view from the edge.  

You could see the green water below, between boards that sometimes wobbled.  

I get a bit woozy just looking at this.  I feel like someone would probably get murdered here in Foyle's War.  

The best part about the Pier was taking pictures of it from afar and getting off of it, to have a nice seaside lunch: Fish and Chips without the fish (the fish was a bit too authentic for my liking...I don't like scales).

On one of my last days, I took a bike/train ride to Arundel Castle, a bit inland.  Arundel is a restored medieval castle built in 1067 by one of William the Conquerer's cronies, Roger de Montgomery.  It got passed around a lot in the Dark Ages, but eventually became the seat of the Duke of Norfolk after the English Civil War. It's been a Roman Catholic house for ages, and has a real Brideshead Revisited feel to it, lots of marian statuary and elaborate triptychs.

Now this is what a castle ought to look like.

The Duke has an extensive collection on MG.  This is what Maisie Dobbs drives!

No castle is complete without ostriches. 

A nice mix of old and new.

Cheap gardeners.

Nom, nom, nom!

The keep, I want to say?

This is where, I imagine, a lady in waiting would sit with her embroidery.

Found a magnolia tree that reminded me of home.  

It's Fall!

Some very Catholic-looking tomb covers.  

And last, but not least, the best (and most discouraging) water fountain ever: