If It's Tuesday, It Must Be Hereford

This past weekend was not planned.

Oh, the actual weekend in London was, seeing family and friends.  And Scott playing backgammon in Prestbury.

But Sunday didn't turn out the way it should have, because of Storm Bert.  Yes, here in the UK we now name our storms.  We don’t have hurricanes or typhoons (yet) but we hate missing out on anthropomorphising our bad weather like the rest of the world.

Anyway, Storm Bert dumped a whole lot of rain on our part of the country.  So much so that the trains to Ludlow weren’t. There were no trains because of landslips (that’s the British term for landslide) and flooding.

I was dumped at Crewe.  Which is not a bad place to be dumped since it’s an excellent hub for many other routes.  But it kind of sucks to stay overnight there (apologies to the, I’m sure, very nice people who live there).

I briefly considered staying at the Hotel Ibis in Crewe and quickly realised ‘not’: Wilmslow was just one stop north of Crewe, and Scott was playing in a backgammon tournament nearby, not scheduled to return to Ludlow until Monday. 

I hopped on a train hoping he would finally see my messages so that I would know exactly where I was going.  He did and I cabbed it to Prestbury’s Bridge Hotel. Luckily, he was happy to see me (he won two of many matches) and we stayed the night.

Next morning, trains to Ludlow were still cancelled because of Bert, but they were going as far as Shrewsbury, an hour away from home, and a very nice place to spend a day and evening. We booked our favourite hotel, the Darwin Townhouse, small and eccentrically cosy with a staff who knows us. Two minutes after booking the hotel, the train driver came on and said that they were going to Ludlow after all.  We decided, however, to remain nomads for one more day.  So Shrewsbury it was: Italian lunch, French dinner - pretty good, actually. 

There’s an honour bar stocked very generously with both wines and spirits, so before bedtime we had a nightcap of Jack Daniels on the rocks.  Haven’t done that in a long time.

We sat in the front parlour across from one another, with a substantial chess board on the coffee table between us.  The bishops were like large salt shakers, that gives you an idea of the size of this chess board. Neither of us had played in a while.  (I haven’t played since Grand Rapids when my brothers beat the shit out of me every time. That was in the ‘60s.)

I remembered how each piece could move but that still didn’t save me from a stupid defeat. Clearly Scott had played more recently and successfully than I!

After a much better sleep on a much better mattress, we enjoyed a great Shropshire breakfast amidst an explosion of Christmas decorations throughout the public rooms. Everywhere you look there are Christmas trees, large and small. Christmas pillows on all the furniture. Holly wreaths on all the windows.  You know it’s Christmas time!

We made it home by train at 10:30 Tuesday morning, just in time to change clothes and ride to Hereford, about 45 minutes south of Ludlow for Scott’s pre-op appointment with the anaesthetist. (He's having a second hip replacement in January).

I came along because we were having fun being nomads, and one more night beckoned in another hotel we love, the Castle House, in Hereford. It is situated down the street from the magnificent Hereford Cathedral. An imposing monument both outside and in.  It is much more interesting inside, because it contains an original copy of the Magna Carta, with the seal of King John I (nasty piece of work I’m glad the lords cut him down to size! [although I think Claude Rains did an excellent job of portraying him in Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood])

The Magna Carta is not the only treasure here in the cathedral: one of the oldest maps of the world, the Mappa Mundi, is also on display here, an eccentric, circular piece of art which depicts the world as it was known in the early 14th century.

But wait!  There’s more!  

The cathedral was a repository for some very important, and rare, books, some pre-printing press and some after.  So valuable were these books, they were chained to the bookshelves where they resided.  Oh, you could take them down and read them (if you got special permission back in the day) but you could not check them out.  There they stayed, and there they stay today.

Such an easy stroll from the hotel, so we stopped on the way home for a late lunch, an excellent pizza, then a lie-down before cocktails in the hotel bar.  We decided a late, light bite was in order, and wandered down the other way to the bao and ramen fusion fast food joint.  Really pretty good!  It’s been awfully cold, so the hot sake warmed us up.  The chicken bites were spicy.  So spicy, in fact, that my lips were burning by the end of the meal.

A leisurely night and late-ish morning saw us boarding the train about 10:30, passing miles and miles of flooded fields and overrun rivers. 

So: London to Crewe, to Wilmslow, to Shrewsbury, to Hereford, to Ludlow. We’ve become more familiar with our part of England.  But it’s nice to be home.