insomnia diaries: sub-blog for hein: operation soggy sheep

So, back by popular demand, le blog! although this time we are in the UK, where my mother and I have come to spend the month of May inhaling chemical fumes, complaining about the cold, and generally getting in the way of the builders who are trying to carry out a renovation of Thwaitehill (for those not In The Know, this is the name of the house where the family gathers annually to sit in the rain, look at sheep, and occasionally sally forth for cold, wet hiking expeditions). We are now a week into our stay, and have achieved a tremendous amount, the most astonishing thing being that we have not yet doused each other in gasoline and set each other alight.

Day 1 I am going to count as Thursday of last week; I arrived at Heathrow after a red-eye flight from San Francisco, and am very proud to announce that I calibrated the necessary eyelash-batting just right, convincing the passport control officer to let me into the country despite a just-expired UK passport without actually being arrested for bribery or indecent solicitation. A seamless train-tube-walk to Euston station, where I actually met up with my mother (and Anita - hello Anita! Anita will pop up again in this story very shortly, so remember her name...) as planned. The fun part was when we were unable to get our pre-booked train tickets from the ticket machine due to the mysteries of Virgin Trains and U.S. Visa cards, and Anita (hello again, Anita!) had to rescue us by buying another round of train tickets with two minutes to spare to get ourselves and our six, yes, six enormous suitcases onto the train. On arrival at Penrith, I got tipped out with all six said suitcases while my mother went on to Carlisle to pick up the rental car; Paul from the B&B in Penrith luckily came to my rescue, a puffing overweight knight in shining armour, who insisted on carrying five of the six suitcases out to the car; he was still breathing hard fifteen minutes later when we got back to the hotel and I don't think it was my gorgeous rumpled post-aeroplane/train look that was doing it to him, either. I think there was a high ratio of herniation to suitcase-age, but that's what he gets for being chivalrous. After checking in, I spent the afternoon wandering around Penrith desperately trying to keep myself awake by doing the bare minimum of absolutely essential shopping: the fudge shop (two large bricks) and the art store (permanent rose oil paint) before collapsing into a tea shop.

There are currently two categories of tea shop in Penrith: those with aspirations to Euro-greatness, that sell espresso in tiny cups and fresh-squeezed panini with coulis of raspberry on a bed of baby yak cud, and those that are more true to their working-class roots, where the menu is eerily close to the Monty Python spam skit. (I ended up in one of the latter; you can tell them because the tables are formica and individual menu items are printed up in dot-matrix and sello-taped to the walls). Everything on the menu was a variation of toast, beans, fried eggs, and tea; if you wanted to go extra fancy you can add mushy peas, fried mushrooms, or fried tomatoes, but other than that it was all about whether you wanted one vs two fried eggs, one vs two slices of toast, whether you wanted the fried eggs _on_ the toast or off to the side, sugar or just milk in your tea. Spam spam spam spam spam spam baked beans and spam. I can't drink bog-standard tea anymore, ever since Dr. Dhar told friend T. about the machines on the tea plantations in India that come along, after the good tea leaves have been harvested by hand, that apparently scoop up everything (small animals, field-worker shit, twigs, etc.) to be ground into PG Tips. Eeeuuuw. I will stick to hot water.

Day 2 I woke up in the middle of the night (blech, jetlag) but hooray! better living through pharmaceuticals, as they say, so I took a magic pill and day 2 didn't actually start until I woke up for the second time feeling relatively well rested at 7 a.m. We spent the morning doing the nonessential shopping (groceries, yawn) at the Penrith Coop. We signed up to be Coop members; this means we are eligible for their insane system whereby you cut out the bottom of your receipt every time you shop there and glue it onto a piece of card and then every ten years they have a day when you bring in your card and redeem it for fifty pence.

At lunch time, we drove out to Thwaite, where Mrs. M. was waiting to let us in (Mr. and Mrs. M, the previous tenants, are now in their late eighties/early nineties; after renting the house for the last 30 years or so, they are now too old to enjoy striding up the fells in the hail while slipping on sheepshit and getting eaten by midges. I say you're NEVER too old to enjoy that). We drove her into Penrith and put her on the train, which was quite sad, as she is terrifyingly frail, and then went back to the house to start Operation Soggy Sheep for reals.

I'm going to stop for tonight because my sister doesn't like it if my blog entries get too long and rambly, and besides it'll leave me something to say for tomorrow night. Let's see if I can add some fun pics...