“Here he lies where he longed to be,
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.”

So reads the self-penned epitaph of Robert Louis Stevenson. It is carved on his gravestone at Vailima in Samoa where Stevenson lived from 1890 until his death in 1893. The Samoans called him Tusitala which means “writer of tales.”

In my own way, in this blog, I have tried to be a “writer of tales.” The stories are mostly true or as true as my failing memory can render the events about which I have thus far written. I have not even changed the names to protect the innocent.

I read Stevenson’s epitaph as recognizing the struggle of travel. Stevenson was, of course, a world traveler well acquainted with the rigors of travel on sea and on land. The sailor’s life in Stevenson’s time, even now, was a hard life on an unforgiving sea. The hunter’s quarry is often elusive and difficult to track, yet the hunter needs to provide. But now, rest at last is their due and we all know where the paths of glory lead, do we not.

Was my trip so very burdensome that I am reduced to quoting epitaphs as I sit recuperating in my familiar and beloved bunker at Stately Johnson Manor South?  I suppose not, although schlepping 50+ pounds of luggage through caverns measureless to man that masquerade as the Toronto and Heathrow airports, as well as the “Tube” from Heathrow to Kings Cross Station, the train to Cambridge (and then reverse the trip) is backbreaking and bone grinding as far as I am concerned.  Walking the narrow, cobbled, and uneven streets of Cambridge with knees that are aged and protesting tested my mettle as much as my mettle has been tested lately. But I steeled myself to the moment by recalling the words of another of my favorite travel writers, George Kennan, the American adventurer famous for his explorations in the Kamchatka and Caucasus regions of Russia in the 1860s and 1870s.  Kennan wrote that the Caucasian mountaineers say that heroism “is endurance for one moment more.” So I kept on truckin’ for one moment more, muttering under my breath, “feets don’t fail me now,” and eventually, Dennis Ryan and I arrived at our various destinations.

And then we were back in the good old USA. And then I was boarding a plane to Detroit headed eventually to Madison. I believe whatever gods may be took some pity on me after testing me so severely for so long. In Buffalo, I was steps away from Delta baggage drop when my stalwart travel companion, Dennis Ryan, dropped me off at the departures entrance of the Buffalo airport. There was no waiting line. Then I was ushered off to TSA security pre-check. There was no waiting line. I was through baggage drop and TSA in less than 10 minutes. But (there’s always a but isn’t there) my departure gate was at the far end of the airport, a long walk away. Undaunted, I saw a courtesy cart with a driver and asked him to transport me to Gate 23. We were there within minutes. I had not yet broken a sweat, and, believe me, I break a sweat easily.

The plane to Detroit left on time, arrived early at Gate A 73. I had to make my way to Gate A 15, a long way away—but not when you have a moving walk-way about thirty feet away that deposited me at the base of an escalator to the express trams, one of which had just arrived as I came off the escalator. Into the tram and in five minutes, maybe less, I am at Gate 15. I had still not broken a sweat.

Flight to Madison was about 45 minutes. The longest walk of the day for me was from Gate 9 to baggage claim, maybe 4 minutes. My baggage was coming around when I got to  claims. I snatched it off the conveyor, walked out the front entrance where my brother, the ever-reliable Tom Johnson, was waiting for me. From touchdown to getting into the car, maybe 15 minutes. If the logistics of travel were always this easy, I might travel more than I do. On the other hand, I might not. Smart money is on the “might not.”

So here I am, back in my beloved bunker, surrounded by my books, photos, and the other assorted treasures I have accumulated over years of haunting thrift stores, antique shops, junk stores, and rummage sales. My stuff—it makes me happy and content. I am once again at peace with the world and myself, and always with you, Gentle Reader, always content with you.

This is not a final post. I have more tales to write about the Cambridge trip. Moreover, Cromwell’s Head  is not just about the trip to Cambridge and back. It is about the search for answers to life’s persistent questions, and that search will continue though the memories of Cambridge may fade. But for now, I am where I long to be. I am the sailor home from the sea, the hunter home from the hill.

I actually do like travel writing; not travel so much, but travel writing is an excellent way to experience the wonders of the world without the travails of travel. Now pay attention here, this is important: according to the Oxford English Dictionary, travel originally meant “bodily or mental labor or toil, especially of a painful or oppressive nature; exertion; trouble, hardship, suffering.” Ain’t it the truth. If it’s in the OED, it’s the truth.

Jessica Mitford, writing in The American Way of Birth, also notes that travail referred to the pain of child birth. Let me tell you, although I have not an iota of moral or physical authority to make the claim, schlepping 50+ pounds of luggage around gargantuan airports may be the closest that I’ll come to the travails of childbirth.

So, travel and travail. Linked with hoops of steel. How much easier to sit in one’s own personal space and experience the world by reading about it. And that brings me to one of my favorite travel writers, Pico Iyer, the British born, Indian essayist best known, at least to me, as a travel writer in such books as Falling Off the Map, The Global Soul, The Open Road, and my favorite, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere. What a wonderful concept: adventures in going nowhere. That’s where I want to go next. I am sure it would be my favorite destination. Reached without passports, boarding passes, security checks, schlepping luggage. Erehwon, land of my dreams.

It’s not a new idea, of course. The 17th century French mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, suggested that “All the unhappiness of men arises from one simple fact: that they cannot sit quietly in their chamber.” Believe me, Gentle Reader, I am practiced in the art of “sitting quietly in my chamber.” Nobody does it better than I, I make bold to claim.

So, well I will concede that Dennis Ryan and I had a grand time during our week in Cambridge, I am ready to be home in my quiet chamber reflecting on Pico Iyer’s admonition that, in this frenzied world, sometimes we need to sit still long enough to find out what moves us the most.

One of my favorite writers of non-fiction is John McPhee, a long-time contributor to The New Yorker and writer in residence at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey where McPhee was born in 1931 and lives there even now. Acolytes of McPhee are sometimes referred to as “McPhinos,” a somewhat unstylish term of endearment. And while I may not technically be an acolyte, I have, on my own consideration, read enough of McPhee to deserve the title of “McPhino.”

McPhee might be described as the “master of the mundane.” I say “master of the mundane” maybe even the drab because McPhee’s subject matter includes oranges, the pine barrens of New Jersey, geology and geologists, truck and train-driving, construction of river craft, Bill Bradley as a college basketball star, Alaska, and the North American shad among a variety of other topics. Most of these subjects were written as long pieces for The New Yorker and subsequently worked into books. If you have not read McPhee, you have a lot coming to you. I urge you to read this master of the mundane and I wish you joy of the reading.

Aside from the topics themselves, for me at least, McPhee’s genius is to tell his stories through, not only his keen powers of observation, but also through the eyes, ears, and attitudes of the people who are always part of what he’s writing about. This has perhaps been the long and winding road to talk about an experience that Dennis Ryan and I had yesterday when we went on our search for the grave of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein is buried in the Ascension Parish Burial Ground about a 10 minute taxi ride from our lodgings at Sidney Sussex College. The cemetery itself deserves its own blog post and I may get to it. For now, I want to share our experience with you that is so McPhee-like.

You enter the cemetery grounds by turning off Huntington Road, a modern thoroughfare, onto All Souls Lane, an unpaved path wide enough for one car. If you go to the end of All Souls Lane, at No. 10 All Souls Lane, you will come to what was a small chapel but is now the site of American-born letter-cutter and stone-carver Eric Marland’s Alphabet Museum, a letter-cutting (read calligraphy) and stone carving workshop.

Marland is an almost direct descendant of Eric Gill, the famous (some would say infamous) British sculptor and print-maker who was part of the Arts and Crafts Movement that flourish in Europe and America from about 1880 to 1920. Gill died in 1940, so Marland, who is not yet 60, did not train with him. Marland did train with David Kindersly who was, perhaps, Gill’s most notable student. In keeping with the tradition, Marland now runs calligraphy and stone cutting workshops out of the Chapel at 10 All Souls Lane. We were happy to meet Greg Hanlon from Melbourne, Australia, who takes time off from his accounting job at an IT firm, to follow his own passion of letter-cutting and stone-carving and to receive tutelage from Marland. From master to master to master, the tradition lives on.

The Chapel at No. 10 All Souls Lane is a vaulted-ceiling, open spaced interior that Marland says is freezing cold in the winter and sometimes unbearably hot in the summer. He’s going to insulate it and put on a new roof, both expensive undertakings with no hope of financial help from the money-strapped Cambridge Council. But Marland is determined and I would not be surprised that were I to return to Cambridge a few years hence (that would surprise me), a good deal of headway would have been made. It’s clearly a work in progress. The interior space is furnished with long work tables, stone cutting gear, blank stones, stones carved with everything from obscure Latin to house numbers. One stone reads Vocatus Atque Non Vocatus Deus and is attributed to Erasmus but actually is one of the oracles of Delphi. A rough translation would be “Called for or not, God is present.” God should probably be god, and I think it might be more appropriately translated as “Be careful what you wish for.” Marland pulled out from under a table a framed original print of the alphabet designed by Eric Gill in Gill’s favorite sans serif font. Marland said, “We just found it going through some old stuff.” Gill had designed some of the carvings on the gravestones in the cemetery.

Eric Marland is a small, wiry, gregarious man. He wore a work brace on his left leg and walked with a slight limp. He and Greg removed a large, uncut stone block from the back of Eric’s van and, that job complete, Eric made use of some metal crutches to move around. Whether this condition is the result of his work activity or not, we did not ask.

Eric loves to share his knowledge and passion for his art with anyone who stumbles onto 10 All Souls Lane. He was born in Cambridge, MA but moved with his family, when he was very young, to Iowa where is father taught at the University of Iowa. Marland was not much taken with Iowa, to hear him talk, nor were his siblings. He and his brother left when each became 18. His sister left Iowa when she was 16. There’s a back story there, but the moment was not apropos to explore it. I couldn’t detect any Iowa accent, but he has picked up a Cambridge English twang. After our experience at the Champion of the Thames Pub the other day, I am a little leary about talking about accents. Let me say that Eric did not sound like Michael Caine.

I suppose we chatted with Eric and Greg for the better part of 45 minutes. It was more like we listened to Eric and that was perfectly all right. He’s a gossiper and had some stories which, true or not, were charmingly told. Marland is a sort-of docent of the grave sites though it is labor for which he is uncompensated. He was part of a refurbishing of  Wittgenstein’s grave marker which is a plain and simple ledger stone inscribed with Wittgenstein’s name and his years on this earth (1889-1951) cut in sans serif modern. Marland still keeps that site relatively free from the creeping vines and other undergrowth that have been allowed to grow wild in the cemetery.

People pop their heads into the Chapel mostly asking where Wittgenstein’s grave is and Eric is always ready to point it out. When we walked in he looked up from his work and asked if we were looking for Wittgenstein’s grave. “Already found it,” we said. “Lovely,” he retorted. We were looking for some other graves of people associated with Wittgenstein (George Moore, Frank Ramsey, Elizabeth Anscombe). We had found Anscombe’s but had walked by Moore’s and Ramsey’s graves. Eric was able to direct us to them.

I hope I’ve conveyed, “McPhino-like,” how wonderful our time with Eric Marland was. Marland is a craftsman of a different time I think. He’s ageless is maybe what I mean. I asked him “how many people say some variation of the “carved in stone” meme. I noted that I was not offering the cliche itself, only asking how many others did. He laughed and said that the notion of “carved in stone” was not all that accurate. Mistakes can be fixed. “Nothing,” Marland said, with what I thought was a twinkle in his eye, “is carved in stone.”

Oh, Gentle Reader, what a day we APs have had in Cambridge. So much has happened that I deem worthy of a blog post, I feel I must post several blogs about July 18 in Cambridge. This is not, however, going  to be a June 16, 1904 series of blogs and I am no Leopold Bloom or James Joyce, but it is the quotidian that provides us with life’s lessons and the small encounters of life are the stuff that dreams are made on.

I won’t start at the very beginning, with a full English breakfast in College Hall. That will be the subject of another posting. I want to start with our Mother Tongue: English. Bill Bryson wrote a fun read about the topic titled English—The Mother Tongue & How It Got That Way. He spends a good part of the book talking about the differences between British and American English. I am not sure that he always gets things right, but he gets it funny. While there certainly is a difference in the expressions that Brits and Americans use, for me, at least, that’s less interesting than listening to the lilt of spoken English by the British. Shaw in Pygmalion had Henry Higgins making fun of it and Lerner and Lowe set it to music (well, Lerner actually) in My Fair Lady. Higgins laments, An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him. The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him…There are even places where English completely disappears. Well, in America, they haven’t used it for years.

I love to listen to various British accents. As far as I am concerned, every British male over 65 sounds like Michael Caine to me. I love Michael Caine’s accent. It is working-class south London cockney. Michael Caine has an accent. It’s a great accent. I suspect even Michael Caine thinks he speaks with an accent.

But not all Brits think they have an accent. Take, for example, this “bloke” that Dennis and I chatted with this afternoon in the Champion of Thames Bar. By the way, I’ve posted photos with brief descriptions on my Facebook page which I think you can access by scrolling through the blogs and finding my Facebook link at the bottom. There you can meet the lovely and talented Beth, bartender at the Champion of Thames Bar (and daughter of the proprietor). But I was talking about this bloke we met. He was “passing through” he said. “Aren’t we all?” I replied. He had married and divorced an American woman with whom he lived for a time in Allentown, PA. where, he said, “she had a very nice house.” But now, divorce almost final, he had returned to the UK to take care of some family business. Dennis and I talked with him for more than an hour. He was a personable guy. Very pleasant. He had an accent. Or so we thought until he set us straight, with good humor, and maybe his tongue, Mother or otherwise, slightly in his cheek. “I was born in Oxford,” he declaimed, “where we invented the English language [no, not really, but who was I to say different even though I had read Bill Bryson’s book?]. I don’t speak with an accent, you blokes speak with an accent.”

Fair enough I guess. But, dammit all, I thought he sounded a lot like Michael Caine.

You TV ornithologists will remember the distinctly British Pigeon Sisters of Odd Couple fame, Cecily and Gwendolyn. C&G were based on characters from Oscar Wilde’s delightful Gilbert-and-Sullivan-esque play, The Importance of Being Earnest. The Pigeon Sisters would coo when they laughed, not unlike the two band-tailed pigeons cooing outside my window. They might be mistaken for owls so very loud are they and flapping wings and harassing each other, though maybe it’s a male and female and it’s a courting ritual. Whatever it is, it’s damn loud and here in Cambridge, at 7pm Cambridge time, I am trying to get some sleep. Until these British birds stop their owl-like hooting, I am unlikely to drift off into the healing arms of Lethe.

More’s the pity, because, by this time, I have been without sleep for more than 30 hours. So you see, gentle reader, Sinclair Lewis was right about the tedium of travel. The flight from Toronto to Heathrow was without incident and came in twenty minutes early. But then the pain sets in. Passport Control, a diabolical invention designed to sap what strength remains in you after a long flight, features those Disney World insidious snake lines. Then on to baggage claim which must have been in a seemingly abandoned warehouse somewhere in Scotland. Then the Bataan-like Death March to connect with the “underground” train from Heathrow that would take us to King’s Cross Station, there to get a train to Cambridge.

But, ironies of ironies, when I booked the rooms at Sidney Sussex College for Dennis and me back in late May or early June, I told the  power-that-be, when I was asked what time we might be arriving in Cambridge, we’d be arriving about noon on July 17. We pulled into the train-station at Cambridge and de-trained at noon on the nose. Do not forsake me, oh my Darling!

We checked into our rooms at Blundell Court, spartan cells that brook no luxuriating in thick mattresses, air conditioning, fluffy towels (and lots of them), and a well-stocked liquor bar. But it’s that old college experience that Dennis and I are seeking, as old men will do when they are trying to ward off nostalgia.

Having settled ourselves into our ensuite rooms, Dennis and I headed out to get the lay of the land, if you’ll pardon the expression. We walked around for a couple of hours, had a little supper, and made our weary way back to Blundell Court and our simple but clean (well, mostly clean I suppose) rooms having survived, if only barely, the second day of our quest for Cromwell’s Skull and Wittgenstein’s brain. That quest will begin in earnest tomorrow, if the Pigeon sisters outside my window will stop giving a hoot.

Buffalo, the second largest city in the state of New York, the “Queen City,” the “Nickel City,” the “City of Good Neighbors.” It’s a city once made great by the Erie Canal, by railroads, steel, and the productions of automobiles. Buffalo opened trade routes to the Midwest. Truly a city of broad shoulders, blue-collared and proud of it.

But, as Frost said, “nothing gold can last,” and Buffalo fell on to hard times as American manufacturing declined. So Buffalo is a city of contrasts: Blighted areas hard on new construction, magnificent architectural gems in the downtown area, overlooking insolent, “modern” atrocities. But a grandeur endures. It’s a city that can still say, like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, “I am big. It’s the movies that got small.”

But, gentle reader, do not shuffle off to Buffalo for that famous sandwich, beef-on-weck. At least don’t shuffle off to the Buffalo Beer Pub as I did yesterday with Linda and Dennis Ryan. The Buffalo wings were excellent, the beef-on-weck a real disappointment. I will, however, on returning to Buffalo from our stay in Cambridge, try another establishment and see if Buffalo, on this score at least, can redeem itself.

And speaking of scores, can you hear Old Blue Eyes (no, not me, though I have blue eyes) crooning in the background? He’s singing Come Fly Away. https://youtu.be/Euci0_BBmNE

And fly away is what Dennis and I will do in a few hours: 6:35pm to be exact. But we got to the airport at noon. Nothing like being a little early to get the best seats. You’ll be flying with us, in spirit I hope, soaring with us over the Atlantic. See you in London.

Day one of the journey to Cambridge, England is almost in the history books. All in all, it’s been a pretty good day. Travel was not as mind numbing as it might have been—knee numbing, yes; mind numbing, no. I even made it through TSA PRECHK without having to remove belt, suspenders, garter belt, knee braces, my three pounds of bling (actually, I did have to toss the bling into a tray), or even my shoes.

Flight to Detroit was about 45 minutes. I de-planed at Gate A2 and had to make my way to Gate A69. Oy! But fear not, gentle reader. I used two moving walk-ways, one escalator, and the express tram to get to my gate. When I de-tramed, I was within 30 feet of my gate. Oh frabjous day! I barely broke a sweat.

The second leg of the flight to Buffalo was also a breeze. And there must have been a good one because we were on the ground in Buffalo 20 minutes early. So early that our gate was occupied by another plane, but the delay was about five minutes. We followed a storm front from Detroit to Buffalo. The pilot said, paraphrasing Bette Davis in All About Eve, “fasten your seat belts; you’re in for a bumpy ride.” No beverage service because of the turbulence. But, gentle reader, there was no turbulence. The ride into Buffalo was as smooth as a baby’s butt. But, speaking of buts, there was rain a plenty on the ground. Roads around the airport were closed due to flooding. The situation reminded me of a song by Johnny Cash: Five Feet High and Risin’. https://youtu.be/5mf-BIZumaA

My soon-to-be traveling partner, and host here in Buffalo, Dennis Ryan, was able to retrieve me without difficulty, however, and eventually we made our way to the Anchor Bar, skirting several more flooded roads, for Buffalo chicken wings. Twenty of the medium hot, thank you very much. An order of ten seemed too small, an order of 50 too excessive, but twenty was four too many. That, by the way, was twenty wings total, ten a piece.

I did somehow manage to lose my luggage claim check. I have no idea where it might be. Luckily, I did not need it.

Most enjoyably, the flight to Buffalo featured a flight attendant, the one who made all the announcements, whose voice was very much the voice of Marjorie Main in her iconic role of Ma Kettle. I wondered if she might not also look like Ma Kettle. As it turned out, she did. But, God bless her, she had Bette Davis eyes!