John Linton ....if Sonning counts as rurality.
We shared half a large sheep for dinner last night (a bit of an exaggeration but indicative of English pub cooking portions) and therefore slept very soundly. The weather forecast for our last day of our trip round the Cotswolds and Chilterns was very iffy and when we woke up the sky was different shades of grey so we decided to play it safe and only go as far as Henley in the morning which, when I was a boy, used to be a pretty Thames side large village only remarkable for the annual regatta and the diamond skulls. Today it is more of a commercialised town but with enough of the original buildings and a Saturday street market for Annette to see what it once might have been.
We left the car at the long term parking on the fringe and walked through Henley and then down to the banks of the Thames on both sides of the river pausing between quite heavy showers. We admired the regatta viewing points and the wide grasslands on the right bank and also the collection of water craft plying this part of the Thames - narrow boats, gin palaces, rowing eights, fours and a couple of single scullers and two magnificent restored Edwardian steam 'yachts' now converted to tourist viewing platforms visiting various points along the Thames between Henley, Marlowe and Maidenhead. They were magnificently restored and maintained and made a great show. More than can be said for the town itself which was grubby and run down in places with third rate shops and a strange melange of people that didn't seem relevant in an English small town.
As the rain threatened to get heavier, and the temperature dropped markedly, we returned to our hotel after a couple of hours and explored the banks of the Thames around Sonning seeing three Grey Herons on separate occasions but otherwise getting very wet. So we called it a day and ate a leisurely sandwich lunch in front of the fire in the main bar while we dried out and smelled the aroma of roasting ducks on the spits on ether side of the fire. The chat around the big bar was about the rugby which had recently finished with much jubilation that Ireland had beaten Australia - apparently everyone has some Irish blood in them though I would have thought, at least from their accents, that everyone in that bar, except us, was English....we spoke very quietly.
During the afternoon the rain got progressively heavier and we were forced to abandon any thought of further exercise and were forced to while away the afternoon finishing a bottle of wine and chatting about nothing important at all and reading the review sections of the Saturday papers by the fire. I detest most newspapers as fiction and propaganda fed to the unintelligent as news but I think the literary/arts review sections of the better (if there is such a thing any more) UK press as the last bastion of intelligent writing in the world's media. So we 'wasted' our last afternoon in the English countryside but we talked about the highlights of the trip to date and recalled how much we have learned and how enjoyable it has been.....I think that is what English country pubs have always been able to induce in the people who wander in to them.
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