It's official: we are vacationing in England this August. Oh, the rapture! If it were possible, I am an even bigger Anglophile than I am a Francophile, and I will be in heaven for the two and a half weeks we are in that green and pleasant land.
Building on the success of last summer's trip to France, we are again exchanging houses through the HomeLink service. I highly recommend the house exchange experience, even though finding an English family was much harder than finding a French family. Perhaps it's the economy, but we sent out a whopping 35 offers this year before getting an acceptance as opposed to last year's 10 or so.
We'll be staying in a lovely house in Twickenham, which is right near Windsor and about a half hour from central London. We'll visit the city often, I'm sure, but we'll also venture to places like Oxford, Cambridge, Stratford, Canterbury, and Down Ampney. If the kids get their way, we'll also make an overnight pilgrimage to Liverpool, but that is still in negotiation. And I have a special, secret destination planned for Patrick's birthday, though I can't reveal the details of that yet. But it's going to be amazing, honey.
As of today, our trip is exactly six months away, which means it's time to prepare. I love to know as much as possible about a place before I visit it, even if I've been there before (and this will be my fifth trip to England, lucky girl that I am). As I did last year, in the next 26 weeks I'll be providing as much context as possible for myself and the kids. Let me count the ways....
I am agog at how many fabulous Masterpiece Theater miniseries are available through Netflix, including:
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Wives and Daughters
The Secret Life of Mrs. Beeton
Clarissa
Bleak House
The Buccaneers
Daniel Deronda
and so many, many others....
At minimum, I want to read or re-read:
The Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan (yes, again)
Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, by Peter Ackroyd
London: The Biography, by Peter Ackroyd
The Life of Thomas More, by Peter Ackroyd
English Music (a novel), by Peter Ackroyd
(Can you tell I adore Peter Ackroyd?)
Eden Renewed (a biography of Milton), by Peter Levi
Middlemarch, by George Eliot
The Dead Secret, by Wilkie Collins
The Faerie Queen, by Edmund Spenser
The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer
Pamela, by Samuel Richardson
The Weight of Glory, by C.S. Lewis
Martin Chuzzlewit, by Charles Dickens
The Tempest, by William Shakespeare
Henry V, by William Shakespeare
and we'll see what else I can get through.
I hope we can see some Shakespeare on our trip, but we'll also see Troilus and Cressida and The Taming of the Shrew beforehand, both performed by the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival.
Ah, the glory that is English music. From Tallis and Gibbons to Britten and most especially my beloved Vaughan Williams, English classical music speaks to my soul in a way that is unparalleled. And then there's all the pop magic, from The Beatles to Led Zeppelin, and from The Kinks to The Arctic Monkeys. It will pretty much be playing constantly (not that that's anything different from the norm around here).
And the art! The Pre-Raphaelites! Nash! Gainsborough! Constable! Need I say more?
Books for the kids? Right now, I'm reading the first Harry Potter book to Daniel and Tess, and I'm reading The Hobbit to James and Hope; I expect we'll continue with both series for the foreseeable future. I hope the bigger kids will re-read The Chronicles of Narnia and The Dark is Rising series on their own. Anne will get plenty of the Alfie series by Shirley Hughes and repeated readings of all of John Burningham's books. I'm pretty sure I can convince Christian to read at least C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters and Dickens's Oliver Twist, and I know he wants to re-read all of the Sherlock Holmes stories, but he has so much reading to do for his AP English and History classes that I can't be too pushy.
Soon I'll post a list of the places we'll go, but as for preparatory education, there you have it. I'm sure I haven't listed some of your favorites; there's only so much time, after all. But if there is something I must include, be it several James Mason films or a detailed review of the Romantic poets (you know who you are, people), then let me know.