Tonight completes one week in Britain. I want to update you since Exeter. I want to report a number of impressions I've had in regard to several specific places, and our life here as I see it.

Britspeak   I revel in the speech here as much as in a country with a different language. I am totally amenable to take a "When In Rome" attitude and to start using local speech. This is not being pretentious; aside from being highly practical, it's a lot of fun. Why not ask where the lift is instead of the elevator, and how to find the disabled parking instead of the handicapped parking. And I'm not above asking someone to pahss the butta. The spellings are fun, too. Excuse me if I should use some. It's for fun, not pretentiousness.

I picked up a new term. After getting lost in a roundabout the other day (see below), a woman told me to take a slip road to get back. I had no idea what I had heard until I saw a sign using that term. It seems to be a service road.

As a guide, try this. Take the word "lovely" and strip it of its traditional meaning of "attractive". Also take "brilliant" and drop its meaning of "bright". Then give both words the meaning of "very good" and use one or the other frequently. You get extra points if you use both in the same sentence, such as: "The dinner was lovely, and the view from the restaurant was absolutely brilliant!"

Left, Please   So we drive here on the left. That is, they do, and I try to. Nuff said? Although we've been here for short visits since, our last Big Drive through Britain and Ireland was in 1966. We were much younger then, and more adaptable. It was a piece o' cake. Now it's old dog, new tricks time and I have to concentrate, although it's getting easier. In the first days, I found I would overcompensate and drive too far to the left, and on the motorway the tyres would start vibrating on the rumble strip, and elsewhere they would squeal against the kerb. (There are kerbs on every highway!) In the first days I bumped into several kerbs, and the second day here, last Sunday, going down the A30 to Land's End, the front left tyre hit a kerb and I had a puncture. As I was changing it, which I could have completed on my own, before I jacked up the car I took Bev out and sat her in the wheelchair. That's like putting cheese in the mousetrap. Promptly two guys stopped to help. Oddly, they were both leather-jacketed bikers who helped; they tend to carry a bad rap. All fixed now, and tyre replaced the next day in Exeter. Smaller roads have no space. It's like driving down a narrow two-lane roofless tunnel. At best you have the famous English hedgerows (bushes) three inches from your left-hand mirror, at worst, stone walls. It's harrowing. I fully expect to see leaves flying from that mirror one of these days. Driving on the left with the occasional car coming at you on the right is not bad. What I find extremely disorienting is driving on the motorway with a stream of traffic on your (left) side and a solid stream of traffic coming at you on the other side of the median. It's dizzying, like looking at a mirror image.

Doorknob Shifting   On that three-week British drive in 1966, we had a car we had rented in Germany and used there for three weeks, then brought over. Driving on the left with a left-hand steering wheel is not as bad as you think. It's just that the passenger on the right has to look to help you pass (on the right) or get out of a parking space (to the right). I saw a Frenchman in Salisbury having his passenger help him get out of a space.

But now I'm lucky (?). I have a British car (a Ford Mondeo) and I have a steering wheel on the right for the first time. This helps in passing and parking, but it's harder with mirrors and shifting, which I do in two steps.

Every time I want to look in the rear-view mirror I (1) look to the right, and find myself looking at the outside mirror, then (2) finally looking left to the inside mirror. Actually, I'm getting better, and maybe once or twice a day, manage to eliminate step (1).

I wanted an automatic car, not only because I didn't want to shift, but also because I didn't want to have to shift with my left hand. But you still have to go into reverse sometimes. Here, too, I need two steps. When parking, (1) my right hand tries to put the doorknob into reverse; when that fails, (2) my left hand finds the stick shift to put it into reverse. Although with practice, here too, once in a while I manage to eliminate step (1).

Roundabouts   In the US, you find very few traffic circles. However, the British road system is unique from any you've ever seen, and also different from any on the continent. The road system (in more built-up areas) could be described as circular. That is, it consists of more roundabouts than you'd care to count in a lifetime, all artfully connected by extremely short bits of highway. If you remember the knobs and sticks of Tinker Toys you can imagine this road system. This is what I mean by circular: you go a short distance, than halfway around a roundabout (left, please), then straight a bit, then 1/4 around, straight, then 3/4 around. I have a good sense of direction and a good sense of geography, but I've gotten lost at least once a day, and always because of taking a wrong turn at a roundabout.

I find it interesting that on the ship, someone referred to the British roundabouts, and it was news to me. I really didn't recognize what he was talking about. I apparently had blotted the whole thing out of my memory, like something I didn't want to remember.

Land's End   Going to Land's End has always appealed to my sense of geography. It's that toe of England reaching out to the southwest, sticking out between France and Ireland. It reaches out to the Atlantic, and to America. Physically, it turns out to be an attractive area of cliffs and breakers below, of craggy islands out a ways, with a lighthouse, of seagulls and quiet. But it reaches outward. You can't sail from it, but a bit to the left on the English Channel side is Plymouth, where the Pilgrims sailed from, and around to the right on the Bristol channel is Bristol (more below).

Just as Americans use the term "from Maine to California" to describe the totality of the US, the British use the phrase "from John o' Groats [on the northeast coast of Scotland] to Land's End [on the southwest coast of England]" to do the same. (It's curious that both expressions cover the area from NE to SW.)

At Land's End there was the usual signpost (Photo by Kenneth Allen), but this one seemed special to me. It had very few arrows. Inland it pointed to John o' Groats, 874 mi (1407 km) away. And pointing out to sea it said: New York 3147 mi (5065 km). Lovely.

Bristol   Bristol is still a major port and doesn't have that much to see. We took a drive through the city and passed some places our trusty Michelin pointed out. (Doing this is a significant accomplishment, considering the narrow streets, the one-way streets, the closed-off streets, the rush-hour traffic, and on the left, thank you.) But Bristol appealed to me because of its maritime history. We had driven in Nova Scotia the Cabot Trail, and here was a monument in Bristol to John Cabot, because he sailed from here 500 years ago. We passed the SS Great Britain from the 1840's, which sailed regularly to America in those years. Bristol was the port that the Caribbean rum and slave trade ran from. On King Street we drove past the old inn, still operating, that was so rich in maritime history that Robert Louis Stevenson used it as a model for the inn in Treasure Island. Then Michelin pointed out the building of the Harvey company. No recognition on my part. They had been wine merchants out of Bristol to France in the 1700's. Still nothing. When politics changed, they instead started dealing in Portuguese ports and Spanish sherries. The light began to flicker, and came on just before I read the last sentence. And their most famous sherry is Harvey's Bristol Creme. Of course. Brilliant.

Bath   That's Baahth. You couldn't want an ensemble of more interesting architecture. In the 1700's it was the place for society to go. There are long streets of classical townhouses in golden Bath stone, and I've never seen anything like The Circus, which has a round park with huge oak trees in the middle, and all around the circle maybe 70-80 identical townhouses with columns, interrupted by three equidistant streets exiting the Circus. Jane Austen wrote all about it, and there's a museum for her. There's the Assembly Rooms where Society met, drank tea, played cards and dahnced. And our book pointed out the one townhouse where you can go peek in the window near the entrance to see a niche in the entryway filled with blue Delft tiles. It was used for gentlemen entering to powder their wigs.

Transporter Bridge   There are a number of engineering landmarks that are highly worthwhile, such as the cable cars in San Francisco. I highly recommended seeing the film "Billy Elliot", and if you did, there's the scene where he's talking to his ballet teacher as they're sitting on and in her car and they look up to see cables and some sort of a bridge structure, and I always wondered what it was. I've checked it out, and it turns out it was the transporter bridge (that's trahnspawta) in Middlesbrough, in the north of England. It turns out there were a number of these bridges built at the turn of the century, including one in Duluth, but most are gone now. There is only one other in Britain, and we went to ride it. It's in Newport, near Cardiff, Wales, and dates from 1906, restored ten years ago. It's a Class One Listed (landmarked) structure. I've learned that, wherever a ferry or a fixed bridge roadway was impractical for shipping (here the tidal variation was too great) an aerial ferry was used on a transporter bridge (Photo by Hywel Williams). A platform-like gondola (Photo by Adrian Pingstone) holding passengers and six cars hangs from the top of the bridge to make the crossing. Great fun.

Welsh   I'm glad to see that the revival of the Welsh language has made such great inroads. Every road sign, and many private signs, are in both English and Welsh. In South Wales, where English is more common, English is written first above the Welsh version, but in the north, where we are at the moment in Caernarfon, Welsh is written first, above the English, since here is where the language has more strength. I understand about 20% of the population in Wales has Welsh as their first language. We heard kids chattering in the street in it.

The Irish Sea   The ferry crossing over the Irish Sea from Wales to Ireland goes incredibly smoothly now. I remember years ago it took hours, now it's a hydrofoil with only the sides of the ship resting on what looks like "walls" below, with the whole center of the ship up out of the water. It takes a scheduled 1h 49 m. The crossing we'll take from N. Ireland to Scotland, also a hydrofoil, is only 1h. And I was able to book them both online, and at a discount at that. I picked up the tickets on arrival.

Irish Gaelic   I have to make a comment about Irish Gaelic. Signs here (but clearly not in N. Ireland) are in Gaelic first, then English, and have been for many years. But poor Gaelic. If you think French has a lot of silent letters, and English (knife, night), and could do with some spelling reform (which I do), pity Gaelic. The language has evolved, but the spelling remains as it was centuries ago. It's the most distorted spelling system I've ever seen, and is in need of reform. Although our ferry came right into Dublin, last time it came in (and many still do) to the Dublin suburb of Dun Laoghaire. Years ago I wondered how to pronounce it. This trip I learned it's pronounced Dun Leary. Laoghaire is actually the spelling for Leary. Go figure.