Driving, Again   In the past Bev and I got used to driving on the left in a day or two. This time (old dog, new tricks) I needed a week or two. But now--piece o' cake. I haven't had any driving problems, don't shift with the doorknob anymore, know where the inside mirror is, haven't gotten lost on a roundabout in a while (the trick is go around an extra time to give the signs another chance). Now, where again was the steering wheel on our car at home?

The only thing that remains confusing is crossing the street as a pedestrian or pulling the car out of a gas station. I just don't know which way to look for the traffic until I consciously force myself to think about it. If you think it's easy, try it sometime. If you don't see traffic coming, and I mean moving in both directions, it's panic time for a moment.

Ireland, Again   Ireland is getting very up-to-date and international. The roads are good, and they're building more motorways. Every highway construction site has a sign telling (in Gaelic and English) how much of the funding is coming from the European Union. Those signs are in the EU blue with the EU circle of stars. Every Irish licence plate (they're thin with all the writing on one line) has over the left the blue field with EU circle of stars and IRL below. I saw a French car with the same insignia with an F and a German one with the same insignia with a D (Deutschland). A lot of restaurant and hotel bills already have Euro equivalants, getting ready for this January 1. Unfortunately, none of the above applies to Britain.

I'm all for internationalism, but sometimes you can lose some of the charm, like when we drove through a quaint Irish village and next to the pub was the Mamma Mia Pizzeria (I swear) and an Indian take-away.

You can see in the Republic the attempt to be one country. When driving we listented to a call-in music program a few times. I found it wistful when the announcer kept on giving the toll-free number: "Call XYZ, and in the North, call ABC."

And I already mentioned the highway numbering problem, like where the N3 goes out of Dublin for quite a ways under that name, crosses into the North and gets a couple of Northern Ireland numbers, than re-emerges on the NW coast as the N3 again. These are all just superficial things obvious to someone passing through and there are of course a lot more substantial rifts.

Regarding my comment comparing the orange sashes of the marchers (I even saw a few people wearing orange fright wigs!) to white Klan hoods, I feel that both symbolic colors are being used to say: "We're here, we're in charge, and there's nothing you can do about it." I just don't like it.

Do keep in mind that although you would expect an Irish flag to be green, from the very beginning of the Republic in 1922 the Republic flag has had three vertical stripes of orange, white, and green. Including orange way back then was already a gesture of reconciliation.

In contrast to the Irish Republic and Wales, I saw next to no usage of Scots Gaelic. At the University of Edinburgh there were signs for the Gaelic studies department which were in English and Gaelic, and the sign at the new Scottish Parliament was, particularly notably, bilingual.

Driving down the motorway in southern Scotland we saw the exit for Lockerbie, where the plane crashed.

Back into England   As we crossed the border back into England I couldn't think of a single popular-type song that had the word "England" in it (I wasn't ready to do "There'll Always Be an England") so we both sang the first line (because I don't know any more lines) of:

with apologies to Vera Lynn, and even though Dover is at the opposite end of the country from where we were. Come to think of it, we never sang a Welsh song when we were there. I've heard of "The Men of Harlech", and we even passed Harlech castle, but I don't know the song.

Thirsk   Our reason for coming to Yorkshire (via Lake Windemere in the Lake District) was to visit Thirsk. So what's Thirsk? Well, when the James Herriot books came out a number of years ago, such as "All Creatures Great and Small", Bev and I were really into them. He used pseudonyms for most locations and people, I tried to figure out which towns were which. I got them mostly wrong, as it turns out, but it was fun. The Skeldale House in Darrowby of the books is 23 Kirkgate in Thirsk (Photo by Misterweiss), his real surgery (medical office). Three years ago the building was made into a museum, and the rooms are set up as a vet's office of the 1940's and '50's. It's just a short walk from the Market Place mentioned so often in the books. His real name was Alf Wight, and It's explained that he felt using his real name would be construed as advertising, which the authorities frowned on, so he took the name of a popular soccer player. I've been rereading the books since just before we sailed.

Helmsley   As much as we've been enjoying the hotels we've been staying in, there's been no need to say anything about them. But when we got to Helmsley, near Thirsk, serendipity struck again. Now of course when you see the words "Helmsley" and "hotel" in the same sentence, you're bound to think of Leona. Well, you can forget that. I had found the Heritage Hotel chain online, and the first two we stayed in, in Exeter and Bath, were Heritage Hotels, and very nice. But the Black Swan Inn here in Helmsley is in a class by itself, which we only found out when we arrived. It forms a backdrop to the north side of the Market Square in the village, and was put together as an expansion of three historic buildings, with newer additions in the back, but all on a petite scale. The oldest building was built in 1611 as a coaching inn, so is Elizabethan/Jacobean. It's connected to a Georgian building, with a beautiful curved interior staircase, and finally there's a Tudor building. It's all very much Olde England. I was reading that Helmsley grew when in 1838 the stagecoach was extended to it from Leeds and York. The Helmsley Highflyer made three trips a week. The Inn is all cozy little sitting rooms downstairs. We were lucky to come across it. There was a problem when we arrived, however. We haven't had any wheelchair problems in any hotel yet, but this building, being three put together, would have been wild. It's the kind of put-together building where you go up the staircase, then down the hall, then down four steps, turn left, then go up two steps, and so on. So they ended up upgrading us to a suite in the back of the building that has not a single step, but we have to leave the hotel, go up the side lane, and re-enter the building by the back entrance to get to our room! Today, before we went to Thirsk, we walked around the square and looked at the shops. Agatha Christie's Miss Marple could have come around any corner, if she had lived as far north as Yorkshire. For dinner, we managed to find a Yorkshire pudding on the menu.