Today I decided to do the Riverside Walk through Leamington and Warwick. This follows the River Avon, and its tributary the Leam. Of course, River Avon is a tautology as “Avon” is the Celtic word for “River”. In fact there are nine River Avons in the British Isles, though this is the one that runs through Stratford-Upon-Avon, so it is the most famous. The Welsh word for river is still “Afon” (pron: Avon with a short “a” and a Welsh accent).

You can imagine a conversation going something like this:

Recent Saxon immigrant: Vot you are callink zis river?
Celt (in Celtic): Well, boyo, this would be what we call a “river”.
Saxon: Ah, Ze River River. Is gutt.

Interactions like this caused the indigenous Celts to underestimate the invading Anglo-Saxons, with the result that they were pushed back to the remote and inhospitable corners of the British Isles to cultivate sheep and grudges.

Anyhow, here’s the River River.

The trail went through a nature preserve consisting mostly of stinging nettles (a part of nature that does not really need to be preserved), under bridges, over bridges, through a field of sheep, and through several manicured parks, one of them mostly devoted to various forms of recreation, including lawn bowling.

A little way from the bowling greens is a cricket pitch, which I’m not showing because it is a large expanse of green with no exciting equipment or accommodations for spectators. This is intentional. For the uninitiated, amateur cricket is the second most boring spectator sport in the world. One of the major strategic factors is the condition of the grass that the game is played on, which may suit one team or the other. Only the English could invent a game where one of the decisive skills is gardening.

The most boring spectator sport in the world is of course the Eton Wall Game. To play this you need a slightly curved wall 110 meters long with a garden door at one end and a tree at the other for goals. The play combines the worst features of Rugby Football and trench warfare. The last time anyone scored a point was 2009. Really, I am not making this shit up. I wish I could, but reality is weirder. The game is, like the English upper class who play it, is both brutal and pointless.

One of the gatehouses to Jephson Gardens has been given over to artists’ studios. I spent some time chatting with Bryan B Kelly, whose naive pointillism is surreal and charming.

He brought up American politics. Like most sensible people he’s shocked and alarmed by the rise of Donald Trump. In English politics he’s worried about Boris Johnson. While the hairdo and some of the attitudes are similar I think that Trump is a stupid person who pretends to be smart, and Johnson is a smart person who plays the fool. The potential damage from Trump is much greater.

This evening we went to see Howard play Prospero in an outdoor production of The Tempest. We had paid for actual seats with a canopy over us, which turned out to be a wise investment. It started to rain before the show and by showtime it was pouring down. I should explain that the concept of a “rain check” has not reached England. If the English stopped doing something (except cricket of course) just because it was raining, they would not get anything done. Cricket is such a slow moving game that you can stop for rain because the game moves at pretty much the same pace regardless of whether the players are doing anything or not. Anyway, the audience in the cheap seats just put up their umbrellas and settled down to get their dose of culture regardless.

The play started a few minutes late, when the rain had gone from “downpour” to “just wet enough to be miserable”. As you can see the set was dominated by a mini-stonehenge alarmingly reminiscent of Spinal Tap. In spite of the terrible conditions, the cast of six put on a spirited performance, and by half time the rain had stopped, the umbrellas were down, and it was actually possible to see what was happening on stage.

The performance was in the round. That’s fine for dialog as you can at least see the face of one of the actors, but for Howard’s soliloquies he had to rotate slowly while declaiming. He did a great job regardless. Here he is doing about 3 RPM.

There were some changes to make the play easier for a modern audience. The cringeworthy, unfunny, and incomprehensible jokes from the clown characters were replaced by cringeworthy and unfunny but comprehensible modern jokes. That great bit about

…the great globe itself—
Yea, all which it inherit—shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind…

had “rack” replaced by “trace”. Damn! I have fond memories of our drama teacher at school (a big influence on both Howard and me) in rehearsals for the torture chamber scene in A Man For All Seasons taking great delight in telling the eleven year old stage hands to “leave not a rack behind”. I missed that line. Howard, if you can, bring back the rack.

Finally, I have to ask, why would anyone sell fireworks, foam rubber, and sweeties all in the same store.

Royal Leamington Spa is a strange place, but at least they don’t worship a giant blue porcupine.