Doubtless like many others, at the time of writing, I am waiting to find out whether my husband and I will be able to go on holiday abroad this year. I would be lying if I didn't say that I will be disappointed if we cannot go, but I am pragmatic and practical enough to recognise that, in the grand scheme of things, it does not really matter if we cannot visit our Spanish apartment this year.
Anyway, if we have no such luck, I am determined to seek out some places in the UK that I have either not visited before or not visited for a length of time and have cultural connotations for me: 1. Liverpool. Liverpool might not be at the top of some people’s list but it is absolutely brilliant for a staycation, even for a ‘woolly back’ from Lancashire such as me. If I visit this time, I will definitely go to the Beatles Museum- we did the Beatles Bus Tour the last time, and it was a joyously boisterous affair, with superannuated pensioners and Generation Xers belting out ‘Penny Lane’ as the bus wended its way along this street. We also visited a graveyard, purportedly where the name Eleanor Rigby on a gravestone inspired the young McCartney to write what is one of the finest, most poignant songs of all time. This is now proven to be absolute bunkum, of course, but why let the truth get in the way of a good story? On a more sombre note, the Slavery Museum was an absolute must-see last time I visited the city and is definitely on my list again, as I would recommend that everyone visiting Liverpool should know something about its history and its links with the slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries. 2. Dorset aka ‘Thomas Hardy Country’. I have never visited this gloriously beautiful part of England, but have long wanted to, having been a lover of Thomas Hardy’s novels and his poems since I was a teenager. In my former life as an English teacher, I taught Tess of the D’Urbervilles at least five times, and never failed to be engrossed by it, not just by the tragic storyline, but also the landscape depicted with their fictional names- from the wonderfully evocative fecund and verdant Froom Valley and the pastoral idyll of Talbothays, versus the visceral horrors of Flintcomb Ash. 3. Seaham Hall. Seat of the Milbanke family, whose daughter Ann Isabella, married Lord Byron at the family home in 1815. I have been fascinated by Byron since reading Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage over thirty years ago. I am not an advocate of how Bryon lived his life and treated his loved ones- very badly by all accounts- but I do love the wit and intelligence that he exhibits in his poetry. Moreover, of course, he was the father of Ada Lovelace, Victorian mathematician extraordinaire, considered to be one of the world’s first computer programmers. 4. Canterbury Cathedral. Shrine to Thomas Beckett and great rival in the Middle Ages for the most popular memorial with our own St Cuthbert. It is the setting for TS Eliot’s setting for Murder in the Cathedral, which depicts Becket’s last days as the ‘turbulent priest’ and his subsequent murder. Although this is a bit of a ‘Marmite’ play, I absolutely love it and it resonates with me on many levels, including the Chorus’s intoning of ‘Living and Partly living’, which encapsulates for me what I felt I was doing for much of lockdown. Bonnes Vacances!