Cats and Castles - Framlingham

Off to the train station to hop a train for Ipswich. We made it there without incident, and our expatriate Scots buddy Elspeth picked us up at the train station.

Bena and me chilling on the train; the scenic Ipswich train station

We (barely) managed to cram ourselves and all our luggage into her car, and set off for her house. Unbeknownst to us, we were traveling to Ipswich on the first day of football season (that is, what the rest of the world calls football, and what we uncultured Yanks refer to as soccer). Denizens of Ipswich take their football pretty darn seriously, so we avoided going through the main part of downtown to miss out on the larger portion of the hordes of fans heading for the stadium. On the way, Elspeth explained a bit of how British football leagues work - they have several different levels of leagues (not unlike how baseball leagues work in the U.S.), but with a surprising difference: if a team does particularly well or poorly in a season, the next season they're advanced to the next higher league or demoted to the next lower one. (Gee, if they did this with American baseball the Cubs would be in the rookie league by now :-)

Eventually, we arrived at Elspeth's house. As many of you probably know, many British residences have postal addresses that refer to names, rather than street numbers. Elspeth's house goes by the moniker "The Coach House," because, oddly enough, it used to be the coach house of one of the nearby mansions. (A brief aside - Elspeth's house is brick, as are most of the houses in England, as far as I could tell. This really weirded me out, coming from earthquake-prone California, where nothing is made out of brick because of its poor performance in earthquakes. Elspeth assured me, though, that England is about as seismically stable as places get, so they can build with brick to their hearts' content.)

We settled down for an afternoon of catching up (we hadn't seen Elspeth since the Las Vegas Dead shows in 1992), reading the paper, trying to stay out of Elspeth's way while she finished up making the components of our picnic dinner, and making friends with her cats. She has three Burmese - the two younger ones were fairly skittish, and only would approach us in fast-moving parabolic trajectories, but the elder matriarch Daisy was the biggest attention-slut cat I have ever seen (and I've seen a *lot* of cats). "Hey - don't read that paper when you could be petting *ME*!!" [tromp] [crunch]

Dinner preparations finished, we headed out for Framlingham and our other expatriate Scots buddy Gavin. We got a lovely tour of the East Anglian countryside on the way to Fram (as the locals call it), with Elspeth apologizing profusely for the lousy weather (cool and misty). We countered that we *liked* cool and misty - we live in the bay area, after all...

By the time we got to Framlingham cool and misty had given way to cooler and drizzly, so the picnic became dinner inside. After dinner we got to meet Gavin's cats, two Holstein-patterned Siamese mixes named Chani and Bonnie. Back in 1994 Gavin had meant to give Bonnie the name of a character from Dune as well, but couldn't find the book anywhere to look it up. His then-girlfriend suggested that they name her after their American pal who'd been so nice to them in their recent run of Dead shows in Oregon and Las Vegas. So, they named her Bonnie :-) Bonnie (the person) had quite a lot of fun playing with her namesake. She was quite tickled to have had a cat named after her...

Bonnie, Gavin and me; Bonnie meets Bonnie

Soon it was concert time - a folk show in Framlingham Castle. Gavin lived only a few blocks away, so we grabbed up umbrellas and walked over. Framlingham Castle is a Norman-era structure that had all these wacky brick chimneys added onto it in the 16th century. The buildings inside the castle walls have mostly been removed, leaving a nice open green for concerts. We came in towards the end of the opening act (whose name I didn't catch) - they seemed quite nice. When the second act started setting up, Elspeth expressed some trepidation about the combination of Highland pipes and amplified guitars, but they actually were pretty good (though I didn't catch their name either). The headliner was the venerable Boys of the Lough - who play pretty damn good for a bunch of old guys :-) It was very evocative, hearing British Isles music played in its native setting - the skirl of the pipes echoing off the stone walls. It was such a mellow concert scene compared to the States, too - no searches at the door, no ID stamps to buy beer. The crowd was a mix of all different ages, from little kids to octogenarians. It looked pretty much like the whole village came to hang out and catch the music. One of the nicest things (and something you'd never be able to do in the States) was that each family group had its own little candle lantern hanging by their blanket - looking out over the crowd and seeing all these little lights was so cool (and I'm sure would send U.S. fire marshals into apoplexy).

We only got rained on a little bit, luckily. After the show was over we headed home, had a quick dram, and toddled off to bed.

On to Turkey