A trip to Derbyshire.
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| St. Pancras Station |
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| the flower stall at the station |
Which is a county in the Midlands. The Middle lands of Britain.
There is a farm outside Derby that they say is the furthest point from the sea in all of Great Britain.
(That would be a mere 90 miles.)
It is here, they say, that the Industrial revolution started. It had the first factory.
At school I liked history. The endless roundabout of the Protestant to the Catholic. The Vikings swept in from Scandinavia.
The Romans marched up from Italy and gave us the straight roads, Verulanium and the baths in Bath. William from Falaise in Normandy hopped quite neatly over the channel, speared King Harold with an arrow in the eye, and got all these messy English people in order, with the Domesday book of 1066 when he went round every village and wrote down in this big book, who lived there.
There were good Kings and good Queens. And ineffective ones. And nasty ones who killed off all the competition. And there was a nice married couple who came over from Holland. And there was the houses of York and Lancaster who fought each other for power for decades. And there was Charles the first who was very little and his son Charles the second who had very curly hair and sandwiched in the middle was Oliver Cromwell who stopped everyone dancing. And they cut people's heads off right and left. We had virgin queens and homosexual princes and a king who couldn't keep his cod piece buttoned up.
answer is... I wasn't.
Factories and mining passed me right by.
So my trip to Derbyshire, to walk the dales with my delightful god-daughter Steffie. (She isn't really my god-daughter , but we both decided to call her that because her route into my life requires explanation and her mother would have said ... " sounds right to me.") This trip with Stefffie was not about the county that sparked the Industrial revolution. No.
What came to my mind was the trip that Elizabeth Bennet made with her Aunt and Uncle Gardiner to Derbyshire, when she had already rejected Darcy once in the woods outside Lady Catherine de Bourgh's estate in Kent; (stay with me here,) and she and the Gardiners went to visit the Darcy stately home, Pemberley, not knowing he would be there...but oh no, oh yes, he was. And they had a very nice time, without even a cup of tea, and then when they went back to their little inn at Lambton, he came racing over and told them about Lydia and Wickham
Yes, it is true ladies and gentlemen. If world history was based on the Shires and people of Jane Austen, or the spy stories of John Le Carre, or the middle earth of J.R.R.Tolkien; I would be a scholar.
So we walked around the dales of Derbyshire and all I saw were the trees which would have caught the fabric of Elizabeth's flowing empire line dress.
Or the bench where she would have stopped to catch her breath.
Or the fields where her ballet pumps would have allowed her to twirl with the possibility of a second chance at love.
Oh my. Oh yes.
Welcome to my world.
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