Visiting the cemetery and other treats

A packed week. My dear friends Mark Blonstein and Don Faircloth from Greenville, SC, joined me in East Anglia for three nights and we stayed on the go. It was terrific having "playmates" for the last stretch of my stay out there. (For the record, even Don, a trained engineer, couldn't figure out all those technological marvels in that house! The satellite reception pooped out Thursday on the TVs, for instance, and even his considerable expertise couldn't get Sky back up and running. A whole room devoted to electronics, and the wretched TVs were dead as doornails. Nice to know it wasn't just me that was flummoxed by all those doodads!)

Anyway, as I was sayin'. Although it was a long haul from my exchange house near Diss down to Kent, Mark and I had our hearts set on going together to the magnificent Sissinghurst Castle and Garden near Cranbrook.

Most of you have probably heard me carry on for years about Sissinghurst. For my money, it's the quintessential English garden. It was the labor of love of a quite celebrated couple, Vita Sackville-West, a writer, and her husband, Harold Nicolson, a career diplomat, beginning in the early 1930s. They continued planting and designing and creating indescribable beauty in the garden until their deaths in the '60s, when they willed it to the National Trust. I first went there in 1998 and fell in love with it. I think so highly of it as a place of peace and beauty that I've instructed my friends, including Mark and Don, that my ashes should be scattered there.

I'm a member of the Royal Oak Foundation, the American arm of the British National Trust, which preserves, maintains and operates over 500 historic properties and areas of natural beauty like the garden at Sissinghurst throughout the U.K. And so when I pay my dues every year, I view it as contributing to my own personal "cemetery fund."

All of my friends will be invited to go to Sissinghurst -- I'm under no illusion that many will actually make the trip -- but if there's anybody around to make the pilgrimage with Mark, you're all instructed to leave a little pinch of me here and a little pinch there...I'm particularly fond of the famous White Garden. There are some magnificent white delphiniums,, lilies and roses with which I think I'd be most compatible. But save some of me for the purple irises in the cottage garden, too, please. There will be plenty of me to go around! And then into perpetuity, faceless throngs will visit the garden and admire these lovely plantings and not even realize what a good job I'll be doing in making them thrive. Can you think of a better place to be remembered?!

No, I have no intention of being scattered at Sissinghurst any time soon, but it doesn't hurt to have a plan. The thought of being buried in a casket doesn't appeal to me at all. And since I have such a strong psychic connection to this place -- England, and gardens, and Sissinghurst in specific -- this strategy just feels right. Eccentric, maybe, but ask me if I care!

So Thursday's long drive to and from Sissinghurst was worth the effort to me -- you know, to assure myself that the high standards of Vita and Harold are still being maintained. They are. In its summer finery, the property was as I remembered it -- dreamy. It's an absolute must on your itinerary if you ever make it to England.

Friday the boys and I spent a delightful afternoon at Sandringham, Her Majesty's estate in Norfolk. This is where the Royal Family spends every Christmas. It was bought in the early 1860s for the then-Prince of Wales, who became Edward VII, and has been a retreat for the British royal family ever since. It's never used for state occasions; instead it's considered more of a family home, owned by the Queen personally and not by the nation. It's filled with lots of family photos and mementoes. We also visited the little church on the edge of the estate. If you've ever seen news footage of the Royals walking to church on Christmas Day, that's where they're headed.

Back in my "home" village we loved the local pub so much that we ate there all three evenings, becoming practically locals. Though located in a rather isolated spot, the Crown boasts an excellent bill of fare. Of course, it's the only place anywhere for miles to eat or drink, so as you can imagine it was well patronized.
  
On Saturday the boys and I both left Norfolk -- them to head to Scotland and me to my second exchange house here in the village of Puriton near Bridgwater in Somerset. More on that military-like operation later. Suffice it to say that here, the technology is accessible. Not a single operator's manual or space-age doodad in evidence. Can I hear an Amen?!