Day 12 Part 1 Places 25-26 : Devon Hills & Taunton

NOTE: this is a re-publish as I do a little editing...

"One effect that still lingered, though, was [Arthur's] joy at being back. Now that the Earth’s atmosphere had closed over his head for good, he thought wrongly, everything within it gave him extraordinary pleasure...There was even, he noticed, a faint rainbow glistening over the Devon hills. He enjoyed that, too."

These may not be Arthur's Devon Hills, but the hills I saw from the train are going to be counted as Place 25. I'm sure the Devon hills were in there somewhere; in Somerset, or the West Country...my UK geography is rubbish. And there's a white horse on these, which is just cool!

When one is in love with the world, it is easy to be in love, period. And I'm a sucker for love stories. Romance. A bit of a challenge to overcome. Followed by bliss:

"...He was wrong in thinking that the atmosphere of the Earth had closed finally and forever above his head. He was wrong to think that it would ever be possible to put behind him the tangled web of irresolutions into which his galactic travels had dragged him. He was wrong to think he could now forget that the big, hard, oily, dirty, rainbow- hung Earth on which he lived was a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot lost in the unimaginable infinity of the Universe. He drove on, humming, being wrong about all these things. The reason he was wrong was standing by the slip road under a small umbrella."

Arthur and Fenchurch "meet" (she is unconscious at the time) as Arthur is hitchhiking home to the West Country, after hitchhiking back to a not-demolished Earth. And then, after obsessing about her, Arthur sees Fenchurch by the side of the road, hitchhiking back to London, and picks her up.

All the hitchhiking happenings probably imply that overall, lots of both good and bad things happened to Douglas Adams - and then Arthur Dent - while moving from one place to another, a passive passenger, carried along for a short while, based on wherever someone else wants to go.

That's all well and good for them, but I hate the sensation of submitting to the whim of the universe. The loss of control, the mandatory flexibility, the roll with the punches...nope, I want to know where I'm going, why I'm headed there, how long it will take, and if possible, who I'll meet that will make the whole thing worthwhile. Or indeed whether HOW I will get there will make it worthwhile:

For example in first class, in my own private coach, like the queen...except wearing a tiara. As you do.

Sometimes that's not possible. But it is fantastic when it happens.

As I write this I am on a train to Place 26: Taunton, which is a critical place in So Long and Thanks For All the Fish:

"“I’d like to go to Taunton,” [Fenchurch] said, “please. If that’s all right. It’s not far. You can drop me at— ”“You live in Taunton?” [Arthur] said, hoping that he’d managed to sound merely curious rather than ecstatic. Taunton was wonderfully close to him. He could … 

“No, London,” she said, “there’s a train in just under an hour.”

Now I'm here, though my train in the other direction, to Bridgewater, didn't leave me time to find a pub:

Tomorrow I will catch Fenchurch's train back to London. Perhaps I will try to find a grubby pub near the station for a cloudy local cider, and a dry sandwich, for the sin of selfishness. Which isn't all that terrible a sin, but does feel like one, when you are really in love with your spouse, feel they make everything better, and yet you decide that you must go off and do fun things completely without them.

"There is, for some reason, something especially grim about pubs near stations, a very particular kind of grubbiness, a special kind of pallor to the pork pies.

Worse than the pork pies, though, are the sandwiches. There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do.

It is by eating sandwiches in pubs at Saturday lunchtime that the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been. They’re not altogether clear what those sins are, and don’t want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to know about. But whatever sins there are are amply atoned for by the sandwiches they make themselves eat."