The sun finally started to shine today, and England looked like it should look in the summertime: beautiful and crisp and... well... old. Walking down the high street in Marlborough, a tiny little town about 20 miles from here, the sun was streaming through gaps between mismatched buildings that hold secondhand bookshops and posh boutiques, high-street chains and quaint tearooms. I parked beside a stream lined with benches on green grass and filled with ducks. The air smelled of the first week of summer holidays when I was little and much closer to grass-level. America suddenly felt a few thousand miles further away.

The gardener appeared today (I don't know whether he schedules his visits or just appears on sunny days. Probably the latter). I watched him from my bedroom window pulling weeds above the pond, and wondered what he was thinking about out there in the sunshine. We spoke for a while as I set off to the post office -- He told me I had a Southern drawl. I'm sure I'd only said two words to him. Perhaps they were "Hey, there," and therein lies the rub.

The route to the post office takes about 2 minutes, but passes delightful English scenes: the pub and skittle alley, the village school (site of the most miserable year of my life, to this day), and cottages whose thatched roofs you can reach out and touch and whose doors look like they were built for children. Outside the village shop/post office is a chalk-board sign that reads something along the lines of: "Please vote us Village Shop of the year. (Come inside for a form). We won 2nd place last year. We'll never give up until we win (some sort of Churchillian stuff)."

On the way home I picked green plums from the bushes and devoured them, sticky juice on chin.