I have made a discovery, one that had been there all along -- as is the way with most potential discoveries -- but only just now enjoyed. A few years ago I bought a copy of H.V. Morton's A Traveller in Italy, but the poor volume suffered the fate of too many other pages on my bookshelves: it sat unread, it's smooth spine uncracked. About two months ago I picked up a dusty volume of Morton's In Search of England in a wonderful little used bookstore in the Virginia Highland's neighborhood of Atlanta. I read a few sentences here and there, intrigued, but reasoned that I should do justice to his Italian journeys before abandoning them for those in my own country. But my bibliomania got the better of me, and about two weeks ago I bought a modern edition of the book. This one has had a happier fate than its predecessor.

It all begins with an illness in Palestine ("I believed I was dying in Palestine. There was no woman to convince me that the pain in my neck was not the first sign of spinal meningitis, so that, growing rapidly worse, I began to attend my own funeral every day."), Morton finds himself standing on a hill with Jerusalem at his feet, and suddenly, in this far-away land, feels a pang of homesickness:

"I find it impossible in cold blood, and at this distance, to put into words the longing that shook me... There rose up in my mind the picture of a village street at dusk with a smell of wood smoke lying in the still air and, here and there, little red blinds shining in the dusk under the thatch. I remember how the church bells ring at home, and how, at that time of year, the sun leaves a dull red bar low down in the west, and against it the elms grow blacker minute by minute. Then the bats start to flicker like little bits of burnt paper and you hear the slow jingle of a team coming home from fields... When you think like this, sitting alone in a foreign country, you know all there is to learn about heartache."

He continues: "I have learnt since that this vision of mine is a common one to exiles all over the world: we think of home, we long for home, but we see something greater -- we see England."

For him, this is a sentiment that defies location; but it's also one that defies time.

This is the beginning of his narrative, the initiation of his search for England. And what a delicious narrative it is: a mixture of wonderfully dry English humour (see below) and the perfect turn of phrase... the enchantment of the perfect words strung together.

"I have decided that when I grow old, with or without gout, sciatica, rheumatism, or lumbago, I will retire on Bath with an ebody cane and a monocle"

"Fight as I may, I have never been able entirely to conquer the belief that women are in all situations honest. All men I suspect; all women I trust; for -- I believe in living dangerously!"

H. V. (Henry Vollam) begins his journey in London and winds his way all the way up to Durham and back down again, passing through cities, towns, villages, and recording his observations, his conversations, his musings in his notebooks "without deliberation by the roadside, on farmyard walls, in cathedrals, in little churchyards, on the washstands of country inns, and in many another inconvenient place." And all this back in the late 1920s, when England was still stinging from the shock of war. "I have gone round England like a magpie," he says, "picking up any bright thing that pleased me." These bright things are gems, or at least they are to me, as I read about Winchester, Salisbury, Exeter: the worlds that are my England, and the familiar places in between: Bath, Newbury, Tintagel, Plymouth, Bristol, Romsey, the New Forest, Stratford-Upon-Avon, and, of course, London.

The arches of Exeter cathedral are "like a problem in mathematics set to music... At one moment it seems that the whole fragment might fly up to heaven or dissolve in cold, formal music." At sunset in Salisbury's cathedral close "nothing it seemed could ever hurt: the soft green grass, the mighty church pointing its slim finger to the sky, and the old grey cloistered buildings dedicated to centuries of peace." Looking out of a window at the spring descending on a London square, "the top boughs of the trees were etched against the saffron stain of a London sky, but their boles descended into a pool of darkness, silent and remote... The very pavements seem ready to crack and lift under the denied earth; in the air is a consciousness of life which tells you that if traffic stopped for a fortnight grass would grow again in Piccadilly and corn would spring in pavement cracks where a horse and spilt his 'feed'."

My only regret: that a 2006 Methuen edition doesn't feel quite as right in the hand as that dusty volume.

In Andover town centre today a man with a cane and slightly crossed eyes sang Moon River to himself.

Two drifters off to see the world.
There's such a lot of world to see.

my england

Winchester

Winchester

Winchester

Sunset from my garden

Salisbury

Salisbury

Salisbury

Salisbury - view from the top of the cathedral tower

Thatched roof in Chawton

Bath

Bath