Night Visions - Seaton, Devon

The four train journeys from London proved rather pleasing – too much so. A passenger next to me woke me up at my town; otherwise I would have ended up in Wales. I gathered my things very quickly, got off at Axminster and immediately found Mary waiting with birthday chocolate chip cookies along with a bottle each of Old Peculiar and Hot Speckled Hen, two premium English dark beers. I did some pretty good damage to the cookies by the time we got to Seaton. It was but a short four mile run along serpentine ribbons in an emerald realm to Seaton, a bucolic seaside village. The ocean is absolutely calm and china blue – not the usual angry dark gray of the North Atlantic. It is utterly glorious with everything in full bloom and I hate to admit it – it does feel like I am home. The climate here is exactly like it was in Atlanta when I left there, absolutely clear and seventy.

I have never seen an absolutely clear starry night in England in all the years I have been coming over here. It was absolute magic. Mix in with this the experience of walking along the coastline at night and wandering through a fabulous little town like something from a Thomas Kincaide painting. It was magnificent beyond words. Virtually every house has a miniature botanical garden. Some yards are a mere 6 x 15 feet. The British reputation for green thumbs is certainly merited in this region of Devon. Seaton has a rather fine terra-cotta brick clock tower with illuminated dials, the whole of which is set in a splendid little park with a small waterfall illuminated in several colors. I did take a few dozen grand photos at night of this magnificent seaside resort village but these will have to await compression when I get home otherwise you will block my e-mail forever if I send huge attachments.

Mary brought along her dog and we chased it and an assortment of collies, mutts, and other unknown variants through fields containing Roman ruins pre-dating Hadrian. It has always been a major thing in England for villagers to assemble at sunset and sunrise in the parks with their dogs for evening and morning romps. The dogs are in heaven and their keepers have pleasantries between them. I am getting in five miles of walking and then some each day. The pubs are pleasing places filled with conversation, happy dogs, and very pleasant bar men tending the taps - a very different sensibility.

I walked a meandering two or three miles ‘home’ alone at 11 PM under the same Orion constellation I see in Anderson. A fine crescent moon has shown up in some grand night pictures I have made. There are no issues of personal safety here. I could not imagine walking home three miles from somewhere in Anderson during the night. I came back and promptly slept through until 10:30 AM and had breakfast at 11 AM. My ears are quite silent and I am having no visual migraine things whatever. Thus far I have had no travel stress and I am even more removed mentally from the world geo-political circumstances, for which I am most pleased. I certainly am glad I did not let it keep me from the journey.

Last year I met a fellow, Sean, in his gallery shop and he sold me the Drecki painting I have in my chapel. Drecki is the fellow who survived Auschwitz because he believed that his Creator God had a plan for his life despite it including a detour through the dark night of a man-made hell. The nights here are anything but. I found Sean in the afternoon and he remembered me at once from last year and told me that Drecki’s widow had died since I was here last year and he now had seven more of his paintings at home in Exeter. He is going to bring these to me here in Seaton on Friday for viewing. I think he will be willing to sell them for little of nothing. Sean believes that English people will not buy large paintings. He had another in the shop that I rather like but it is on board, large, framed, and would have to be shipped. I might yet get it. It feels a bit like a tranquil John Constable landscape.

In another gallery shop I met a fellow, John, who does restorations and new Victorian plastered frames for London galleries and museums. He had several oil paintings that were really rather pleasing. I may well end up taking one of these home, as it would be manageable on the plane in bubble wrap. He has an old oil painting that feels much like a JMW Turner study of small boats. I spent perhaps an hour with this fellow as he showed me his studio and the process of making these frames. These fellows are both pleasantly chatty.

I found a Belva Plain novel, Homecoming, in a second hand Red Cross charity shop for sixty pence and read the whole of it at one sitting last night. I will give it back to the shop and it can be sold again. It did prove a rather good diversion and was a poignant story of a family quite shattered by dysfunctional relationships and calamities. In the end these failures were all repaired. Alas, in the real world, this does not usually happen.

Thus far I have bought but the single book, knowing that whatever I buy is going to have to be dragged around for six weeks. I am finally beginning to learn to not add ballast to my load while wondering around. There are lots of nice things here but they would be hard to stuff into an aluminum can doing 600 MPH, eight miles up, without special and expensive arrangements made in advance.

Haven’t seen a drop of rain yet or even the hint of one. This is a really good thing over here. I don’t see Internet news, TVs, or papers, or hear conversation about military doings. I can see the fine crescent moon out my west-facing window on the second floor. There is a vase of nice red dianthus on the windowsill.