The establishment.

Based on everything I've ever heard about establishing a bank account in this country, I expected that my 1 p.m. appointment at the construction-displaced NatWest (which is now in a very-nice-but-still-temporary temporary building in a parking lot) would go something like this:

Dr. S: I'd like to open a personal account, please.

Bank: How could you be so bloody stupid?

Dr. S: But I have this money that I'd like to deposit.

Bank: And why should we want to help you? Bugger off!

And repeat until one of us forfeited this perverse staring contest.

Instead, what happened was this:

Bank (having taken my ID and address verification yesterday): Right! Just follow me, please. [into private room, with sheaf of pamphlets and papers] We'll just pop in your details here. [perhaps twenty minutes of popping details into a computer, printing out letters and forms, verifying details with me] There you go! You should start getting text messages today, telling you that the address has changed on your account.

Dr. S: So these accounts are now active?

Bank: Yes!

Dr. S: And when can I expect my debit card?

Bank: Probably Thursday or Friday next week. But maybe earlier; they seem to have been issuing them fairly quickly of late.

Dr. S: Brilliant! Thank you so much for your help.

Bank: Right! Bye, then!

The process took 40 minutes, all told, but there was never a hitch or a hold-up. And indeed, this evening a text message arrived from the bank, telling me that the address on my account had changed--a sign that the account is in the process of setting itself up.

I had been dreading this process actively all week and passively for several years. What made the difference between my almost incredibly easy experience and the frustrated experience of everyone else I know? I can't even begin to imagine.

I celebrated by finding the cinema, becoming a member, seeing an afternoon movie in a nearly empty theatre, and then taking myself out to a solo dinner on the second story of Pizza Express, on the corner of the Cathedral Close. I didn't have a cathedral view while I ate, but going to Pizza Express involves so many intermingled memories for me that I provide myself all my own dinner entertainment.

The local branch of a chain of home furnishing stores I love is closing (as are all but this chain's three main London stores), and out of the liquidation of its stock, I managed to score a pair of pillows at half-price. For some reason, durable, firm pillows are nearly impossible to find here. As long as these make it through the year without my having to go back to sleeping on two pillows every night, I'll consider my £15 (and my day of toting around a plastic bag of pillows) to have been well-spent.

Pattern acquisition.

I've told you this, right? That I'm in England to run a study-abroad program--the same one that brought me to England for the first time, sixteen years ago next month? When I first started teaching at the college, it seemed as though everyone's favorite question was, "Is it strange to be back here, teaching?" My answer then was, "Not really." I'd spent a lot of time in the village after graduation, and I'd been teaching for several years, and somehow the strangeness of teaching where I'd been a student not so long before wasn't particularly great.

Somehow, the strangeness of coming aground in Exeter after not having spent any significant amount of time here for sixteen years feels far greater--no doubt in part because I also haven't started a job in a new environment in the past seven years, even though I have set up house over and over and over again in the past decade. This afternoon, taking what I thought was the walk I used to take from campus to the city centre, I ended up in an Exeter neighborhood I'd never seen before, and as I kept walking, I realized that I had gone far out of my way. It was still a grey day, though at least the pouring rain had stopped in the morning, and it was cool enough today that I wore a coat and a cotton scarf all day (plus wool socks! I have worn my wool socks every day since I've been here!). So there I was, striding along on what felt absolutely like an autumn day, down a footpath and then through a neighborhood in the middle of a town where I lived for a whole year of my life without ever seeing this part of it. And when I finally emerged onto a road I knew, I couldn't help but swear at the fact that I was on the other side of the city centre from where I'd planned to go.

Meanwhile, I also seemed not to be able to help layering Cambridge over Exeter, or Exeter over Cambridge, and noticing over and over again how much grittier Exeter is, as a town, than Cambridge. No big surprise there, really, and it's not as though all of Cambridge was well-to-do. But partly because the university here is outside of town, whereas the colleges, with all their manifested wealth and tradition, are all over Cambridge (keeping it elevated above any number of elements of the English cultural landscape that are just as homogenized or banal or disheartening as any of the frustrating political, social, and geographic developments I've left behind in the U.S.), and partly because it's now 2011--after the first economic collapse in 2008 and at the cusp of another, possibly even greater economic and cultural faltering here, across Europe, and all over the place back at home--rather than 2007, when I arrived in Cambridge just as the pound started riding so high against the dollar that I still automatically double a number to figure out what I'm going to pay for things--partly for these reasons, my walk around central Exeter today had a significantly more grim feeling to it than my early walks around Cambridge. "You'll be glad you're living where you're living," said my excellent friend when I spoke to her on the phone this evening. And I'd already been thinking that on my jam-packed, standing-room-only train trip home this evening. I'm always glad to be at a quiet margin.

As I walked through town after my failed attempt to go to a movie at the arts cinema (which, unbeknownst to me, was off of a particular street, rather than on the street), finding myself increasingly stressed by the number of randomly meandering people all around me on the sidewalks and the street, I pretty rapidly began aiming myself at the big Waterstone's bookseller at the corner of town, a store that (when it used to be a Dillon's) was one of my favorite haunts during my year in Exeter. Once securely inside, I remembered what a nemesis to me "3 for 2" deals in bookstores here are.

After a little while, it was safe to come out of the bookstore again, and then, lo and behold, I discovered the little in-town branch of the grocery store I used in Cambridge. There are two main groceries in England: Sainsbury's and Tesco. (There's also the Co-op, which is what I use in my little village here, and then there's the upscale Waitrose, the convenience chain Spar, the frozen goods emporium Iceland, and who knows how many other assorted places.) In 1995-96, their in-town branches still predominated--definitely in Exeter, though also across the country as far as I know. Tesco was the closer of the two stores to where my flat was located, and so it was the store my friends and I used most, even though Sainsbury's had far nicer store brand foods. By now, supermarket versions of both of these stores--which are typically located out beyond the edges of towns, so that one almost has to use a car to get to them--have become enormous phenomena, and what's left in downtown areas are Sainsbury's Local stores and Tesco Metro stores. The funny thing about Exeter is that its two stores, in their Local and Metro incarnations, have switched geographical positions: the Tesco Metro is now very near where the old (and expansive) Sainsbury's used to be, in the old mall, and the Sainsbury's Local is now mere doors down from where the old Tesco was.

You can understand, I suspect, why I had a fairly confusing day today, and why it felt good to get home and wash dishes and cook some dinner pasta and watch the news.  

On my way back to the train station--where I kept finding myself staring at the vastly overgrowing planters between the tracks, and the paint that's peeling off of the rusting ironwork everywhere--I cut through the still bright and shiny outdoor pedestrian mall that Exeter has built over the past half-decade or so. By this point, I had so many bags that I didn't want to mess about with getting out my camera to take a picture of the downright strange way I finally saw Exeter Cathedral up close again for the first time in over a decade, with its towers rising up over these retail stores and chain restaurants and crowds of meandering teenagers and shoppers and families. And then, almost before I realized what was happening, my muscle memory took over and carried me back to the passageways I knew, the walks I used to take to get to the Cathedral Close--these walks that are still there, with all their little cafés and sandwich shops, directly parallel to the new mall development. And then there it was, and I did not have a lens wide enough to take it in--so it's a good thing I can go back.

Things I did take in:

Tomorrow: part two of my adventures with the bank--which, thankfully, have so far not been adventurous at all.

Stop Look Listen.

To get to town, and to the water beyond town, from where I live, I have to cross the tracks of the branch line of the rail that runs from Exeter down to Exmouth. What I didn't realize until Monday, when my Exeter-bound train was delayed at the platform by the Exmouth-bound train, is that northbound and southbound trains basically must depart from Topsham at the same time, because they're sharing the line everywhere except at the Topsham station. See? You can see where the single track splits into the northbound and southbound tracks, which it does just before the Topsham platforms; the tracks rejoin just beyond the north side of the Topsham platform. I find this completely enthralling.

By the end of the evening, after I'd made many phone calls and set up lots of logistical details, and after I'd had a wonderful Skype-enabled afternoon of conversation with (and birthday singing for!) my beloved classicist friend and his wife--perhaps the two people I most regret not having gotten to say goodbye to in person before I left to come here--it already felt like a full day. And then the sun, which had been obscured by rainclouds all day long, in its setting turned the sky marvelous colors. And there was nothing to do but leave the house again and chase the colors back to the western skies.

And then, at some point, there was a dog who, more than anything, wanted to fetch a stick from the water. Which he got to do. Which set this swan a-hissing and put its wings in attack-ready mode.

Swans' hissing is what inspired Elsa Lanchester to play the Bride of Frankenstein the way she did, don't you know.

Tomorrow or Tuesday, I should have said.

In the past, I have prided myself on getting through jet lag pretty swiftly and easily, and this time around seemed to be no exception--except, I noticed by mid-weekend, that I kept staying up ridiculously late. 1 a.m., 3 a.m., 4 a.m.--later and later each night, in fact. Knowing that letting myself then sleep eight hours would be a recipe for disaster (or at least a lengthily deranged sleep schedule), I kept forcing myself to get up by 7:30 or 8. And finally, yesterday afternoon as I took the train up to my office, it started to hit me that I was exhausted. I managed to stay awake until about 8:30, when I fell asleep on my couch. By the time I woke up at 9:22, I wasn't sure whether 9:22 meant a.m. or p.m. Somehow I got myself to bed, only to sleep until nearly 8:30 a.m. And so today felt slighly less off-kilter.

I find myself wanting to tell you everything and not knowing where to start. Should I start with the thrill this sign provoked in me the other day, as I walked the half-mile to the local food (and awesome everything else) emporium around the corner from my house?

My heart leapt up like that iconic woman there. I must look as if I'm high on something much of the time here; I know I'm walking around smiling at everything, from fancy chocolates to exquisite and strange salad dressings to bottles of elderflower pressé whose labels say "You're lovely." For real.

The groceries on this table are so local that the wild rocket from Warwickshire counted as being from far away: most of these things are from this county or the next one over.

Or should I tell you, instead, about taking an evening walk, thinking that I'd just follow an estuary-side trail

around its two-mile loop back to where I live, and instead finding my way down a path

to fabulous and thoroughly organized and provided-for birdwatching spaces (like this hide)

where simply sitting still and listening to other people for fifteen minutes got me started learning about what kinds of birds are congregating here, and what the impact of another marsh's drying up has been, and where the curlews are gathering, and when the plovers arrive, and how one kind of bird will slip in amongst another and arrive with it in its wing-flashing glide into shallow waters?

Or the strangeness of metering something so wrong that the image comes out 100% more interesting than it should have done?

It really was this young cow who took the day, in the end: we startled each other a tiny bit beside this fence, and then we both kept doing what we'd been doing (he: eating, I: photographing) but also examining each other, at the same time.

I had to hold myself back from trying to pat the cow, who reminded me so much of a very large dog.

And then there was the other cow, the one who was more skittish and skeptical--and farther from the tasty ivy.

And then I was back home and talking on the telephone to my beloved parents and eating dinner and gearing up to stay up too late one more night in a row.

Fortunately, given the things I need to do tomorrow, last night's crashing out early seems to be setting in again tonight.