It’s rained a lot this week. And whenever that happens I call it a Shropshire summer.
Many years ago we went to Shropshire for a week in the summer. Except the weather didn’t know it was summer. It pretty much rained incessantly. We were ill equipped for rain and the damp chilliness of the old Georgian bed and breakfast we stayed in. I had one hoody and tracksuit bottoms and pretty much lived in them for a week.
I huddled by the big square paned window watching the clouds mass and grey, the sun edging underneath as if to remind us it was there and the warm mist rising off the fields and hills in the distance. For although it rained, it was warm.
It was the summer I read Anna Karenina. I can often date holidays by the books I read. When we did venture out for tentative walks the smells were overwhelming, wet earth, roses in bloom, woodsmoke. I was a London girl at the time and the scent of a wet warm countryside was wonderful. I wrote and read and ate and slept.
I can’t say we did much else that week. We were well fed by our hosts who went to a lot of trouble to look after us. It was a vegan bed and breakfast before there were such things. We hailed a train one day over the border into Wales to visit a bookshop. We walked and rested.
And yet I still remember this time vividly. It was simple, slow, there wasn’t much to do. This was long before the internet. So it was time spent reading, talking, watching the ever-changing weather; just listening, just looking. Even now, one of the most memorable holidays I ever had.
I think this was one of my earliest memories of embracing simplicity and immersing myself in my senses and experience. Early on we dropped all preconceptions of what the week would hold and just stopped and slowed down. We didn’t drive then so we stayed within walking distance of where we were.
It was a simple paired down experience.
It was perfect in its imperfection that week. We let go of all our expectations and as a result soaked up all the experience.
Perhaps it’s time to return to Shropshire again with my old copy of Anna Karenina.
“If you look for perfection, you will never be content” Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
“Reading Anna Karenina again, I see that it's more extreme than that; urban buildings and landscapes are practically invisible, whereas the countryside is described in exquisite detail.”James Meek rereading Anna Karenina