Oast Ho!

a short time in Kent

I haven’t posted for a while because I haven’t been swimming: I am not in Austin, haven’t been since the first days of June. I’ve bounced around some. Now me & mine are in an oast house in Kent, in England.

An oast, should you wonder, is a kiln for drying hops. This house has a big round former oast at one end. Once upon a time I lived in an apartment with a round room I used as an office, and I have always missed it, missed that round room more than perhaps any single dwelling of my life.

The oast house overlooks a pond, featuring ducks, moorhens, baby moorhens, and two piebald waterfowl who look goosey to me but which my mother-in-law insists are ducks. It isn’t a pond to swim in.

Today we drove to beautiful Folkestone to see dear friends. Some members of our party went fossiling; others, including me, went to the fair. One of my kids & my friend’s kid went on the dodgem cars. In England, the point is to dodge; in America, to bump: that seems about right. At any rate, the cars were put in motion, and soon the operator was saying on the intercom, “Don’t put your child alone on the dodgems if they can’t reach the pedals!” Sure enough, there was a small girl becalmed in the middle of the rink. One of the attendants tried to help her out with steering; eventually he got into the car and chauffeured her.

I still love carnivals even though some of the rides I once loved no longer love me. Anything that spins around and around now makes me sick, demented.

Roller coasters still thrill me. They were always my favorite. At this point—this summer I’m working on a book about fiction, not a book of fiction—I’m tempted to insist that roller coasters are fiction, full of narrative and suspense. At the very least they’re plot.

No roller coasters at the carnival. (That might make a good title.) One of my kids and I are going to go to the Pleasure Pier at Blackpool in a couple of weeks.