Wordsley, Stourbridge, England: 11 degrees, chilly, grey, and overcast with showers.
It’s grey and miserable but not too cold. It is Friday, so it should have been a simpler day, and it was.
One class in the morning, a couple in the late afternoon, and one at 9:00 p.m. Between the classes, posting a blog, journal writing, coffees and teas in the local cafes, and dates in a Mini Countryman in abandoned car parks.
My beautiful, little, perfect woman lives with her parents. She left her marriage of 31 years because her ex-husband supposedly cheated on her. Probably as the last straw, she left and went back to live with her parents in July of last year. I also currently live with my mother, so it’s almost impossible for us to have a more intimate relationship. I don’t mind because it’s still early, and we are gradually getting to know each other.
All I know is that when I’m with her, I feel nervous and happy at the same time. We are talking about spending a weekend together, visiting a local town, staying in a hotel, and besides going out, exploring the region is probably the best way to find some intimacy.
It is not that I’m just thinking about sex, but more of having quality time with this special person, for each other to get to know each other better, and have some time that we’re not separating or splitting up at the end of the night. She said that she would like us to travel, but I’m not sure if she is ready for it yet.
A lot is going on in her life, a lot of changes, a lot that maybe she is afraid of, but just having some nice time together can help, both for her and me.
Where my mother lives, which is classified as a village, there are many small villages and towns connected by roads and canals. Due to the Industrial Revolution over 200 years ago, England is crisscrossed with canals that intertwine and connect. The large, heavy industrial factories of the past received raw materials via the canal system and also exported their final products through the canals.
Nowadays, many people live on the canal in narrowboats, or in the past, they were called barges.
There is tourism during the summer months, where you can rent a longboat for your family and travel up and down the canals for a week, stopping at towns, villages, and local pubs for the day before moving on.
Supposedly, Birmingham has more canals than Venice in Italy. Of course, we cannot directly compare Birmingham with Venice.
Clearly, nobody can deny that Venice is one of the most beautiful and unique cities in the world. In the past, Birmingham was at the centre of the industrial revolution, which made it look grey, ugly, heavy, and dirty, and oppressive to say the least.
Now that all this heavy industry has disappeared, Birmingham has become much cleaner, more organised, and more attractive; it is a significant improvement on what it used to be, even though many jobs have been lost because of it.
If someone genuinely wants to know and get familiar with the English countryside, as I mentioned, navigating a narrowboat or longboat is an excellent way to do so. It is not dangerous, you do not need a licence to operate the boat, and you won’t cause any harm, you won’t kill anyone, because it only travels at two or three kilometres per hour.
You also don’t need to rent a narrowboat; you can walk along the canals. My mother lives in Wordsley, near Stourbridge, which is the main local town, about two miles away. It is very pleasant to go for walks from one place to another.
Besides the natural English flora and fauna, the different shades of greens and browns, the contact with nature is truly sublime. The wildlife is abundant with ducks, geese, swans, quails, squirrels, badgers, and foxes, and if you are lucky, you can see them all the time because they’re not shy.
I suggested to my beautiful, little, perfect woman that next weekend we could visit one of the neighbouring towns or villages. I thought of Bewdley, probably because it is regarded as one of the most beautiful villages in the region and in England.
Bewdley is cut in half by the River Avon that runs through it. It is special to me because not only do I think it is wonderful and special, but I also have fun memories of my late teens there before going to live in London, where I would go with groups of friends from that time to the main pub in the heart of the village, the Saint George.
The Saint George was, and still is, a pub-hotel I would visit on fine English summer days. It would be absolutely packed, lively both inside and out, at the front and in the beer garden and car park at the back. My friends were older and quite wild back then; they loved to party, and I just went along for the ride.
It was a special time, probably because we were young and a bit crazy too. Everything feels good when we are young; as we get older, it becomes more difficult, not impossible, just more challenging.
My mother continues to cause some stress over me having a friend directly, and an undercurrent of pain is waiting to flood out—like a tsunami approaching, I can feel it, but I am ready.
A car park meeting with my beautiful, little, perfect woman; a class; a late dinner; and in bed by midnight.
Thank you.
Thanks for reading this blog post. Please explore my other posts and share your thoughts in the comments section.
Richard
