I slept in until about 11am this morning. It was nice. With no chores and no animals to deal with, I could simply lie in bed and listen to the rain.

Yes, the typical English weather is back today – damp and gray. I hear that we got quite a bit of rain in North Carolina, which is good because we are in a fairly serious drought at the moment. I haven’t been able to chat with Andrea yet, so I’m not sure what we measured at the farm.

Craig took me out to Winchester for lunch. Once England was ruled from there, and they had more than the usual number of old buildings, churches and battlements. Much of the castle was razed by Oliver Cromwell, but the Great Hall of George III was there.

Also in the Great Hall was a supposed replica of Arthur’s Round Table. There wasn’t much explanation given (as I thought Arthur was a complete myth) but it was kinda neat since it was something like 800 years old.

We had Sunday lunch in a pub, and we both got the “Sunday Club”. This was a large platter of roast beef (roast chicken in Craig’s case), roasted potatoes, peas, carrots, broccoli, and something called “Yorkshire Pudding”, which reminded me of a chicken pot pie shell. It was smothered in gravy and quite good. It took awhile for the food to arrive, so Craig scored a newspaper (where I found out that Silent Hill was based on a video game and since no movie based on a video game has been any good, I have to mark it off my list) and we sat and read. For some reason it felt too early for beer, so I had a soft drink and Craig had cider (not the soft kind).

It is St. George’s Birthday, and for that reason there were a lot more people wandering about than usual. We wandered ourselves over to Winchester Cathedral, which it turns out was used as a set for part of The Da Vinci Code. They promised a display called “Cracking the Code” which rebuts some of the assertions of the book. If you have been living under a rock for the past two years, the premise of the The Da Vinci Code is that Jesus survived the crucifixion, married Mary Magdelene, and moved to France. It would have been nice to see the exhibit, but as the evensong service was underway that part of the nave was closed off. We did sit and hear some amazing choral music, and I read parts of the Common Book of Prayer and struggled to figure out when Easter was (there is a whole part about the calculation at the front of the book, and since other movable feasts are based on Easter, it was the key to determining, for example, when to celebrate Christ’s circumcision). Just when we thought the service was winding down, the priest started in with the sermon and we decided to leave.