Today I went to Woodstock with a few friends. We'd intended to take a walk at Blenheim but were only a few hundred yards inside the gate when rain started falling in heavy sheets.
So we took refuge at the Bear and drank tea and hot chocolate in the Churchill Lounge before a large electric fire. The room was beautiful -- comfortable wingback chairs, lush carpet, thick curtains, gilt mirror over the mantlepiece. The others were reading or lost in their own thoughts, and I sat happily pondering snatches of Tolkien and T.S. Eliot.
After a while I curled up in a curtained window seat that reminded me of Jane Eyre's Gateshead hiding place and watched the rain fall in the growing twilight. The window fogged up a little, but I could still see the gentle glow cast by the street lamps on the stone cottages, and the occasional pedestrian hurrying past under a black umbrella.
Would love to go back some rainy winter's day and while away several hours in that room with The Return of the King and The Four Quartets.
"History is a pattern of timeless moments." ~ Little Gidding
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