Doncaster from Denver

I've just been looking on the website of the Denver Post, because I remembered hearing even more sirens than usual yesterday when I was sitting at home. It appears that someone working in a shop on 16th Street Mall got shot. While I was away someone got themselves shot in the Capitol building too. It's not comforting to be in a place where the law entrusts any old maniac with your life. That could be said for drivers' licensing too, of course, as you would know if you were one of we foreign people who have to go and sit around in the DMV once a year to renew our licenses.

But what really struck me on the Denver Post site tonight was the "Post Poll" at the top of their "Denver and the West" page. It reads:

Will you watch tonight's pre-season game between the Broncos and the 49ers?

o Yes
o I might
o No
o Don't know

Vote now!

The Denver Post - taking civic engagement and democracy to new heights.

Well, since I am already in a complaining mode, it is time to talk of Doncaster.

Doncaster

- is in Yorkshire, but is sadly far removed from the hilly stone-walled sheep-dotted landscape many of us might associate with the name, being in the South.
- is a town of many similar looking houses all built of strangely smooth-faced deep red bricks.
- was once prosperous and thriving, or so I've been told.
- has numbers of my relatives living in and around it.

From childhood I've been going to Doncaster from Scotland on a fairly regular basis and have always felt oppressed by all that red brick. As I have got older, though, I've begun to wonder - do people who grow up in Doncaster and visit Scotland have a similar reaction to all those grey buildings that I think are so stately? Do they find them cold, where I find them elegantly cool?

Anyway, the trip wasn't to look at red brick, but to visit my 92 year old grandmother, and so I should be less ungracious. It was, again, a family trip, and on our full day there we all went out to the village of Epworth, which was red brick and pretty. We visited The Old Rectory, the childhood home of John and Charles Wesley, founders of Methodism. There wasn't a great deal to see inside the house - though looking round houses is always fun if you're not engaged in trying to rent one - but the physic garden outside was interesting. I like kitchen gardens and physic gardens. I can imagine putting in the effort if the plants are going to enhance my dinner. Otherwise, I feel somewhat the same about flowers as I do about fireworks. In the one garden I've ever had, in Japan, I successfully grew hordes of caterpillars which ate my neighbours' trees. My ambition for my future house in the U.S. is to have a yard full of prairie dogs.

In the physic garden I saw licorice in its natural form for the first time. It looks like this:

Back in town in the evening we went to Eating Whole, a tiny vegetarian restaurant that serves a great organic cider (the British alcoholic sort, not the American soda) and a deep-fried blue cheese appetizer, both of which have the power to make me suddenly warm to Doncaster.