Goodbye to our very comfortable B&B, packed and ready, off down the road and into town. Wandering past tiny bow fronted shop windows – a sweetie shop, brilliant poster paint coloured sweets round as marbles; a petite jewellers, crammed with silver brooches, necklaces, rings, all looking as if elegant Georgian ladies had worn them only yesterday. A trip to the museum at Sally Lunns, where the 500+ year old kitchen is still to be seen, dark musty stone and ancient wooden implements – even stalactites and stalagmites. Then to the Abbey again, this time to study the marble epitaphs, surprisingly lengthy and detailed. Suddenly I am acquainted with the young wife, whose ‘early demise is deplored by her affectionate husband and child’ and the ‘apothecary, laid here after a long and wearisome illness, borne with the utmost Christian patience, whose virtue and diligence was known to all’. Then back to Sally Lunns for lunch, this time up a set of creaking cramped stairs past ancient black beams, to the Jane Austen Room, where a floor and window tilted and twisted by the centuries fascinate us as we eat. And then it’s home, via trains that come on time, and rush now through the blackness spiked with occasional orange lights. And at last up the stairs to Curle Street, to laugh and chat with Bincy and Fiona.
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