What’s a Bard?

When you pack up some fruit and cheese and a bottle of wine and head to the Samuel-Grand park in Dallas during the summer, it’s invariably to go see Shakespeare in the Park.  We’ll most certainly do that when we get back to our regularly scheduled Texas summer.  But before they begin the show, someone from the Shakespeare Dallas organization gets up and explains how a bard is a storyteller.  There’s a consistent call-and-response thing that has happened in every show I have attended.  He says something to the general effect of, “And Shakespeare is often called the Bard…”  The audience out on the lawn shouts back, “What’s a bard?”  So let me tell you what he would say next.  

A bard is a storyteller.  

Yesterday, we went to the hometown of the bard of all bards.  The grand-bard of them all.  The third child of a glove maker and a farmer’s daughter, William Shakespeare.  We went on the second of our scheduled day trips from London, this time, to Stratford-upon-Avon, the Cotswolds and Oxford.  Wow.  Stratford was very cool.  We only had enough time to tour the house where Shakespeare was born and raised, then we had to head to the next destination.  We actually grabbed a sandwich after the self-guided tour and ate it on the bus, as we didn’t want to kill time in a restaurant.  The next two stops were the ones that, if I were in charge of the tour company, I would cut out of the tour.  I would have the guide drive by, make a little commentary, and preserve the time for one of the other two locations.  We went through the Cotswolds.  What’s a Cotswolds?  Well, it’s not a bard.  I kid- it’s just a really pretty, picturesque part of England.  The houses are all made of the locally available materials, which means they’re all in a blonde-ish stone.  Frankly, I could have used more time either in Stratford or in Oxford.  

Ooh, and Oxford- we got there at 4:30 and everything closes at 5.  That’s one of the reasons I would have chopped out the Cotswolds from this tour.  There’s a great science museum that was closed, but if it were open, they somehow had Albert Einstein’s chalkboard where he used to do complicated equations.  There were innumerable libraries for the multitudes of universities, all of which looked cool from the outside, and none of which let us in after 4:45.  Behold, Cas trying to get into a door labeled Geometry and Arithmetic: 

Yeah- 30 more minutes in Stratford and another 45 or more in Oxford.  Regardless, we did hit up some really great spots.  There are lots of places that claim to be the oldest pub in England, and we went to one that, of those claimants, is still the third from the oldest. Nobody holds the official title, because no one can prove it.  Regardless, The Porch House was established in 947 AD.  It’s in a spot called Stow-on-the-Wold in the Cotswolds.  I got a pint of the trademark “warm” British beer, meaning it’s a cask beer where the draft is pulled from underground wine-cellar-temperature casks.  Had to try it.  Honestly, that was not my favorite, but it was pretty authentic.  

For a stop I would remove if I were the tour organizer, it was a nice perk.  Beyond that, we really enjoyed Oxford, and the trip back to London was pretty swift from there.  We had a dinner at a Thai restaurant.  In fact, when we mentioned where we planned to eat, the tour guide changed his drop-off plans.  Our dinner pick was right around the corner from the spot where his company parks their buses overnight.  We basically went back to the tour company’s mothership.  

All in all, the day was wonderful.  We did feel rushed in parts, but the things we did see were pretty great.  We stopped at a gift shop on our way back to the hotel and picked up our souvenir refrigerator magnet.  This one is a red, double-decker bus.  It’s a little token that could start either of us telling stories…. You know, like a bard.

Here are our photos: tinyurl.com/dunlap-pl