Friday, April 17, 2009

Market Day in the County Town

The Wednesday market in Dorchester is fun, unlike some of the High Streets we’ve visited, with holiday-makers and shoppers all getting sunburnt together. The country so far as we’ve seen it is full of fair-skinned northerners. London will be more cosmopolitan. One sees the same physical types as at home in Utah—or even more of the very fair-skinned, freckled, or redhaired people. Maybe they look more fair because of less sun. They are not as weathered as the westerners I know.

The Dorchester museum is enchanting, with centuries and millennia of history thrown together and tucked into corners. I tried to find the Roman pottery—in a corner behind the door—and mosaic tile—we were walking on it. I saw a tag for a portrait of Judge Jeffries (“the most feared man in England” said our coach driver, a man of great volubility and sweetness and untrustworthy facts), but the portrait itself had vanished. [2003]

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