Day 13: Rest day in Stratford-upon-Avon

We wake up in our air-conditioned luxury, shower and then mosey on down to take a leisurely breakfast of French toast. After that, we head out into the inferno to take our washing to the Sparklean launderette. I cannot recommend this business enough. Cheap, helpful and quick, it serves both those on lengthy tours and the canal boaters. Even better, it does not reference Shakespeare in its moniker.

Most Stratford enterprises seem to pay homage to the bard who was born, married and died here. There is the Pen and Parchment pub, the Shakespeare Distillery (I’m unable to identify a connection between the playwright and the distillery, good though its products may be) and Othello’s Taxis among others. As our son Robert says, would you feel confident as a young woman travelling alone at night calling Othello’s Taxis? It could be worse, they could be called Romeo’s Taxis. My apologies if the proprietor is actually called Othello. In the midst of all this, there is the Chaucer Head Book Shop, that obviously didn’t get the memo.

We spend our time having coffee and cakes, stocking up our pharmacy and walking back and forth to the launderette. We don’t really bother with sightseeing, as we have both been to Stratford before and it’s 33 degrees Celsius in the shade. I have a work Teams meeting at 1:30, then we have a delicious lunch at the Deli Cafe and retired for an afternoon snooze.

As a treat, I have booked tickets for an evening performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The Other Place, the smallest of the RSC theatres here and the only one I could get tickets for. Rich once played trombone in this play at school, but it’s not one I know despite its fame. Trombones were around in Shakespeare’s time as they were invented in around 1450. The performance is slightly abridged, as this is a joint production with the Unicorn Theatre for younger audiences, but it’s immensely enjoyable. It also has creative captions of the script imaginatively displayed on the set, which is a master stroke, not just for accessibility but for aiding understanding of the archaic language. There are no trombones though.

We head off towards the ferris wheel but it doesn’t seem to be running at present, maybe because of the heat. So it’s a brief sojourn in our room, then out to dinner. We’ve had a lovely time in Stratford (though still walked over 14,000 steps) but it’s back out onto the (hot) road tomorrow.