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A Trip To Tat

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Returning Silently, with resolve, Tat plotted her next trip to England, just her and her handy little suitcase on wheels. Two days of exploring Hamstead Heath and surrounding Camden Town community would suffice. The visit out there this trip had lasted such a brief time. They stayed just long enough to have a coffee in a funky old restaurant across from the Heath, walk over and gaze down the entry path, and then jump back on the bus that would return them to their hotel. Tat and Len had disagreed on how to find the canal. Len stormed along, disparaging the area’s lack of photographic opportunities. Tat had wanted to engage with the political pamphleteers at their booth by the bus loop, but even this brief encounter with the lifeblood of…show more content…
They discussed the likelihood of it being a building fire of some sort. London, unlike home in British Columbia, is full of buildings but not that many trees. The plume of smoke they’d seen a couple of days before from the hotel room had disappeared within an hour. Sadly, this one was different, they discovered over supper that night at the Goose Pub. The pub had only one television screen, mounted up high. The pictures and commentary went on and on about the blaze, which the night before had destroyed the homes of most and the lives of hundreds as the Grenfell Tower burned. The plume of smoke they’d seen from the train was residual fire from the burning high-rise not quite quelled the night before. Tat felt awash again in the feelings and images of the past few weeks. How did the pleasantries of travelling in the springtime in England co-exist in her psyche with the Manchester bombings, the mass murders on the bridges and in the market in London, the crippling computer failure at British Airways, a bumpy national election, and, finally, this horror of a fire? It was just like on the train, trying to focus on the conversation of the woman from the Cotswolds, while ignoring the prattle in the other ear coming from the Americans. It was just like the split thinking she always got from living in Canada seeing on nightly news the dysfunctional antics of their neighbours’ president. She really, really did not want to go home to that. Next day, shaken and
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