Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Of a Housedress

Yesterday on our tour of the Wycombe house (for lack of a better word. Mansion is more in the way of a proper description), there was an elderly British couple that somehow wound up in our tour group. The rest of us were female and Oxford affiliated.

I don't think the man really liked having us along. If there was something the guide was discussing, he was pushing casually past us in order to have a look. If the guide was moving along, he was holding her back with a question (Given that the guide wasn't allowing us the time to ask questions). He was completely bald on top, but had frizzled hair around the sides that was somehow growing in a horizontal fashion. When he got in front of me at one point, I noticed how baggy his khaki pants were.

They were both, he and she, smiling sweetly throughout the tour. She usually stuck with us; he was the one the guide would have to go back for: "Sir, I can't leave you in there... Yes, I know, but you need to come with us."

She (his wife, not the guide) had her silver hair in a sort of chignon and was wearing a blue and white flower patterned housedress. In America, that would be dismissed as frumpy. Somehow, being British, it made me think of the British PBS show with the Buckets (Boo-kays), and made it quite the fashionable thing. Plus her smile was just that gentle. I never heard her speak.