Perfect Vacation

I have a friend who had never heard of Downton Abbey until I gushed last winter about its splendid English-y upper lips and costumes and oh-my-heavens Miss Mary! It turns out this friend is a 19th-century-British-miniseries fanatic, and when she discovered DA on Hulu we didn't see her again for several days.

To thank me (or perhaps to retaliate) for the Downton Abbey tip-off that resulted in her lost weekend, she loaned me her library of English DVDs. Sense and Sensibility (the Emma Thompson/Hugh Grant edition. North and South (the English version, not the Civil War version).

Cranford.

This series deserves a paragraph all to itself because oh, my. For two days I've been immersed in the 1842 market town that is "governed by etiquette, custom and above all, an intricate network of ladies." I watched with bated breath as the doctor was caught up in the web of romantic intrigue, and as young Harry learned to read. 

I've knitted most of a baby sweater as the railroad came to town, coming up for air occasionally to pity poor Husband who has had to be sequestered in tax seminars while all of this wonderful drama is unfolding. (He may say he prefers tax seminars to English period dramas, but I know he's just being brave.)

I finished the series just a few minutes ago, and I'm still misty-eyed from the ending, which was as perfectly genteel and proper as it should have been.

Vacation means different things to different people. Some golf, some shop, some go to museums. Me? I'll take a a BBC mini-series on my laptop over any of those.

This is just my cup of tea.