First taste of England

This is an extract from my Journal, going back to 1979, my first trip to England, on my way to the USA for a two-month stay in the summer, replacing another priest, while getting my first taste of life in a USA parish. But my first stop was England for a week, visiting an aunt who lived in Portsmouth. These are just two snippets from my journal...

For anyone leaving humid and dry Malta in the summer months, the cool and fresh climate is something that we all cherish and relish and look forward to. But what surprised me the most is that walking in a simple T-shirt was a great relief for me, while everyone else was bundled up in coats, hats and gloves. They must have looked at me and wondered which planet I had just landed from! It was so great and therapeutic just walking through clean streets with flowers in their front gardens, especially the roses, tulips and hortensias, which I knew were very delicate flowers and hard to raise in a warm climate like Malta. So it was just  such a pleasure seeing these large flowers in pink, lavender and white scenting the entire neighborhood. One day I ended up walking close to a golf course, and since this was my first encounter with this new sport for me, I ventured on the lush grass and enjoyed the soft feel of the newly-mowed grass. At one moment I come across a golf ball, and of course I picked it up, and took it with me, hiding it in my pocket. I walked around the luscious manicured lawn, but as I was leaving, I noticed a group of 4 men coming towards me, searching for something on the grass, looking in bushes and under trees, while I eyed them inquisitively from a distance, with the ball in my pocket. It was only later in the day, when I was proudly showing the ball to my uncle and cousins, that I realized that those 4 disconsolate golfers were actually looking for that ball, which belonged to one of them! What I thought was a great discovery for me turned out to be a colossal disappointment to one of the golfers, as he was penalized one stroke, maybe even two strokes!