There was no way he’d be sporting a baseball cap here, thank you, even if it almost seemed to be part of the national costume. Both he and Miles habitually chose headgear looking like it came from the nineteen thirties, and neither of them cared if it made them stick out like sore thumbs. Almost as much as their accents made them stick out. Everywhere they’d been, girls had almost swooned at their voices, admiring the way they said even the simplest of things, “Thank you” evidently as impressive as the soliloquy from Hamlet. One of them had been brash enough to insist they say “Harry Potter” and kept squealing every time Miles had obliged. Brashness and baseball caps, they were some of the fruits of the journey westwards of which Roger didn’t approve, alongside fast-food chains and words like gotten. No one in the stories he wrote would ever have said gotten unless it was preceded by be or sandwiched between ill and gains. At least the surroundings felt comfortingly familiar.
