We stumbled upon the Bakery on the Water, a great little bakery and restaurant just around the corner from Allerton Cottage. Now we have breakfast there every morning.

A huge chalkboard sign on one wall of the bakery proudly proclaims that Bakery on the Water is owned by the fourth generation of bakers.

Our god daughter Stella and her mom are both great bakers. I wondered how far back this family tradition had existed, so I asked Stella if her grandmother and great grandmother had been bakers, too, and she said, “Yes, they absolutely were. As far as I know, all of the women on my mom’s side have been passionate bakers for a very long time!”

While that’s unusual, it’s probably not as unusual as four generations of professional bakers. Maintaining a successful business and handing it down from generation to generation to generation to generation is a truly rare achievement.

For example, I think my dad always knew that I was not destined to follow in his footsteps as a dairy farmer. By the time I was about five, I had already figured out that the kind of hard, dirty physical labor he performed about 12 hours each day was not for me. In fact, watching how hard he worked was all the motivation I needed to do well in school and go to college to learn to do anything that would keep me off the dairy. The concept of spending the rest of my life rubbing up against 1200 pound shit-covered animals did not appeal to me. Not even a little bit.

On one hand, I think he was very disappointed. On the other hand, I think he knew my interests and skills were different than his and he wanted me to go out and succeed at something that interested me.

Years later, I unintentionally made it easy for my employees to read exactly how my day was going. They knew it was a bad day if they could hear me walking down the hallway, drumming my fingers along the wall while repeating the words, “I could have had the cows. I could have had the cows. I could have had the fuckin’ cows.”

So when you learn that Bakery on the Water has been owned and operated by one family for four generations, it seems like an even greater accomplishment.

Here’s hoping there’s a fifth generation coming along that can make even better cream teas and Chelsea buns. They’ll do fine, I suspect, if they’re even half as good.

Hack writer standing in front of a great writer’s home. Shakespeare’s home is still standing 450 or so years later, while my first home was torn down five years after I was born. What can be extrapolated from that is that Shakespeare was 90 times the writer I am. I’m pretty sure that’s an underestimate.

You can’t go to Stratford-upon-Avon without visiting the Avon upon which Stratford is. Or something like that.

An excellent example of Jim and Jamie’s remarkable ability to take selfies in which the sky is blown out and completely devoid of color.

Today Jamie and I went to visit Stratford-upon-Avon, a small village just north of the Cotswolds where William Shakespeare was born somewhere around 1564. You may have heard of him. Apparently he wrote some plays and poetry.

Stratford still exists and prospers primarily because Shakespeare was born there, and apparently in order to provide sellers of souvenirs in central England with a way to separate tourists from their pounds and pence.

Although I’ve been doing it for more than 40 years, I’m the first to admit that being “creative” is an odd way to make a living.

Almost all creative people — no matter whether we’re novelists or painters or sculptors or mere advertising copywriters — are incredibly insecure about what we do. We’re all convinced that we’re frauds and that everything good we’ve created in the past was the result of pure luck and that the last good project we completed will be the final good project we ever do and we dread the moment that the phone rings and we’re given a new assignment because we absolutely know this will be the one that finally exposes the true lack of talent that lurks inside us.

Do not think I’m exaggerating. I’ve had this discussion with many creative people in many fields and 99% of them wholeheartedly agree with the previous paragraph. The remaining 1% just won’t admit it.

With that in mind, you have to believe that William Shakespeare was not your typical creative personality. It’s almost impossible to believe that he looked at himself in the mirror and said, “I’m a freakin’ fraud. Oh, sure, I may have written 37 of the greatest plays in the history of the English language and 154 sonnets that will be remembered for half a millenium, but it was luck. Pure, unadulterated luck.”

I slept through most of Shakespeare when I was in high school, but managed to pass the test because I read the Cliff Notes version of Romeo & Juliet. Luckily, I had a great English lit professor in college. Mr. Piggott’s lectures made Shakespeare come alive. He made it so interesting that I actually read and appreciated Othello.

What you may not know is that the Bard wasn’t just a master of the English language, he damn near created it. Someone with far too much time on his hands determined that in his various plays, sonnets and narrative poems, Shakespeare used 17,677 different words.

But the incredible thing is that he invented 1,700 of them. And for those who didn’t gain an appreciation for Shakespeare from Mr. Piggott, you may be surprised to learn that you’re probably still using many of them every day.

For example, here are a few of today’s common words that were first used by Shakespeare:

accommodation, aerial, amazement, apostrophe, assassination, auspicious, baseless, bloody, bump, castigate, changeful, clangor, control (noun), countless, courtship, critic, critical, dexterously, dishearten, dislocate, dwindle, eventful, exposure, fitful, frugal, generous, gloomy, gnarled, hurry, impartial, inauspicious, indistinguishable, invulnerable, lapse, laughable, lonely, majestic, misplaced. monumental, multitudinous, obscene, palmy, perusal, pious, premeditated, radiance, reliance, road, sanctimonious, seamy, sportive, submerge, suspicious

But Shakespeare didn’t stop with mere words. He also put common words together to create phrases that were completely new to the English language. Until he put pen to paper, none of the following commonly used phrases had ever before been uttered:

all that glitters isn’t gold, barefaced, be all and end all, break the ice, breathe one’s last, brevity is the soul of wit, catch a cold, clothes make the man, disgraceful conduct, dog will have his day, eat out of house and home, elbowroom, fair play, fancy free, flaming youth, foregone conclusion, frailty thy name is woman, give the devil his due, green-eyed monster, heart of gold, heartsick, hot-blooded, housekeeping, it smells to heaven, it’s Greek to me, lackluster, leapfrog, live long day, long-haired, method in his madness, mind’s eye, ministering angel, more sinned against than sinning, naked truth, neither a borrower nor a lender be, one fell swoop, pitched battle, primrose path, strange bedfellows, the course of true love never did run smooth, the lady doth protest too much, the milk of human kindness, to thine own self be true, too much of a good thing, towering passion, wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve, witching time of the night

This remarkable man, the son of unremarkable parents from an unremarkable village in central England, created and recreated an entire language. All on his own. It’s been nearly 500 years and Shakespeare’s words are as alive as ever.

Advertising copywriters like me are thrilled if we can cobble together an amusing little 60-second radio commercial that can still make people laugh the second time they hear it. It’s a lifetime achievement if one of us manages to create a single “catch phrase” that becomes part of the vernacular for a week or two.

For example, my proudest achievement in advertising wasn’t even for something I created. It was for recognizing the theretofore unrecognized genius of Harry Cocciolo (Hi, Harry), a kid who applied for a job with my ad agency. I looked at his portfolio and the mystery to me was how he could still be unemployed when his genius seemed so clear. He worked for us for a year and was then hired away by one of the world’s best ad agencies. The first of many great ad campaigns he created there was “got milk”.

It ain’t Shakespeare, but it’s as close as you can come in the world of advertising.

As you’ve probably guessed by now, we’re not big city people. So after landing at Heathrow airport, we completely bypassed London and headed straight to the Cotswolds, a place most Americans have never heard of.

It’s an area in south central England named after the Cotswold Hills, a range of rolling hills which rise from the meadows of the upper Thames river. It’s known for the honey-colored Cotswold limestone from which, seemingly, every building has been constructed for many hundreds of years. Everything from ramshackle garden walls to huge manors and estates is built from the same gorgeous stone.

The Cotswolds stretch from just south of Stratford-upon-Avon to just south of Bath, and includes parts of several English counties — Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Somerset, Worcestershire and Warwickshire.

We’ve rented a cottage in the village of Bourton on the Water, which may be one of the prettiest places we’ve ever seen. Our beautiful little cottage was built sometime in the mid-1700s and is about a 30-second stroll from the heart of the village, which is home to around 3,000 people. It’s perfect, really.

And it’s exactly what we needed.

We’ve been living out of hotel rooms for the last month and eating three meals a day in restaurants gets old pretty quickly. Renting a cottage with a kitchen and being able to have a couple meals “at home” each day really helps out. We’ll be completely recharged by the time we leave the Cotswolds.

Take a look at the stunning little spot we’re calling home for the next seven nights.

Here’s Jamie standing in the front door of Allerton, our charming 250-year old cottage.

I readily admit that I have a bit of clotted cream, jam and scone on my T-shirt as I write this. Jamie just compared me to her Uncle Terry because I am not at all embarrassed by having that souvenir of my lunch on my shirt. I consider it to be a fashion statement.

Everyone knows what scones and jam are, but unless you’ve been to England, you may not know what clotted cream is. It sounds horrible, but it’s wonderful. Wikipedia’s description of it does not make it sound any more appetizing:

“Clotted cream has been described as having a ‘nutty, cooked milk’ flavor, and a ‘rich sweet flavor’ with a texture that is grainy, sometimes with oily globules on the crusted surface. It is a thick cream, with a very high fat content (a minimum of 55%, but an average of 64%)…”

“Due to its high saturated fat content, the regular consumption of clotted cream is usually thought to be bad for health. A 2006 survey of nutrition professionals ranked clotted cream as the least healthy of 120 foods selected to be representative of the British diet.”

Well, let me make this as clear as I can: Screw each and every one of those wimpy-assed nutrition professionals, because clotted cream, jam and scones is the food of the gods.

I would eat this stuff three meals a day and snack on it in-between if Jamie would let me. I’m pretty sure I’d pass out and go into a sugar and fat-induced coma after about three days, but before losing consciousness I would use my last breath to beg Jamie to have clotted cream, jam and scones intravenously-injected directly into my bloodstream.

That’s how good it is.

I keep getting photos of people in our swimming pool while we’re gone. It’s cold and rainy here in Bourton on the Water — in other words, perfect weather for England — but we wouldn’t mind a little of that hot Texas weather right now.

I guess I should just be happy that Coach isn’t wearing his Speedos in this photo.

No one will ever mistake our photos for those of Ansel Adams, but this image of the Matterhorn is just about the coolest thing we’ve ever seen.

I know you’re going to look at this photo and say, “This is their worst one yet.” But wait. You don’t know the story behind it.

This is the 150th anniversary of the first successful ascent of the Matterhorn. Most of the first party to make the historic climb didn’t make it back alive. Zermatt is celebrating the anniversary in various ways and this photo, believe it or not, is one of the ways.

They’ve installed lights on the side of the mountain to mark the route taken by the climbers. All over Zermatt you see posters and photos and images that show the lights going up the mountain. I even bought a T-shirt with a cool illustration of the mountain and the lights. But we just assumed the celebration was over because there were no lights on the mountain our first night in town.

Jamie and I had just turned out the lights and gone to bed on our second night in town when I looked out the window and hollered, “The lights are on.”

We jumped up, I grabbed my iPad, we ran out onto our deck and I took this quick shot. Within seconds of taking the photo, the lights went out.

The photo’s not going to win any awards, but we still think it’s pretty cool that we got to see the lights.

By the way, why is it called an “ascent” instead of a “climb”. They’re called mountain climbers, not mountain ascenders.

The award for the worst-named menu item in the world goes to Denny’s Restaurants for a breakfast combo called “Moon Over My Hammy”. I have ordered and eaten it, so I am qualified to attest to the fact that it does not measure up to the Super Moon Over the Matterhorn, which can only be ordered in Zermatt.

We read the other day that we were going to have a “Super Moon” on each of the nights we were in Zermatt. In case you didn’t read the same article, a super moon is what it’s called when a full moon occurs at the same time the moon makes its closest approach to the earth. That relatively rare combination of conditions makes for a bigger, brighter moon called a Super Moon.

The sun went down in Zermatt last night and the super moon rose directly over the Matterhorn.

How cool is that?

We took a cog train to Gornergrat, a rocky ridge 33 minutes up the Pennine Alps from Zermatt. You could get whiplash turning your head from side to side to see all the remarkable views as the train slowly climbs upward.

And when you get to the top of Gornergrat, there’s a small train station, an observatory, a hotel and, of course, a shopping center designed to separate tourists from their hard-earned francs.

The remarkable thing about Gornergrat is that there’s a 360 degree view and you can see 29 mountain peaks over 13,000 feet. Pretty impressive.

I think most people think the Alps are, well, Alpine and everything looks like a virgin forest or a grassy meadow out of the Sound of Music. But as you can see, there’s nothing but glaciers and rock up at this altitude.

I just looked it up. The tree line is about 6,900 feet. Almost nothing grows beyond that point. It looks like the surface of the moon.

Us. Alpine peaks. An observatory. Nothing clever to add.

Jamie tested out the panoramic photo function on her iPhone. We’re not sure how many degrees around it’s supposed to capture, but we made a guesstimate that we got about 270 degree view.