Lundbooks Editorial

NEW LOOK WEBSITE

2010-02-09T12:15:00.003Z

I have two new developments to report. The first is the different way the books are displayed on the website. It should not make any practical difference to customers searching for and ordering our books, but underlying what you see are files which can more easily be accessed by Google, which should help our books to be more widely findable.

Having said that, there appear to be a few problems at present with the uploading of our files, and as I write I suspect that half our stock is not showing on the website, but no doubt such teething problems will disappear over the next few days. George Lund has worked very hard on the project, and no doubt will kill this particular problem with his usual speedy ruthlessness.

The second development is one which a week ago I would have been ashamed to admit to, but which I'm now revelling in. I've discovered Twitter.

Not that I had not heard of it. It is hard to avoid any news report on any dramatic occurence in the world which does not these days acknowledge the part Twitter has played in the dissemination of the reports from the ground. However, it was associated in my mind with silly people following the inane ramblings of empty-headed so-called celebrities.

So when a couple of bookselling colleagues whom I respect admitted last week that they "twittered", I was somewhat surprised, but, holding my nose somewhat I ventured onto the Twitter website to see what on earth it had to do with anything serious.

And was pleasantly surprised.

Yes, you can "follow" the musings of your show-biz heroes, if that is your delight, but more to the point, one can give out and receive useful snippets of information about news, and business and all sorts of other things. I am now following such institutions as the British Library, the New Scientist magazine, the Guardian newspaper science pages, Scientific American, some booksellers, and some cycling related activities.

From the point of view of Lund Theological Books I think being on Twitter will enable us to quickly post small items that in theory could go on this Blog, but which in practice have been too little to bother with posting on the blog, which tends to be used for longish ramblings, such as our holidays. Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters, so you can make a quick point very easily.

Over the last month or so we have made various offers of discount on sections of our catalogue. This has been mentioned on the home page of the website as and when appropriate. From now on, any special offers, which may last only a few hours at a time, will only be announced on Twitter. There is a link at the bottom of the our home page, so it won't be difficult to check them out.

I hope also that customers will interact with the business via messages on Twitter. Comments, questions, complaints, compliments, are all welcome, and will be able to be seen by all comers.

They tell me this is the twenty-first century. You are welcome to join me in stumbling around its foothills.

More Culture

2009-12-10T09:30:00.008Z

In Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood Mrs Organ Morgan complains about her husband - "With Organ Morgan its Organ Organ Organ all the time." With us the last few weeks its "culture culture culture all the time".

A week after hearing Handel's Messiah in Trinity College Chapel we were back there last Thursday to hear Bach's Christmas Oratorio. Its lovely music and the student choir and orchestra did justice to it. Not sure how the relatively scantily clad soloists endured the cold though. It was worse than the previous week, and that was bad. Still, we did get a free glass of wine to cheer us up in the interval.

Saturday we went to London. My sister in law had managed to buy tickets to the opera at Covent Garden and then discover that both she and her husband had arranged to go to watch rugby matches in different parts of the country - so she gave us the tickets for Tchaikovsky's The Tsarina'a Slippers.

We made a day of it, walking first the few hundred yards along the Euston Road from Kings Cross station to the British Library where there's an exhibition on the history and development of photography. Their own holdings are enough to provide a comprehensive overview of the subject and there is a broad range of stunning and intriguing imagery. And lots of early camera equipment too. The story was told of some early photographer who went to Egypt and had the bright idea of having a small caravan like structure which was his darkroom and equipment store. The locals he travelled amongst were convinced this was where he kept his harem.

Then we tubed (is that a real verb?) to South Kensington to see the newly reopened Medieval and Renaissance galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Stunning. It looks like thirty million pounds well spent. We had about two hours and I reckon saw about a third of the exhibits. In the nineteenth century the V&A must have had collectors out plundering Italy, for half the stuff in the first section we saw appeared to have come from churches in Venice and the Veneto - tombs, sculptures, well heads, the whole east end of some chapel.

Further on are medieval altar pieces and other religious artifacts, none of which I can remember their having on display before. Left, detail of the St Margaret Altarpiece, Germany around 1520.

There were some old favourites though, like the Luck of Edenhall (left), a piece of Syrian glass from the time of the crusades, with its own leather carrying case, and the Becket Chasse (pictured above).

Then we ran out of time and had to go and eat, which we did in a Polish restaurant near South Ken tube station which we think is the same one we first ate in around 1973. I had Kartofflen, a sort of potato and onion and bacon tart, with a mushroom sauce. Very good.

Then to Covent Garden, where the seats turned out to be in the Amphitheatre, a steeply raked section a dizzying forty or fifty feet above the stalls. The Tsarina's Slippers (no, we hadn't heard of it either) is a delightfully silly piece, with plot which is partly Feydeau farce and partly Last of the Summer Wine, about a young blacksmith whose young lady won't marry him unless he provides her with a pair of slippers just like the Tsarina's. His mother, the local witch, and eligible widow, is wooed by the Devil and several local men, including the father of the young lady. In one scene the witch is visited by several suitors in turn, and every time the next chap arrives the current one is hidden in a sack. When the son arrives home he drags the sacks out, thinking they contain either coal or his tools. Subsequently, on the way to commit suicide in despair of winning his girl, he finds the Devil in what he thought was his tool sack and forces him to take him to St Petersburgh where he persuades the court to give him a pair of the desired slippers. All then ends happily ever after. The Royal Ballet is involved too, as there are a couple of dance scenes in the second act.

The Guardian critic slated the production. I got the impression she wanted the whole thing transposed to a tractor collective in Soviet Russia. That would have ruined it. The eighteenth century peasant and court costumes were delightful and Tchaikovsky's music is just right for this light piece.

On another subject, you may or may not have noticed that I have a link on the home page of the website to a list of vestments and clerical garments I am selling. They mostly belonged to my recently deceased father in law, though a few were mine. It would be nice to find homes for them.

Handel, Handel, Handel, Purcell/Handel, Handel

2009-11-27T19:28:00.004Z

We've had a positive feast of Handel this last ten days. For a start English Touring Opera brought five operas to Cambridge, performed one per night over a week. We went to three of them.

We started on the Tuesday with Flavio. Like most Handel operas is has a very silly plot, involving a chap killing his fiance's father for having slapped his own father in the face. Honour is more than love, you know. And a king who falls in love with someone else's girl (who is the sister of the man who does the killing). The king sees the error of his ways in the end and lets her marry the man she loves. Kings always come short in Handel's operas. The singing was good of course, and that is what one goes for.

Next night we saw Teseo. That was a mistake. An even sillier plot - far too complicated to summarise but if I tell you that there's a prince who is pretending not to be himself, and his father the king who at one point tries to poison him, thinking he is a rival, and Medea, who in all the works she occurs in is always a bad lot, and various people who want to marry (including the King of course who comes short at the end). But it wasn't the plot that was the problem. It was that we had seen this very production within the last 18 months or so, and it is now a bit tired. Not all the singers were the same, and they were all right, but it was a bit of a tedious evening.

Thursday we had off so we could miss Tolomeo. We've seen it before, and it all takes place on the shore of some miserable island where everyone gets shipwrecked at various times and no-one recognises anyone else, and they fall in love with the wrong people and they try to murder people they shouldn't, like their brother. Tolomeo is the rejected son of Cleopatra. She never appears (probably put off the sea after Actium) but is a malevolent force behind all the action. So unlike the home life of our own dear Queen.

Friday we heard Alcina. That's one adapted from Ariosto, where a wife comes (in disguise of course) to an island to rescue her husband who has been ensnared by the wicked enchantress Alcina, a sort of Circe character. Ruggiero, the husband is as wet as a fresh plaice, but he was sung beautifully by a most ravishing young New Zealandish singer, Wendy Dawn Thompson, who I would go a long way to hear again. Of course she should have been a castrato, but they don't seem to make them any more, which is a pity.

Saturday we didn't go to see Ariodante. That's another opera adapted from Orlando Furioso, but there isn't much adaptation. The characters are called Ginevra, Dalinda, Polinesso, Ariodante - and Donald. I can't remember the passage in Ariosto, but I am pretty sure he wasn't called Donald in the original. Nor was he a Presbyterian minister. I expect he was a king. But that is the extent to which Handel has adapted the original.

The main reason for not going to Ariodante was the fact that we already had subscription tickets to an Academy of Ancient Music concert at West Road, the University concert hall. This turned out to be the highlight of the week for me. In the first half Carolyn Sampson sang music by Purcell. In the second half she sang works by Handel. She is a magnificent singer, with real presence. (Next night we heard her again on Radio Three, singing from Westminster Abbey.) It would not worry me if I never went to an orchestral concert again. The human voice is what moves me, not artificial contraptions, however well played. But of course Carolyn Sampson's recital would not have been half as good without the orchestra behind her. Her Let the Bright Seraphim from Sampson, was a duet/duel with the trumpet. It sent shivers down my spine.

We had a rest for a few days, and then went to Trinity College last night to hear the Music Society put on the Messiah. It wasn't perfect, but it was good, and in some parts very good, with some cracking good young soloists. It was cold though. Apparently Trinity are cutting down on the heating bills by turning it off. With that great quadrangle they should put in some ground source heating, and a few solar panels on the roofs wouldn't come amiss either.

Anyway, a good week, music wise.

Spanish Holiday October 2009

2009-11-20T15:33:00.014Z

On Saturday 10 October Rosalind and I set off from Stansted airport in an Easyjet plane for Malaga. This was to be our big summer holiday for this year - we reckoned on the weather in the south of Spain being warm enough to call it a summer holiday.

The plan, meticulously worked out, was to spend a couple of nights in Malaga then work our way north, staying in Granada, Seville, Cordoba and Madrid before getting an overnight sleeper to Paris followed by the Eurostar to London. All the hotels were booked, and all the trains, thanks to the website Seat 61. The only journey not booked was a bus trip from Malaga to Granada. We reckoned that the train route was too indirect and long, and that a bus would be quicker. It wasn't till a few days before we left home that we realised that the day we had chosen for this bus trip was Spain's national holiday, and began to wonder if there would be any buses running at all that day.

The most stressful bit of any journey is in my experience getting to and from the airport at the other end. We once spent an hour waiting for a bus at Ancona airport, only to discover, as it sailed past, that we were standing in the wrong place, a couple of hundred metres away from the correct bus stop. So we then had to wait another hour in the sun for the next one. But in Malaga it worked alright and we managed to get off the bus within a couple of hundred yards of our hotel, which we had cunningly chosen between the two most important sites, the cathedral and the Alcazaba, around 100m from each.

Malaga (the link is to further pictures on Flickr) is the nearest airport and big city to the Costa del Whatsit and the Costa del Something Else, where all the British go for their binges of sun and booze, and I guess not many tourists stop there, but it has lots to see, and was an ideal place for our first ever days in Spain. It is a big place - some 650,000 people, but the old part where we stayed is compact but within yards of the modern centre. We walked around a bit on the Saturday afternoon we arrived. It was warm and sunny, and there were parakeets in the palm trees in the park near the harbour. I was surprised at the vegetation, expecting it to be similar to that of Cape Town, which is supposed to have a Mediterranean climate. But Malaga has not only the Mediterranean stuff - oleanders and the like, but a lot of subtropical plants like bananas, which in South Africa you would have to go as far north as Natal to see.

Apart from the odd church we also saw the Picasso museum. He was born in Malaga, and the museum is in an old palace. Not only is there a good collection of his work, given to Malaga by some of his relations, but as a bonus under the palace has been excavated and one can see the quite extensive remains of some Phoenician buildings, they having founded the city originally. It stayed open quite late, then we had supper out of doors near the Cathedral.

The next day, Sunday, was to be our only full day, so we packed in all we could. The cathedral wasn't officially open to tourists, but while searching for breakfast we snuck in while a service was on and were able to get a quick look. We spent the rest of the morning on the hill that holds the Alcazaba. There's the remains of a Roman theatre at the bottom of the hill outside the entrance (though that is being re-excavated or something at present, so it isn't much to see).

The Alcazaba is the Moorish fortress on a long hill which runs parallel to the coast. The walls are extensive, the gardens beautiful, and the views impressive. And the paths are steep. There's a good museum in the remains of the old palace at the top.

Further east from the Alcazaba is a higher hill with more Moorish ruins. In the heat of the day we came down from the lower hill, bought some lunch from a bakery and set off with it to the Castillo de Gibralfaro on this high hill. Hot work, so it was good to sit under the pines at the top and eat. The views from here are even better, and the ruins quite extensive and enjoyable.

We got down the hill in time to find a tourist information bureau who in answer to our worries about getting a bus to Granada the next day said that to be sure thousands of people would want to celebrate the national day by going to see the Alhambra from Granada and we ought to go to the bus station to book NOW. But the bus station was a mile or so away, and the day was hot, and the story didn't seem that likely as we had had to book our Alhambra tickets in advance over the internet. So we went instead to see the Picasso birthplace museum. Not very interesting to be honest.

That night our sleep was disturbed by a phone call from the hotel reception at 1am. They'd had an email from Rosalind's sister.

The message was to call home, and when we did next morning it was to hear that Rosalind's father had died the night before. This led to some discussion as to what to do next. We decided that as things were under control at the Northampton end for the time being we might as well go on to Granada as planned for that day, and work out things as we went along. There turned out to be no problem in catching a bus, and we were in Granada by the middle of the day. It was a matter of going north from Malaga, then east, by which time you are north of the Sierra Nevada, the snowy mountains, the highest range in Spain. Not that we really saw them very well.

Because of the public holiday the bus we caught from the bus station in Granada to get to the centre was diverted, and we had to find our way on foot from somewhere random, but that worked. When we got to the centre we found we were just in time to see a public procession with marchers in medieval costume, bands, and what appeared to be the town council (in modern dress and mostly looking slightly awkward). Granada is another big city - three quarters of a million people, and not at all what I had expected. It was the last bit of Spain that the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, conquered, and so has enormous resonance in Spanish history. They are buried in a magnificent chapel which abuts the Cathedral. The Alhambra, which is what everyone comes to see, is another Moorish fortress on a hill, this one on a spur above the city, and one of the wonders of the world.

Our hotel was an old house in the Moorish style in a narrow street on the opposite side of the valley from the spur the Alhambra stands on. It was just up from the river Darro. Further up the hill is the old Moorish quarter, and from the top the views of the palaces of the Alhambra are what all the pictures show. The hotel was a miniature version of the one we stayed in at Aleppo (was it last year?) - open courtyard, rooms looking down and across it, charming. Our room also had a window onto the narrow alleyway the hotel sits in.

We had time to walk up the hill behind us and have a drink in a restaurant garden looking across at the Alhambra, then explore a bit in the centre. There were stalls with hog roasts in a square near the cathedral, but we opted to go back to the hotel and start the process of trying to organise getting home.

Fortunately the hotel had organised internet access for the guests in a corner of a rather unused sitting room. The downside was that it was a very old computer which kept losing its internet connection and having to be rebooted. It also didn't have a printer. We had come to the conclusion that the way to get home now would be to fly from our next scheduled stop, Seville, which has an airport and flights by Ryanair to Stansted. This was successfully booked online, as was the cancellation of our hotel bookings in Cordoba and Madrid. For some reason it wasn't possible to cancel the Paris booking - I think it had been booked through an agency rather than direct. The Seville booking was modified from three nights to one.

Our meal that night was outdoors in a square a few hundred yards up the Darro from our hotel. I came rather short because, despite the earlier hot day, at night there was a cold wind up the valley and I was in my shirt sleeves.

Tuesday morning saw us out early climbing the hill to the Alhambra. Our tickets had been booked online before we set off from home. We had a wonderful day. The Alhambra is gardens, and Moorish palaces, and water and tiles. It was nothing like I had imagined - the hilltop is for a start quite extensive. The caliphs' palace is on the northern side of the hill so as to be sheltered a bit from the hot summer sun, and is all courtyards and shade and trees and formal ponds and different levels, quite higgledy piggledy. Truly a paradise on earth.

Around the middle of the afternoon we'd taken in as much of paradise as we were going to, so went back down the steep walk to the city. We found an internet cafe where we were able to log on and print out the plane tickets we'd bought online the day before, and that done we visited the Capilla Real, where Ferdinand and Isabel (and their daughter, Joanna the Mad and her husband) are buried. It is a treasury of art and decoration. You aren't allowed to take photos, but for once I feel the authorities are quite right to forbid them. And then the cathedral. I am a bit blank about that, but I think it was the place where we saw, in the apsidal ambulatory behind the high altar, a dozen or so glass cases each displaying an illuminated service book around three feet tall. They look sadly neglected. Was tempted to nick a couple, but how on earth does one smuggle, let alone carry, even one volume the size of these?

Supper was outdoors on a square in the Albaicin, the Moorish quarter. I was warmer tonight, having taken precautions, like a jumper. At the end of the meal there appeared three itinerant musicians, a guitarist, an oboist and a young woman singer. They serenaded us with blues songs for a while, then settled quietly on the steps across the square, strumming and singing quietly with a whole group of their friends who'd joined them. That was Tuesday.

On Wednesday, we took as planned our first and last Spanish train journey, from Granada to Seville, where we arrived in the early afternoon. Although is is some 60 or so miles from the sea, Seville was a great port in the middle ages and later. The Vikings even raided it up the River Guadalquivir, and later the golden fleets from the Americas unloaded here. We had just over twenty four hours to see what our originial plan of three days stay would not have been enough for. We did our best.

Our first stop after we arrived was at the station ticket office, where a young man whose command of English was fairly rudimentary went, despite that, out of his way to help us by refunding what he could of the money we had paid for train journeys we were not now going to be able to take. After this encouraging start we found our way to our hotel in the old Jewish quarter, quite near the cathedral. A walk past that towards the river brought us to the 13th century Toro del Oro, and then we walked up the riverside boulevard, a surprisingly broad stretch of land which we later discovered was until ten years or so ago the site of the railway station, now moved to the other side of town where we'd just arrived. As it was getting late in the afternoon we weren't sure what we should try to see, but then we realised that
we were going in the right direction for the Museo de Bellas Artes in a redundant monastery, where we spent the rest of the afternoon immersed in Murillos and Zubarans and other wonderful examples of Spanish art. There were one or two blank spaces on the walls, but we caught up with these paintings a few weeks later when we went to the Spanish religious art exhibition currently at the National Gallery.

I wish I could now remember where we ate that evening. All I do remember is passing a corner of a square filled with ranks of bikes for hire under the splendid Seville scheme. We saw all sorts and conditions, from office gents to students using them around the city centre.

Our last day, the Thursday, was a full one as the plane didn't leave till 9.15 in the evening. Our first visit was to the Hospital de los Venerables, a 17th century old people's home for priests. It has a chapel of some magnificence, and a centre dedicated to the work of Diego Velazquez, who like Murillo, was a native of Seville.

Then to the Real Alcazar, another royal palace dating back to the Moors, where the present Spanish Royal Family still have apartments. It is another riot of courtyards and tiles and gardens. That took the morning.

The cathedral took the afternoon. Built on the site of the 12th century great mosque of the Almodhad rulers, it has one of the biggest cathedral footprints in the world. It is all superlatives. I was moved by the courtyard, full of orange trees. It had been the place where ablutions were performed before entering the mosque. And there is the bell tower, the former minaret, which you can walk up by a ramp rather than the more usual steps in towers. Good views from the top.

It was 36 degrees Celsius that day in Seville. By contrast the temperature at 11pm at Stansted was somewhat colder. I prefer the Seville climate. We were met at the airport by our eldest - very civilized to be picked up like that.

Spain was a great success and we can't now wait to get back to take in the bits of the holiday that we missed. Maybe in the spring.

Poetic acknowledgment of book's arrival

2009-06-08T14:04:00.002+01:00

The following "I got your book" email arrived this weekend, and at the risk seeming to blow my own trumpet I have to share it with you. It really made me laugh when it arrived. The author and I can't decide quite what the form is, but set to the right tune it could easily fit into Gay's Beggar's Opera.

The book's arrived, so very fast

I really feel quite stunned.

So very little time has passed

Since mailing Mr Lund.

Condition Fine, all tight and clean,

No bruising, and not sunned.

In fact, exactly as has been

Described by Mr Lund.

The price was fair, the book was good,

No need for a refund.

From what I've seen that never should

Be asked of Mr Lund.

Reader! if buying books online

Is something you have shunned

Remember, you'll do really fine

By using Mr Lund

Anti-cyclist Notices

2009-05-27T12:30:00.002+01:00

I complained recently in my blog about Dublin about the ubiquitous No Cycle Parking notices.

But how about this one, fixed to railings in Portugal Place in the middle of Cambridge?

I suppose it proves that Cambridge has better educated prejudiced people.

Rochester and Diggers

2009-05-26T09:22:00.003+01:00

On Saturday I got taken, as a birthday treat, to Diggerland outside Rochester in Kent. It is a kind of theme park owned by a firm that hires out and sells JCB digging equipment. They have several such parks around England. My family had noted my complaint that I had never driven a tractor or any sort of big earthmoving plant. The plan is you pay your entrance fee and then go round the park taking turns on whatever takes your fancy.

You can dig some pretty big holes once you have got the idea of which lever to push in which direction. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it isn't rocket science, so a lot of fun can be had.

The aerial photo was taken from a cherry picker 50 feet up. Rochester Cathedral spire can just be seen slightly right of centre in the distance. In the foreground are many of the Diggerland rides.

Having had our picnic and exhausted the rides (as so often, there's almost as much fun watching other people mess up as in doing it oneself), we went into Rochester itself.

Imposing castle, right next to the cathedral.

The cathedral itself is smallish and Romanesque.

There's a big light crypt.

The quire has the remains of this fine Wheel of Fortune wall painting.

In a transept is the Baptismal Fresco, claimed to be the first fresco painted in an English cathedral for over 800 years. It was painted over an eighteen month period in 2003-4 by the Russian iconographer Sergei Fyodorov.

Where fresco painting differs from just slapping paint on a wall, is that it is done onto fresh wet plaster. The paint and plaster dry together, thus binding the colour into the material. Only a small portion of plaster can be prepared and painted at a time, since the former dries quite quickly and then can't be used.

When complete the font of the cathedral will be placed in the transept in front of the fresco.

The top, obviously, depicts the baptism of Christ; the bottom left the baptism of King Ethelbert by St Augustine of Canterbury some time round about 600 A.D. On the right newly baptised Saxon Christians emerge from the River Medway and are given communion by Bishop Justus.

The work is quite impressive - one of the best artistic additions to a cathedral in Britain in the last half century.

The baptismal transept from the High Street.

Rochester's High Street is long and pretty. Almost every other building appears to have a plaque on it telling of its appearance in some or other work of Charles Dickens. Some even appear more than once - Eastgate House, an imposing Tudor mansion, is Westgate House in one of his books and The Nun's House in another. All harmless fun and I expect it gets the tourists in.

Greetings from New Zealand

2009-05-21T08:25:00.004+01:00

Every time I send out a book I email the buyer with a little standard paragraph asking them to email me back when the package arrives. I've never bothered to add up what percentage of them do, but there are a fair few every week, mostly just a couple of words acknowledging receipt.

But today I had the best ever, a real work of art. The book, by the way, was called Boot and Shoe Design and Manufacture and was quite big, so it went sealed in a blue M-Bag, which is supposed to be delivered unopened to the customer who lives in New Zealand and who wishes to be known as Sylvia Carp.**

Here's what he wrote when he emailed to say it had arrived.

Arrived 07:40pm NZST Thurs 21st May 09

Proceedure: Sheepdog notes activity. Woof woof.Yap yap. Owner shouts. Shurup ya mangy heathen etc. Feeds goat, hens ... returns to bothy. Blue sack at doorstep. Suspicions: old Australian "Snake in a Sack" trick. Thinks: *wrong continent*. Pokes sack with shepherd crook (not cheap chestnut pommy type that bends out of shape in rain as used in nativity plays). Thinks: *Bloody big bag for one book*. Tentative fondle of bag in book region. Thinks:*Yes, book. Fear not*.

Notes: Blue bag stamped "Royal Mail Great Britain". Bow to royal bag and inspect.

Inspectors report: Bag, blue, huge sufficient carry ferret, nets (long and purse types), 410 shotgun foldup type, Woodbines, ploughman's lunch, fox terrier. Bag has small tears to recto and verso, tape repairs numerous, green customs label fits dog collar and keeps dog quiet for 1/2 hour. Dog O.B.E. other buggers' efforts. Contains book wrapped in cardboard. Shelf book, wall mount bag, feed dog cold porridge.

Expressions: Thanks mate

**Latest message from customer:

Yes, publish and be damned, pseudonym Sylvia Carp please, otherwise I get a lot of useless goat offers of the "I was going to take them to the slaughter house but ..." variety. I'm not a goat dealer but a secondhand bookseller retired trying to escape telephone offers of "readin books" etc. The situation is getting ridiculous. Yesterday I received a bootmaker's textbook from a theology specialist and ordered theologian Sara Maitland's Book of Silence from a rag and bone dealer in Yoevil.

Dublin

2009-04-20T21:04:00.013+01:00

We spent three nights in Dublin during the week after Easter. Our first time in Ireland.

London Stansted airport is only thirty-five minutes by train from Cambridge. Ryanair may have a reputation for being brusque with its passengers, but they have always treated us alright and we got to Dublin airport without incident. There's then a choice of three buses for the eight miles into the centre of the city. I chose the cheapest at Euros 2.20. It takes an hour, twice as long as the one that costs six times as much, but you see more of the suburbs.

Our room was above a pub in Pearce Street, opposite one side of Trinity College and a bit less than half a mile from the main entrance to that college. An easy walk then to lots of sights and buses to more of them. The room itself was quaint. The TV, perched high on a bracket, had a broken remote control so you had to stand on tiptoe to change the programme. Reception was awful anyway. Sky News was best for reception, but I'd rather gnaw my foot off at the ankle that watch that. The two BBC channels were awful and the Ulster regional news seemed even more parochial than our home Anglian news. We never did work out when the local RTE news was, so never watched any of their programmes. Another quaint feature of the room was a hot tap on the sink that was set at right angles to where it should have been so you couldn't actually hold your hands under it. And when you turned the cold tap on it came very gently for twenty or thirty seconds and then gushed at a million gallons a second. This was accompanied (and presumably caused by) the noise of a pump which sounded as if it could empty the Irish Sea in ten minutes flat. This pump must have worked all the other taps in all the other rooms because a feature of our stay was the roar of this pump ever few minutes, continuing as long as the water was run. Perhaps this pump also supplied the shower. The shower was a wonder. It supplied an abundance of really hot water. So unlike most hotel showers I have encountered round Europe.

We'd booked a concert in the Dublin Handel Festival for the first night, at the splendidly named National Concert Hall which also turned out to be walkable. The hall is mid-nineteenth century but inside it is kitted out in the modern manner, reminiscent of the city concert hall in Birmingham. The programme was full of slightly unusual pieces which were fun to hear, but we wondered that the hall was only half full. The reason became clear when the choir began to sing. They weren't that bad, but they aren't top-notch (which is a pity because the orchestra and the soloists were). Our Lady's Choral Society has a choir of about a hundred and twenty, and it just wasn't rehearsed enough. Perhaps it is too big. But alright, it wasn't perfect but the music was jolly so we enjoyed our evening listening to Handel's Anthem on the Peace (Aix-la-Chapelle, 1749), Laudate Pueri Dominum, Sing Unto God (Wedding Anthem for Frederick, Prince of Wales, 1736) and other works. The tenor soloist, Robin Tritschler, and the bass, Jeffrey Ledwidge, had particularly lovely voices.

Next morning we went out earlyish (in the rain) to try and beat the crowds to the Book of Kells at Trinity College. The college is everything a college should be - old bits, very new bits, quadrangles etc. More satisfying actually than most of the Cambridge colleges. The exhibition of which the Book of Kells is the centrepiece is an example of how these things ought to be done. Lots of space, large, well-lit information boards, good information without being over wordy. The Book itself isn't as large as one expects it to be, but I suppose that is hardly the fault of Trinity College.

After admiring the Book itself one goes upstairs to see the library. A fine place, big enough to play cricket in were it not for the shelves and ladders which go right up to a very high ceiling. By the time we got out, round 11ish the world and his wife had come to see the Book so we were glad we'd been betimes. We now went to the Tourist Office (so badly signposted that we only stumbled on it accidentally) and bought Euros 25 bus tickets which entitled us to unlimited trips on the tourist buses which circulate the centre endlessly, rides on any other Dublin Bus urban service, and a fast bus to the airport, lasting 72 hours. We then got on one of these buses and went as far as Christchurch Cathedral.

Christchurch is one of two medieval Anglican cathedrals in the city. It was built in the late 1100s by the first Norman conqueror of Dublin, Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke. It is a fairly impressive black-stoned pile on the top of a hill above the Liffey, but inside is dark and miserable. A video show in the crypt tried to put out the spin that it was an important place in the life of Dublin, visited by Presidents and the like, but methought they protested too much. The only item of any amusement is the chained and grilled iron reliquary which holds the heart of a previous archbishop, the unlikely named St Lawrence O'Toole. And that is only amusing since it hangs on the wall of this so protestant cathedral.

We then walked down the hill away from the river the couple of hundred yards to the other Anglican cathedral, St Patrick's, built not long after Christchurch by an archbishop who wanted to be free of the prevailing political powerbase which controlled the area Christchurch was built in. St Patrick's is a much happier place, housing the tomb of its famous Dean, Jonathan Swift, of Gulliver's Travels fame. Also the enormous tomb of the Boyle family, erected in 1632 by Richard Boyle, earl of Cork, which originally stood in the sanctuary before a very foolish Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford and viceroy had it moved to the back the next year. Boyle did not forgive or forget and eventually had the pleasure of orchestrating Wentworth's fall and execution.

Why the Anglicans should hold onto both these cathedrals and not give one to the Romans is a mystery, but I don't suppose you can expect much of a church which cannot even agree to have just one cathedral for their diocese. The Romans have to put up with a nineteenth century pro-cathedral (which we did not have time to visit).

Somewhere else we failed to visit (we didn't realise the first time we were there that it is in the grounds of St Patrick's) was Marsh's Library, the earliest public library in Ireland, built in 1701 by Archbishop Narcissus Marsh. (Narcissus! I ask you!)

But we did get on the tourist bus again to go to Kilmainham Jail built in 1796 and used against the enemies of Britain until the formation of the Irish Free State in the 1920s. Our tour was led by a fervent Irish nationalist who laid on quite thick the sufferings of the Irish under the British. The story more or less finishes with the execution of a dozen or so of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising by firing squad in the courtyard. Nearly a hundred were sentenced to death, but after the callous shooting of the badly injured James Connolly, kept alive by the doctors so he could be judicially executed strapped to a chair, the resulting world revulsion forced the British government to commute the sentences of the rest to life imprisonment. The irony is that though the majority of nationalists had not supported the Rising, the treatment of the surrendered participants by Britain brought many of them round to the rebels' side, and independence was achieved within six years. The visit to the jail was moving.

The afternoon was finished by riding the rest of the tourist bus circuit to Trinity College and having supper in our pub (I tried Guinness just in case it tasted any better in its home town, but it didn't) before getting on yet another bus to St Audoen's Roman Catholic Church almost next to Christchurch Cathedral where we heard another concert in the Dublin Handel Festival. St Audoen's, which is 19th century and now has a Polish congregation, should not be confused with the medieval St Audoen's Church (Anglican) next door. Religion in Dublin really is quite mad.

Handel and the Golden Age of the Triosonata was presented by the Irish Baroque Orchestra Chamber Soloists, consisting of two violins, cello, theorbo and harpiscord. Their playing was exquisite. We were somewhat distracted however by the fact that the theorbo player, Richard Sweeney, is so like our younger son that they could be brothers - right down to mannerisms and facial expressions. It was quite unnerving. But a really good concert.

Next day it really rained, so we did inside things. In the morning it was the National Museum, full of Celtic gold. Not a very big museum, but well laid out. In the afternoon we went round the corner to the National Gallery. Lots of good stuff including a famous Caravaggio, the Taking of Christ which was discovered in the 1993 in the dining room of a Jesuit house in the city, misattributed and fairly unloved. I don't like Caravaggio much and this one didn't move me, but there was lots more good stuff in the gallery for me to enjoy.

By the time we had finished it was later afternoon and still raining so we got on the tourist bus yet again, and did the full circuit of Dublin, in the rush hour. The driver did have the sense to use some back streets between the official stops so as to avoid some of the worst holdups. We passed the Guinness experience again, and didn't go in again. When we got to the stop for the Jameson's Whiskey Distillery the crowd who got on smelt so highly of the liquor that I am surprised the poor driver could still drive us safely. The whole bus reeked.

We hadn't managed to get tickets this night for the big Messiah at Christchurch, so we ate leisurely at a restaurant in the Temple Bar area where there are lots of eating places and touristy things. The dish we both had was boxty, a delicious potato pancake. Mine was filled with Irish stew, Rosalind's with bacon. The picture is of a pub near where we ate the boxty.

This building is by the entrance to the castle.

Friday morning was our last, and there was unfinished business in the form of places yet to be visited, including St Michan's (mummified bodies in the crypt) and the Marsh Library I mentioned before. However, we decided to go to the nearest place first, the Chester Beatty Library. I had heard the name Chester Beatty in connection with early New Testament texts, but that was my only knowledge of the man. The library, hidden behind Dublin Castle, which we did not bother visiting, was so good that we spent the whole morning there, so missing the other possibilities on our visiting list.

Sir Alfred Chester Beatty was an American mining engineer who made a lot of money and liked collecting things. This was a good combination since he had not only money but taste, and a willingness to consult the experts on what was best. There are two galleries to visit. The Arts of the Book has manuscripts and bindings from ancient Egypt, China, Japan, India, the Middle East and medieval Europe, all stunning in their beauty and rarity and displayed in well designed and well lit showcases.

The Sacred Traditions gallery has writings and pictures of the major religions, including the famous NT texts from the second and third centuries A.D. Chester Beatty was born in New York in 1875 but from 1911 lived in Europe, first in London and then in Dublin. His fame as a collector was so great that he was offered all sorts of manuscripts, including a hand-written letter by Jesus. He apparently declined that one.

That was the end of our trip apart from the return, which was much like any other return journey. Dublin was good, and we now want to see more of Ireland.

It looks like quite a few people cycle in Dublin. It was particularly nice to see the Garda on their bikes around the city. But everywhere you went there were notices like this. Depressing.

Bicycles (Again)

2009-03-19T20:18:00.004Z

But before I start on bicycles, a story I was told this week by a friend who teaches eight year olds. One of hers told her that the ancient Egyptians killed their enemies with sparrows. It would appear that the child had got spears and arrows mixed in her mind and this conflation was the result.

To bicycles. I have a new one. I like to have an excuse, and this time it is the fact that this year the Royal Mail put up their charge for collecting my mail daily to nearly £500 per annum. Until a few years ago they didn't charge anything to collect, then they sneaked in a £150 charge, and since then it has gone up and up.

The worm finally turned as far as I am concerned and so since the beginning of the year I have been taking my mail up to the nearest Post Office branch, about half a mile up the road. The problem turned out that mail in bags is not only heavy, but bulky too, and I was hard pressed to get it all safely up the road on my present Dutch bike.

So after a bit of research I went to London last week and collected a Yuba Mundo, a German bike designed with heavy loads and African roads in mind. It is 2.1m long and supposed to carry 200kg of cargo. Which is probably more than I could actually pedal by some way. The secret is that the back carrier isn't bolted on, but part of the frame of the bike. All I have to do is put all my mail bags together in another mailbag and bungee the lot onto the carrier. Works well, and will also be useful between here and the allotment. See the link to the maker's website for pictures and YouTube video.

I may be psychic, but I didn't see this one coming.

2009-01-21T20:23:00.002Z

I had a phone call this afternoon. The caller asked did I also do Tarot readings. Also in addition to what, I asked. Also in addition to being a clairvoyant she told me.

So I told her that not only do I not read tarot cards, but I am not clairvoyant either. She was disappointed.

Asked her where she'd got this information. She said that if you search yell.com for Psychics and Clairvoyants in Cambridge my name is one of those that comes up. So when she'd rung off I looked it up myself, and she was quite right. This does explain why this is about the fourth time since the beginning of December that I have had phone calls from women wanting their fortunes told.

I've complained about Yellow Pages before on this blog. For years they've been sending me postcards every year telling me that Lund Theological Books is being listed under Astronomy. My conjecture has been that they mean Astrology but don't know the difference. Now I'm a clairvoyant apparently.

If the rest of their classifications are this accurate I do have one prediction for Yell.com - they aren't going to stay in business all that long. Bunch of idiots I'm afraid.

A Dictionary of Euphemisms - Book Review

2009-01-07T15:31:00.003Z

Bob Holder: A Dictionary of Euphemisms: How Not To Say What You Mean. Oxford UP, 4th edition 2007.

It may seem ungrateful to critically review one of one's Christmas presents, and so it might be if the present were totally unsolicited, but the book was on my Amazon wants list so the giver is in no way to blame for choosing an inferior gift. And in fact it is not inferior, but quite a fun book, and useful too, even if I do have the reservations set out below.

It has had rather a chequered history, having first been published in 1987 by Bath University Press (where the author happened to be Pro-Chancellor, whatever that is, at the time) under the title of A Dictionary of British and American Euphemisms. Two years later Faber published a revised edition. Then in 1995 Oxford University Press published what is here called the second edition (wasn't the Faber revised edition the second?) under the present title. The third edition (no date given) was published under the title How Not To Say What You Mean and then this edition reverted to A Dictionary of Euphemisms. Talk about complicated!

A good working definition of euphemism is the one I found in an old edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature - "substitution of a less distasteful phrase or word for a more accurate but more offensive one". This is much the same as the author's own definition, taken from Fowler's Modern English Usage - "the use of a mild or vague or periphrastic expression as a substitute for blunt precision or disagreeable use", though the latter is a bit more verbose. The problem is, the author doesn't actually understand the difference between euphemism and pure synonyn nor between euphemism and slang.

Take for example his entry for the word potation as a euphemism for an alcoholic drink. It is not a euphemism at all. It is just a pompous sounding synonym. And the expression wet nurse. That is just the traditional way of describing a woman hired to breast feed an infant. I see no euphemism in its use.

Likewise his claim that the word ticker is a euphemism for the heart. It isn't a euphemism, just a slang word, as is the word reefer for a marijuana cigarette, and plastered and wasted for drunk. The whole book is riddled with such examples of simple synonyms, slang words and expressions, and colloquialisms with which the author has padded his text out.

But perhaps I am unjust. It may not be deliberate padding but merely a result of his being unable to grasp the subtle differences between these concepts. Perhaps he is, to use some of his own entries, "backward" or "a penny short of a pound". And now I'm being unkind.

To be fair the Dictionary of Euphemisms is a jolly good read of the dipping into sort, with lots to learn, lots to laugh at, and some things to disagree with. I particularly like the author's dry explanations of what phrases do not mean. For example of his entry for not all there (meaning stupid or confused) he says "It describes a mental state, not that of an amputee." I end with an entry which is typical of the author's gentle humour.

win home obsolete Scottish to die

Christian devout use of the death of another, although the speaker seldom seemed anxious to secure a similar victory for himself.

Montaigne, Sculpture, Music

2008-10-26T10:50:00.002Z

A busy day, yesterday. I started off with half an hour on the allotment, digging in manure and clearing. It had been wet overnight so just walking from the road up to the shed at the back of my site got my shoes soaked. Have resolved to keep the Wellington boots at home and change into them before setting off for the allotment.

Then back home to change and on my bike again to the University Library where there was to be a talk by Philip Ford, Professor of French at the university, on Montaigne's library. The UL has recently been given a gift of the collection of books collected by an industrialist, Gilbert de Botton. Montaigne had a library of some one thousand volumes, all of which were dispersed in the early sixteen hundreds at the death of his daughter. Now only 99 can be traced, most in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris or the Municipal Museum of Bordeaux. De Botton's collection, with nine of Montaigne's personal copies, is the third largest collection of them. He also owned many editions of the Essais, including copies which belonged to Napoleon, Ben Jonson, and Rousseau, and other related items. Professor Ford's lecture was on Montaigne's education, his attitude to books, the actual room the library was kept in, and the publication and reception of the Essais over the centuries. The lecture room holds fifty people and it was pleasing that it was almost full - deservedly so as we were well served by our lecturer.

My own interest in Montaigne stems from some years ago when my mother, visiting from South Africa, complained that she had lost her Penguin edition of Montaigne. So I bought her another. It turned out though that what she had owned was an earlier abridged Penguin edition, whereas what I had bought for her was the enormous and magisterial later Screech edition, and she didn't want this new one. So I read it myself, over many months, greatly enjoying it.

I came back to it, and started all over again, a month or two back, as a result of my reading of another book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a Lebanese writer. It is hard to try and summarise in a sentence but it is basically about how we fail to take into account the likelihood of the improbable happening, so leading to financial crashes because of blindly stupid bankers and economists. He even names Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae as likely to fail (and don't forget all this was written a couple of years ago before the present imbroglio). The book so fascinated me that as soon as I had finished it I read it again, from cover to cover, something I have never done before. Anyway, Taleb mentions Montaigne as one of his favourite authors and this inspired me to start reading him again. And so the interest in this talk. No time after the lecture to look at the exhibition of Montaigne's library, so that will have to happen another day.

It was then back home for a quick lunch and then set off for Ely for another lecture, stopping only briefly to donate some old books and bedlinen to our local Emmaus community. The lecture, sponsored by the Cambridgeshire Historic Churches Trust, was by Jeremy Musson, a BBC presenter apparently, though I hadn't ever seen him or heard of him. He was quite good on the subject of marble statuary in country churches, with many examples of places I don't know. His presentation was slightly marred by the fact that he isn't an awfully good photographer of church interiors, and his dark pictures were even further obscured by the too-dim projector he was using, so it often wasn't possible to see the details he was trying to point out. Anyway, we were quite edified, and after a quick foray into a hardware store we came home to Cambridge.

Then after supper it was on our bikes again to go into Trinity College in the town centre to hear a recital of operatic duets in the chapel by Clara and Nina Kanter, twins who are undergraduates at different colleges of the university. They both have ravishing voices, though I liked Clara's best as she is a contralto. Something of the quality of her voice brings to mind Kathleen Ferrier. I only ever heard her on recordings, though my parents heard her in Newcastle in the 1940s and gave me the taste for her.

She, Clara, and Nina (soprano - they aren't identical twins) gave us selections from Handel's Giulio Cesare, Rossini's Semiramide (no, I hadn't heard of it either) and Berlioz' Les Troyens, ending with a Brahms song, Die Schwestern, about two sisters so alike that they fall in love with the same man. It was forty minutes of sheer vocal heaven, heard, I am sorry to say, by a mere handful of audience.

And so home, where we had an argument about furniture to end the day. But that's another story.

An American Election

2008-10-20T12:36:00.002+01:00

I was sad when the Democrats did not choose Hilary Clinton as their candidate. She would make a good president, and Barack Obama doesn't have the experience yet to make as good a president as she would have done.

It was also my opinion that choosing Obama would open the election up to a McCain win. I still think that. I am never usually a Republican supporter. That party appears to be one that does not care about the poor, or gun control or any of the other evils which in the eyes of outsiders so marr the US's claim to be a great nation. The present president must be one of the most incompetent, and quite frankly wicked, America has ever had. But McCain seems more decent than the rest of the Republican pack, and if we have to have a president from that party I'd rather have him than any of his rivals. Having said that, his choice of a running mate and some of his recent pronouncements have rather put me off.

The most likely outcome of the election is still, I reckon, that McCain will win. The polls say otherwise at the moment, but when it comes to the day there will be many who will not vote for someone who is not white, though they may not admit it to the pollsters now.

And if by some miracle Obama does get in, what is the betting that some racist fanatic won't assassinate him in the first few months?

It would be good to think that he could get elected and despite his inexperience be a good president. Someone who could sort out the social ills of the States, and solve the Israel problem would be wonderful. But will he ever get there, let alone deliver?

France, September 2008

2008-09-17T20:04:00.035+01:00

Clicking on a photo will bring up an enlargement of that photo; clicking on a highlighted place name will link to all my photos of that place on Flickr

Thursday 28th August.

Our trip could have got off to a better start. I had removed our road atlas of Britain from the car on the premise that any fool, even I, could find his way from the Cambridge to the entrance to the Channel Tunnel near Folkestone. This proved not to be the case when we discovered around 7.30am that part of the M25 closed. The satnav is all very well if you know where to tell it to go, but my non-motorway geography is not to hot, so we had to wake Harry by phone and get him to look up where we should be heading for.

The result was that we just missed check-in for our shuttle and had to wait an hour and a half for a later one.

Once on the other side we made good time to Reims where we had a hotel booked. As the satnav turned us into the street that the hotel was supposed to be in it became obvious that it was pedestrianised and the only way to go was down into the underground carpark immediately in front of us. Having parked, we came up in the lift to discover the hotel immediately opposite us.

It wasn't long before we were in the cathedral. It is the ancient place of coronation for the kings of France, and has impressive carvings and glass. But what sticks in my mind are the ubiquitous lighted tri-lingual information boards that did much to help the visitor understand what he was seeing.

Friday 29 August

We didn't have far to go, as far as the crow flies, this day, so we ambled off the motorways towards Beaune. On the way we happened to notice in the guidebook the entry for a little place called Chatillon-sur-Seine. Its museum holds a bronze vase, some 150cm high (almost as tall as me). It appears to have been made around 500BC in Greek Sicily, and it was eventually part of the grave-goods in a Celtic cemetery, nearby at Vix. It is quite a sight, well worth the stop.

It was here that we had trouble finding lunch. Then I asked at a bar, who didn't do food, but suggested that we could buy something to eat at the boulangerie opposite and then come and sit at one of their tables and have a drink. Which was friendly. French people are very friendly.

Next stop was Fontenay. The satnav suggested, and I agreed, since it was in the Michelin road atlas, a little shortcut to save some time. This was in contrast to the road signs which suggested a long way round through a town. That nice little road turned out to be more or less a riverbed, through the top of the valley that Fontenay sits in. Beautiful, but bumpy. The driver coped well. She in fact drove the whole trip. I was not allowed to on the grounds that I don't know right from left. This is not fair, as I often get it correct, and anyway, what I really don't know right from is wrong, not left.

Fontenay is beautiful but austere, which is what one expects of Cistercian establishments. In the nineteenth century it was converted into some sort of factory, but a later family of owners have restored the tranquillity.

The great sight of Beaune is a fifteenth century hospital. The architecture is impressive, and so is the triptych by Roger van der Weyden. For obvious reasons it is kept in a darkened room (which is also full of people) so photography is a bit of a problem.

The whole town though, is delightful. Our hotel was just outside the city wall, and had conveniently had parking all down the side.

Saturday 30th August

The cathedral of Autun has sculptured capitals, beautiful ones, and was well worth the slight detour we made to spend an hour there.

Most of the day was spent getting south to St Remy sur Durolle where we'd hired a house. Near to Autun, in the wine country, the country is hilly and interesting. Further south we were in the valley of the Loire and it was flatter and less interesting, but the last part of the journey, from Roanne westwards was through wooded mountain slopes. We had no sooner arrived than we had to rush off 25 miles to Clermont-Ferrand to pick up the rest of our party from the train. We were late but in the end but only by a quarter of an hour.

Sunday 31st August

I took no photos this day. There was a market in the village. The usual things, but also a stall selling mattresses. Odd. We didn't do much except wander round the village a bit.

St Remy sur Durolle is a large fairly ugly village set on the side of a hill in a mixture of meadows and woods. Though the village is not pretty it has above it a craggy hill holding a Calvaire which looks south over the village to the wooded hills on the other side of the Durolle. The Puy de Dome, the extinct volcano behind Clermont-Ferrand, can be made out in the haze to the west. And at the bottom of the village there is a reservoir which serves as an inland beach and watersports area for the area. Its quite attractive with lots of facilities, though in the usual French way everything, bar the restaurants, was closed as we were into September.

Monday 1st September

It was a long journey south to get to Puy-en-Velay but I reckoned if I didn't get the family there the first day they would never go. The principle religious parts of the town are built on volcanic outcrops, which makes for some dramatic settings. The west end of the cathedral juts out from the top of a hill on which the east end sits. The main entrance is via steps under the nave. You come out into the nave just in front of the choir, facing the high altar.

We climbed up to another chapel high on its own spur of rock. Most dramatic, though surprisingly not a killing climb. There's also a large bronze statue of the Virgin on another hill, above the cathedral. It was voted that we had climbed enough, so we didn't make it there.

Tuesday 2nd September

Vichy was only a few miles north of us, through wooded mountains. The drive was worth it but Vichy is a waste of time. A very dull provincial city, and the vaunted spa architecture hardly exists. Well, I had told the family it would be a waste of a day, and it was even worse than I had predicted.

Except - there's mentioned in the book an ancient church, dedicated to St Blaise,. It turned out to be as boring as the rest of the town, but attached to it, sideways on, is a modern church with striking mosaics and wall paintings. This modern bit, Notre Dame des Malades, is called a chapel, but it is actually bigger than the old church by a long way.

Wednesday 3rd September

Next day was set aside for a visit to Vulcania, a sort of volcanic theme park set on the slopes of one of the volcanoes that overshadow Clermont-Ferrand. It is mostly geared to children, but some was very clever, especially a 3D film show that had us frightened out of our wits.

Even more fun was the Puy de Dome, the actual extinct volcano above Clermont. You can drive almost to the top, parking just under the remains of a Roman temple of Mercury. The views from the top are of mile after mile of green volcanic peaks.

Supper was in a lovely restaurant in Thiers, where we spent the next day.

Thursday 4th September

St-Remy-sur-Durolle is just a few miles from the town of Thiers , a famous place for knife making in the past, the factories having been powered by the waters of the Durolle. Now it is a fairly attractive place set on a steep site. We spent a pleasant day rambling the streets and the side of the river, marred only slightly by a rotten lunch in a local restaurant, and a puncture on the way there. There was also a rainstorm and a tourist trail which turned out to be barred once one had walked all the way down the valley. However, we enjoyed the day. At least it was interesting compared with spending a day in Vichy. In one of the churches there is a delightful modern statue of Joan of Arc.

Friday 5th September

As this was our last day all together we stayed around St Remy, having a four mile walk in the woods. In the afternoon we inspected the cemetery, which was just behind our house. The fashion in the area (we noticed it in Thiers too) is for many of the graves to have what look like open-fronted greenhouses over them. Sometimes the roof and back and sides are glazed, but often they are covered at least partly in galvanised sheeting. It all makes for an ambience quite different from what you get in England

Saturday 6th September

It was rainy in the morning so we got a bit wet in Clermont-Ferrand . But we did see the cathedral, built in black basalt, a volcanic stone. We used to have lots of black buildings in Britain, but now they tend to be cleaned up. You can't do that in Clermont-Ferrand - the rock is naturally black and that is that.

Then, having dropped our companions at the station for their return to Britain we drove to Bourges , further north. The cathedral has a wonderful sequence of stained glass, and a crypt that we didn't get into. It was a compulsory guided tour, which I hate even when they are in English, let alone foreign that I don't understand much. Incidentally I love the sign you often see in French streets, prohibiting singing by the public (Chantier interdit aux publique).

Bourges also has a great late medieval chateau built by some finance minister of a king, but we got there too late to get in.

Sunday 7th September

Now we drove to Chambord in the valley of the Loire. The scenery all the way was flat, wooded, and according to the map full of little lakes. A bit boring, and then you get to Chambord, which is just incredible. I saw quite a few Loire chateaux on a trip thirty years ago but for some reason I had never heard of Chambord, the greatest of them all. It was built by Henry VIII's contemporary, Francis I, as a hunting lodge, and is miles grander than anything of the same period in England. It is just so stunning, all built round a double staircase, but must be, and have been, frightfully cold in winter. You can walk on the roof amongst the turrets - the terrace was to watch the hunting originally. Nobody ever seriously lived in it for any length of time - it was just too draughty, so the 400 rooms, 80 staircases and 365 chimneys rather went to waste. After the Revolution the state hoped to sell the place, but the only bidder that came forward was the English Society of Friends who wanted it for an orphanage. Fortunately for the orphans war broke out again and the negotiations broke down.

Then after a picnic lunch on to Blois . It too has a chateau, which is quite grand, and fun (though largely a 19th century rebuild), but being in an urban restricted setting it isn't of the standard of Chambord. Sunday night was not a good time to get a meal in Blois, but we managed in the end to find a restaurant open. Not a good meal, but they were mixed all through the holiday – sometimes really good, sometimes rubbish.

Monday 8th September

It was a long drive to Lisieux , but I have a bit of a thing for St Therese, "The Little Flower". She seems at one level to be just a silly pious little girl, but there was a steeliness of purpose in her that belies all that and I admire her fortitude as she died of tuberculosis.

One can see the convent she lived and died in, and the family home in the town, but we just went to the Basilica built in her honour. It is one of the biggest churches built anywhere in the twentieth century and quite frankly we expected it to be totally kitsch.

It isn't. It is a lovely building, decorated with fantastic mosaics. Sadly, the shop had no postcards of them, and the only book for sale on the building had mostly pictures of the building operation rather than the finished church.

It wasn't too far then to Honfleur , a little port on the south of the mouth of the Seine, opposite Le Havre. Honfleur is pretty. Every other shop is an art gallery and it is full of the beautiful and rich. Our Renault Kangoo van looked somewhat our of place in the hotel carpark. There's a little sailing harbour, and a church made of wood by local shipwrights. Lots of nice restaurants. I'd go there again.

Tuesday 9th September

Naively assuming that if Honfleur was good then other villages along that coast would also be so, I planned our route to Amiens to go north along the coast road for a bit. This was a mistake, as the road actually ran quite far inland most of the way, and the villages were horrible. We did stop in Fecamp where there's the Eglise de la Trinite, a huge ancient abbey, quite out of character with the rest of the rather dowdy town. The museum-cum-distillery (Benedictine) was closed for lunch. We escaped as soon as we could.

In the afternoon it rained so hard at one stage that we had to stop the car for a bit. However, when we got to Amiens the weather was good again. We got to the cathedral with ten minutes to look at it, so when we'd been kicked out at 6.15 we explored the area down from it called the Lieu, a network of little streets and canals and a university. That was pleasant, and also a walk further along to the hortillanges, a former allotment system in the canals. We could only walk along the edge as it was closed. After supper in the Lieu (the best of my whole trip) we found we were in time for the daily light show at the west end of the cathedral. This was very clever. The west front is all carved statues and lives of the saints and a Doom. Analysis of the scraps of paint still extant in the corners of the carvings has enabled a detailed picture of what the front would have looked like in all its painted glory. Now, every evening five huge projectors on the square in front project coloured light onto the statues so that they look as if they are painted again. Faces, crowns, different items of clothing, are all in their own colours. It really looks remarkable. There was a fairly schmaltzy soundtrack in the background. After twenty minutes the light show started again, with the soundtrack in English this time, but we'd got the gist so didn't bother to sit on the cold steps any longer.

Wednesday 10th September

There was time next morning to get into the cathedral for a rather longer look than the night before. Amiens is on the Somme and the memorials reflect this. The big thing in the cathedral though is the groups of painted sculpted scenes. There's sequences of the life of St Firmin, the first bishop, and John the Baptist.

Then we set off for Boulogne for lunch. Miserable little place. Shan't bother again. At restaurants in the Auvergne a few days before, my requests for a well done steak had resulted in my being served a slightly seared but internally palpitating piece of bloodied meat (which was actually nice). In Boulogne I got a piece of well-grilled shoe leather. Memo for the future - remember that the further from England one gets in France the less they ruin the meat by overcooking.

More pottering north along the coast gave us a promenade walk in Wimereux, twinned with Herne Bay (but nicer than Herne Bay), and a view of the English coast from Cap Gris Nez. I never realised England was so small, even with binoculars.

Our last act of mad folly was to visit a hypermarket in Calais. We bought some wine and had a whine. We didn't like the experience. Next time we shall do our shopping well before the end of the trip in some more local supermarket.

Then, the Tunnel. Fortunately it didn't catch fire till the day after we went through it. I would always advise travelling before, rather than during, disasters.

A good fortnight. I hadn't done any French language revision, having rather despaired of ever being able to speak or understand the language, but lots came back to me and Nikki and George both know quite a bit and so were an encouragement. Nikki really enjoyed our puncture as she was able to chatter away to the man at the garage.

The only problem is that the Auvergne is now yet another part of France that we know a bit of and would like to see more of. Life is just too short.

Trip to Syria, May 2008

2008-06-01T21:31:00.045+01:00

Clicking on a photo will bring up an enlargement of that photo; clicking on a highlighted place name will link to all my photos of that place on Flickr

Sunday 18th May, Cambridge, 2.15am

After two hours sleep got up, dressed, and hardly had we done so when the taxi arrived, five minutes earlier than requested. Arrived at the bus rank on the edge of Parker's Piece with twenty five minutes to wait in the cold. However, after five minutes the previous bus arrived, a quarter of an hour late, so we got on that and set off for Heathrow via Stansted airport. Of course we got to Heathrow rather earlier than planned, but at least we were there, and we sat around for a couple of hours till seven when the check-in opened.

Eventually 10am came and the plane took off. It was some sort of Airbus, not very big, with a central aisle and three seats on either side. Airbuses are always more comfortable than Boeings in my experience, and I was given a window seat behind the wings so spent much of the trip indulging in one of my favourite pastimes, staring out of the windows of planes. Sadly, on this trip Syrian airways didn't show our flightpath on a screen, but I did manage to work out what we were passing when we crossed the northern tip of Cyprus. As we came in to land I was puzzled by what looked like small red gas cylinders on the roofs of all the houses. These turned out later to be water tanks, somewhat bigger that I had thought.

Damascus airport is smallish and as the party were on a group passport it didn't take too long to be let into the country, find our baggage, and change some money. Syria doesn't allow the export of its currency, so you have to get it once you arrive. The currency is Syrian Pounds, divided in theory into 100 piastres per pound, but as the pound sterling is worth roughly 90 SP, there aren't in practice any coins smaller than SP 5. As a quick rule of thumb we treated one SP as one penny and just divided every sum by 100 and called the answer pounds sterling.

We were driven by coach to a hotel somewhere in the suburbs of Damascus for a stay of three nights. It wasn't very exciting, and the shower was abyssmal, but then around 98% of all the showers in all the hotels in the world don't work properly as far as I have experienced.

Monday 19 May. Damascus - National Museum, Christian Quarter, Great Ummayad Mosque

Next morning it was into the coach which was to ferry us throughout the trip and off to the National Museum. The coach didn't inspire much confidence - there were two long cracks in the windscreen which almost met in the middle, and a pebble hole between them. Some of the shorter passengers didn't find the backs of the seats comfortable, but it was fine for me. Our driver had a fridge of cold bottled water behind him, which you could buy off him whenever we stopped. (An oddity of Syria turned out to be that the bottled water is all still. No such thing as fizzy water, which lots of us could have done with.) The coach could have done with a better public address system - it wasn't always easy to hear the guide - and a loo would have been useful, but it got us round hundred of miles with only some slight problems on the last day.

The guide, as we set off from the hotel, tried to address us. As the chattering passengers started to quieten one voice did not. A woman was haranguing her husband, loudly and bitterly, and she continued to do so, not realising for the best part of a minute that her's was the only voice. We all sat embarrassed till she tailed off. Actually we turned out to be with a really nice group of twenty travellers, married, single, old, middle-aged, gay, American - quite a cross-section of the world - and everyone got on very well.

The first part of the morning was spent in the museum, undergoing a crash course in the history of Syria while seeing exhibits from many periods and places. Sadly, museums don't let you take photos, which makes it harder to remember afterwards what you have seen, but it was a good intro to the country. Of course many exhibits are in museums in foreign countries, and some only survive as copies in Syria of things destroyed in wars in Europe.

The highlight for me was the reconstruction of the synagogue of Doura Europos, a trading city on the Euphrates, which runs through the eastern section of the country. Forget everything they ever told you about Jews not allowing depictions of the human form. My guess is that the room is about 40 feet wide, and 20 high and deep. It is absolutely covered in frescoes of Old Testament scenes in bright colours and a style which reminds me of Ethiopian Christian art. When the town was sacked by the Sassanids in the mid third century BC the synagogue was filled with sand somehow, and that preserved the vibrant colours until it was rediscovered in 1932. It is breathtaking.

Syria has a complicated history, being in that much fought-over buffer zone between Egypt in the south and various kingdoms in the north. The Hittites, Assyrians and Persians were there, as were the Canaanites. Alexander conquered it and after his death it was part of the Seleucid Empire. Then the Romans ruled, latterly from Byzantium, till Muslim armies invaded from Arabia in the 600sAD. Bits of the land were briefly crusader states, then Arab again, before the land became part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire from 1516 till the end of the First World War. There was a brief attempt at independence, but the Great Powers weren't having that, and gave France a mandate which lasted till 1946. During their time the French did a lot of good archaelogical work, but they also hived off that part of the country which is now the separate state called Lebanon to appease their particular favourites the Maronite Christians. It is no wonder that the Syrians tend to rather interfere in Lebanon, which is historically part of the same territory. The French also gave the northern Mediterranean coastal provinces away, to Turkey, to encourage that country not to side with the the Germans in any future war.

After the museum we were bussed round to the Eastern Gate of the old city, the Bab Sharqi at one end of the biblical Street called Straight. It should now be called The Street Which Is Being Repaved And If You Aren't Careful You Could Fall In A Very Deep Hole. From here it was a short walk through the narrow streets of the Christian quarter to the Chapel of St Ananias. For those who have forgotten their bible he was the chap who healed St Paul's blindness. The chapel is just a pair of vaulted underground rooms with no feelingof holiness at all. It is run by RC Franciscans, though none were in evidence. Sadly, it was the one church on our whole trip which did nothing for me. Could it be because all the rest were Greek Orthodox? I really don't usually have a problem with Roman Catholic in England or France, so maybe it was must me that day and it wasn't really as tawdry as I am making out.

Lunch in the courtyard of a house converted to a restaurant was followed by an interesting afternoon. We made our way through the streets of old Damascus to the Putting on Special Clothes Room. At least that's what our guide book says it is called, I didn't have to put the clothes on and so didn't go up to it. Incidentally, more about the dreadful guide book, for which I had paid good money to Amazon, at the end of the blog. The special clothes were a hooded long brown cloak for the ladies of the party so as to make them fit for going in a mosque, though we didn't go into the mosque yet, as there was Saladin's tomb(s) to visit. He has one wooden one and one marble, the latter provided by a crawling Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1898 to suck up to the Ottomans. The round (or octagonal perhaps) building they are housed in is about the size of the Arian Baptistry in Ravenna, all white and blue tiles inside, and quite moving.

Then the Great Ummayad mosque. I won't bore you with the historical details except to say that an enormous pagan temple of the 9th C BC to Hadad became first a Temple to Jupiter under the Romans and then the Cathedral of St John the Baptist under the Christians. When the Muslims took over they shared it with the Christians for a hundred years before they effectively bought them out and largely rebuilt it, using Byzantine mosaicists amongst 12000 workman.

I had never been in a mosque before, except perhaps little ex-mosques in Rhodes. The courtyard is vast, mosaiced, and impressive. The mosque itself is only marginally smaller, and completely carpeted. A third is roped off for women and children though they are allowed into the rest of the building too, it is just that men are kept out of the women's bit. People walked around, slept, picnicked. Down one side a preacher at a desk haranged a large group of young men in their twenties, sitting on the carpet around him. He was amplified all over the mosque and the courtyard, so you couldn't get away from him. Two thirds of the way up the building there is a green windowed freestanding edifice within it, containing it is said, the head of John the Baptist. There was a good feel to the whole mosque, even if carrying my shoes around was bit of a nuisance.

Then we went around the main souk and were shown behind the scenes at a shop where a Jaquard loom was being used to make silk damasque cloth. We could not resist the resultant colours and spent heavily! The souk here is wide and high. Not very romantic apart from the bullet holes in the roof left over from some revolution. But then we hadn't at this stage seen the side streets, or indeed Aleppo.

At supper in an old house (palace more like) in the old city we were treated to a tame Whirling Dervish. A bit of a shame that a religious rite should become a tourist attraction.

Tuesday 20 May. From Damascus to Bosra

We took the coach south towards the Jordanian border. With four million inhabitants Damascus stretches a long way. What was noticeable on the sides of the road in places were huge areas covered in small piles of rubble. It was if lorry loads of building detritus had been carefully dumped in a very regular grid plan. Perhaps they had. Also on the sides of the road we saw our first Bedouin encampments. Usually there were two, three, up to six, tents and somewhere in the vicinity a few people looking after a small herd of goats. There was sometimes a satellite dish, as tall as the tent, resting on the ground. So there must be electricity. Perhaps one of the tents was dedicated to holding a small generator. There were no dogs. It was days before I saw my first in Syria, and the whole time we can't have seen more than a couple of dozen. What a wonderful country it is (says one who fell off his bike last week attempting to avoid the attack of one of the brutes).

As we drove south, looking right towards the west we could see on the horizon the Golan Heights, part of Syria occupied by the Israelis since 1967. And we passed over another bit of history, the railway line that T E Lawrence used to blow up on his days off.

Our first call was a large village called Ezraa, around 80k south of Damascus. Driving through it the immediate impression one got was that not a single house had been completed. All had an upper flat storey with reinforced concrete pillars sticking out of the top. The reason is, says the guide, that Syrian families are very family orientated, and as each generation grows up and marries a new storey is added to the home.

The other thing that intrigued me, though I didn't find out the answer for some days, was that some of the houses sported a painting or stencil of what was obviously the Ka'aba in Mecca on their walls. The reason for this, I learnt, was that that is what you do to show you have done the pilgrimage to Mecca. It is a rather nice idea. We should take it up. Those of us who have been to Rome could paint a picture of St Peter's next to our front door and perhaps devote Methodists who have made the pilgrimage could have Wesley's Chapel on their wall.

At the far end of the village we came upon what looked like a small square black (all the stone round here is volcanic basalt) fort with a dome (and if you went round the back an apse sticking out). This was the church of St George, where he is buried. There's an inscription outside which dates its use as a church as going back to 515, and another which says it was converted from being a pagan temple. I reckon it was a little fort before that. It just has that look. Inside the church has been made into an octagonal by building arches across the corners. Altogether a pleasing building.

Then on another 50k to Bosra, even further south. Bosra has lots of claims to fame. There are extensive ruins. It was there in the Bronze Age, the Egyptians knew it, the Seleucids held it. The Nabateans moved there capital there from Petra at one stage. Under Trajan 5000 troops were stationed there, which is why the most important reason for Bosra's present fame exists, the theatre. A World Heritage Site, it is considered to be the most perfectly preserved Roman theatre in the world. And it is a stunner. It is so intact because the middle got filled with windblown sand, and the outside was encased in the walls of an Ayyubid fortress of the 13th century.

Its a gem, but you can also see the remains of a church were Muhammed, in his trading days and before writing the Quran got advice on religion from a Christian monk, the ruins of a cathedral which was the model for the first version of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (it fell down) and one of the oldest mosques in the world.

Until the French came along and persuaded everyone to leave most of the archaeological sites in Syria were inhabited. Traces of their homes still exist amongst the columns in Bosra, and the new town still slightly overlaps the old. We were taken to a cool courtyard garden for lunch. Not sophisticated and formal like one of the houses in Damascus, but sloping, irregular, and with various hovel-like rooms off the sides, including our first Syrian loos. Holes in the ground may be a good thing from a physiological point of view, but I was glad I was not a woman. I could not have coped with the squatting.

It was a late lunch as we'd spent a long time site-seeing, but when it came to setting off it transpired that our quarrelling couple of the day before had taken themselves off and got lost. The guide went in one direction and the coach in another, and eventually they were found. They said they were sorry, and to give them their due they didn't do it again.

Once back in Damascus we were taken up Mount Qassioun to see the view of the city. It was cool up there and is a favourite place for Damascenes when the summer heat comes. It was over 30 degrees every day we were there, and come June and July is so hot that the tour company don't even bother to run trips to Syria.

Mention of Mt Qassioun reminds me of the problems of travel and transliteration in Syria, and I suppose all Arab speaking lands. Transliterations into Roman script of place names can vary wildly on roadsigns even within a few yards of each other. What we call Homs is often written as Hims, and so it goes. And according to the guide book it is usually the case that though road signs in the countryside are usually in Arabic and Roman script, those in the towns are usually only in the former, which makes it hell for foreign drivers trying to find the right road out of town. With our propensity for getting lost (see blog of Sicily last year) I was glad we were on a guided tour and I didn't have to worry.

Wednesday 21 May - To Palmyra

Up very early to get to Palmyra (or Tadmur or Tadmor as they call it), 250k northeast of Damascus. Palmyra is an oasis in what I would call desert, but they call steppe (bedu in Arabic, hence Bedouin for dwellers on the steppe). We drove through this desolate but quite gentle country, undulating with the occasional range of hills to pass. Not sandy, but with a sort of grey brown stone surface. Sometimes sparse vegetation. There should have been more, and there should have been Bedouin with their flocks, but apparently the rains failed last winter so the nomads have had to keep their flocks nearer the coast where they wintered. We did pass a herd of a hundred or so camels some way before a crossroads which signed Palmyra straight on, and Baghdad right.

The ruins of Palmyra, next to the palms of the oasis, are quite spectacular, though somewhat diluted for the first few minutes by the small horde of souvenir sellers who descend on you when you get out of your coach. Having failed to sell you anything they get on their motorbikes, and while you walk up the column-lined street they wizz off through the ruins and ambush you two hundred yards further on, greeting you as if you had never seen them or their table cloths before. But you have, and they ride off again to meet you further on again. If you are lucky another coach arrives at the start and they buzz off to try it on the newcomers. They weren't really a problem, and people never were actually.

Here we saw for the first time something that isn't quite peculiar to this site as we saw more of the same at Apamea, but which I haven't seen in any other classical ruins. Many of the pillars down the side of the main street had little plinths protruding out into the street, some 3 or 4 metres above the ground. These were for the local worthies to place statues of themselves on.

It was really hot that day and there's little shelter on the site, but lunch was in an airconditioned 6th floor restaurant of one of several hotels that abutt the site. There's a Valley of the Tombs, which come in two sorts, underground and overground. The overground ones are towers of about four stories. Each floor has a central chamber with floor to ceiling niches either side. The deceased was placed on the shelf of a niche and the end sealed with a decorated plaque. Room for three hundred occupants.

The underground tombs (called hypogeums, which I suppose just means underground) had a grand staircase going down to a big door behind which was a chamber for the inevitable feasting, and again, niches for the bodies. The one we were taken to see had been a family tomb, but financial constraints had meant that the owners were forced to take paying guests.

The biggest part of the site is the Temple of Bel (or Baal). Quite impressive. Of course in later times it became a Byzantine church and then a mosque until the French moved everyone out in 1929.

I don't suppose we did real justice to Palmyra - apparently the best time to be there is early morning and in the evening as the sun goes down - but it is quite a place whenever you see it. Our final act was to be taken in the coach up to the Arab fortress which tends to be in the background of any photos of the place, and look down with almost an aeroplane's eye view on the site.

We then had a long 210k drive west towards to coast. I began to notice for the first time that there was a lot of rubbish - plastic bags and the like - at the sides of the road. At first I thought, well what about England? When you go along our main roads in the winter when the trees are bare you see that in every bush, and under every bush, there are millions of plastic bags. That is true, but in the end I realised that Syria is even worse than we are. There really is the most awful lot of rubbish just dumped or left to blow. A pity.

At first our drive from Palmyra was all desert, but as we went west towards Homs the vegetation changed in that there were now some trees and plantations of almonds. After Homs we began plunging down towards the coast, and the vegetation became lush and Mediterranean, and we were passing through a coastal mountain range, with Lebanon in sight on our left (south). The border comes within a few kilometres of the road here. Halfway down the road to the coast we turned north into the mountains through a series of almost interconnecting villages, all looking prosperous and 90%, the guide told us, Christian.

This is perhaps the moment to say something about our guide, Samir. He never told us his surname. Of Syrian Greek Orthodox background from Aleppo, he lives most of his year in New Zealand with his British wife. Highly educated, trained as an archaeologist, proficient in various languages, good humoured, patient, he was the best guide one could have had on such a trip. He took everything in his stride, from hotel rooms to questions about the Hittites. The only time I saw him at all moved to emotion was when I rather provocatively asked him whether the Arabic speaking nations would every consider doing what the Turks did and move from using Arabic script to Latin. (There would be advantages, like having vowel sounds indicated in the written language.). He positively roared his NO in response to my question. A bad guide could ruin a trip like this. Samir made it wonderful.

Our destination that evening was our hotel for the next two nights, a monstrosity on the top of a mountain with view of the mountains of Lebanon in the background and Krac des Chevalliers on its own hill four or five miles away.

Thursday 22 May - Saladin's Castle, Ugarit

Despite having spent the night within sight of Krac we didn't go there today. Instead we drove to the coast and made our way north 130k to Saladin's Castle, 40k inland from Syria's northern port, Lattakia. It was a Byzantine fortress, taken over in 1108 by a French family called De Saone, and kept till Saladin and his son took it in 1188. The Arabic name was always Sahyoun, but it was renamed Saladin's Castle in 1957, presumably in an attempt to make it more romantic or popular.

It was the biggest in area of all the Crusader castles. Built on a wooded spur, with ravines on either side, its only weak point was where the spur joined the mountain behind. To cancel this weakness an enormous gulley was cut, probably the the Byzantine builders of the castle, right across the spur, 28m deep and 15m wide. They just left a pinnacle at one end to support a drawbridge to the "mainland".

The road through the ravine is so narrow and hairpinned that we were transferred from our coach into minibuses, which drive into the gulley from where a ramp leads up to the castle. It is a good wild place, heavily wooded and not much reconstructed, full of wild flowers. But hot, very hot.

Then down to the coast just north of Lattakia before a short drive to Ugarit or Ras Shamra, famous for being the place where the first alphabet was discovered in tablets in the extensive palace archives. The site only came to light in 1928 and was excavated by the French, who took all the best finds to the Louvre. Now it is a few kilometres from the sea; in its heyday in the 2nd millenium BC it was an independent Canaanite coastal city state with trading links all over the Mediterranean. When the Sea Peoples (the Philistines) arrived c.1200BC it went into a decline.

There isn't a lot to see apart from jumbles of stone amongst the vegetation, but there are signs in the floors of the sophisticated plumbing systems. The oddest touch is the family tombs, which were placed under the floors of the houses. They are like a smaller version of the much later hypogeae of Palmyra, with a stone staircase leading down to a vaulted chamber around 8 foot long and 6 high. The bodies were presumably stacked on the floor or on some sort of wooden shelving as the only feature of any sort left is small niches, possibly for lamps, in each wall.

Ugarit seen, it was back in the coach for the long ride back south to our hotel near Krac. Unfortunately that night Rosalind was hit by a stomach bug and did not get much sleep.

Friday 23rd May. Monastery of St George, Krak des Chevaliers, Hama, Apamea, Aleppo

Quite a day this, with an early start. It was just three miles or so to the Monastery of St George which has been going for some time. Off one side of the courtyard is the New Church of 1857. At a lower level, but at the other side of the courtyard is a smaller 13th century church. Both these were remarkable in having two fonts, one old and one new, all properly plumbed in with hot and cold running water. English fonts could do with the same. Even lower is the 6th century church, but this is just a bare vaulted room, much like a bigger version of the Ugarit house tombs of the previous day.

Then on to Krak des Chevaliers. Looked at from one side this is an impressive solitary fortress standing on its rock. The approach is from the other side where a modern town goes right up to its walls. The inside is vast, built to accomodate 2000 knights. It rarely had that number, and when the Knights Hospitaller lost it to Sultan Baibars in 1271 after 160 years of Crusader occupation, there were only a few hundred knights in residence. Even then the castle wasn't taken by force but by trickery - the knights surrendered when they received a letter from allies in Tripoli saying no relieving force was going to be able to come. When they got to Tripoli under their safeconduct they discovered the letter was a forgery.

The place has a friendly feel. British castles (many modelled on this one) often have a grim and empty atmosphere. Maybe this sort of architecture is more fitted to the climate in the middle east than to our shores. Rooms that here were cool and pleasant in the hot Mediterranean midday are so often in Britain just dank and cold, even on summer days.

After Krac we went inland and then north, up to Hama, on the Damascus to Aleppo road and more or less halfway between them. The town is on the Orontes River, here running north looking for a gap in the coastal range of mountains. And herein lies its fame, its waterwheels. In the local museum we saw a sixth century mosaic of one just like these, though of course they wear out and what we saw were only three or four hundred years old. The river was too low (that drought again) for them to be going round, so we missed their famous groaning. Their purpose, I should explain, was to lift water out of the river into aqueducts which channelled it into the neighbouring fields. The seventeen or so that are left are superceded by electric pumps, just like the drainage windmills in East Anglia, but they remain as representative of the hundreds which once lined similar rivers all over the Middle East.

We didn't spend more than twenty minutes at the Hama waterwheels before going into the cool of the local museum. It is small but full of treasures, especially a huge fourth century Roman mosaic of a group of female musicians.

Then north again, but to the west of the Damascus - Aleppo main road, to visit Apamea. It is apparently Syria's largest classical site, but it doesn't have the appeal of Palmyra. What there is is a mile or so of the main street flanked by columns re-erected by Belgian archaeologists from the 1930s onwards.Basically, you walk down this street and that is it. It had a huge Roman theatre, now robbed out, and was famous for its fighting elephants, which it trained in a big way. Unfortunately for the elephants some kind of non-proliferation treaty in 162BC with the Romans led to their all being slaughtered. Most of the better finds were transferred to a Belgian museum which was totally destroyed in the Second World War.

Maybe our problem was that our visit there was on such a busy day in our itinerary and we didn't spend enough time to do the place justice.

Towards the end of the afternoon we got back on the road north and got to Aleppo in the early evening. The hotel was an old house (I'd have called it a small palace) in the old city to which you had to walk a few hundred yards as the coach couldn't drive there. We had a first floor room which looked out to the Citadel. In the foreground however was a wonderfully scruffy bit of ground which sported a large trailer full of plastic chairs, a cockerel, a crow, and two sheep. It was quite a big bit of land and we couldn't see all of it because of various trees, buildings etc, so the sheep weren't always visible. They appeared to be Siamese sheep in that they went round so close together that they seemed to be conjoined at the shoulder.

The hotel was lovely, and we dined on the roof with an even better view of the Citadel than from our room.

Saturday 24th May - Aleppo.

Next morning there was a tour of the said Citadel. It is built on a natural hill, so that far from being a man made tel the natural rock can be seen in a few places on the top. There is a mixture of Bronze Age, Byzantine, Ayyubid and Mameluk architecture, some still in the midst of excavation. Having got to the top by various gently ramped streets we came back down through private precipitate staircases in the Mameluke palace and found ourselves once again at the grand gateway.

We must have visited the Aleppo National Museum that morning as well, but I have absolutely no remembrance of it. What was a highlight was the visit to the souk, a much more exciting place than the one in Damascus, with narrow streets, interesting architecture, especially the khans, which appear to have been inns for merchants where their pack animals, themselves and their wares could rest safely overnight. There is a warren of streets, courtyards, lanes, in places vaguely themed, such as wedding dress sellers and butchers having their own areas. You can go in a few yards from skinned sheep's heads to jewellers' windows full of gold to carpet sellers. For once we wandered unguided, but safe from all but the occasional rushing pack donkey which, apart from the odd bicycle is the only way to move goods round the souk.

Sunday 25th May. St Simeon, Maaloula, Damascus

It was an early start on our last full day in Syria. We set off in a northwesterly direction from Aleppo to St Simeon. This turned out to be one of the highlights of the whole trip. The place is a lonely pine covered hillside around 25 miles from Aleppo and within sight of the mountains of Turkey. Here lived on an 18m (around 60 feet) pillar for the last thirty six years of his life Simeon Stylites, a hermit courted by the world, from royalty to beggars.

When he died in 459AD the emperor caused to be built a complex of four basilicas around the pillar. The eastern one was a cathedral, the others gathering places for the thousands of pilgrims who came for centuries to see the place and scrape a little off the holy pillar to be used as a holy potion and cure for every disease, mental or spiritual, known to man. Which is why all that remains of the pillar is a 2m high boulder.

And all around it is ruin. But what ruin. This must be one of the most beautiful and numinous religious sites in the world. I suppose it is something about cool pine-clad hillsides with ruins that rings a bell in us. I can remember the site of Epidaurus in Greece, the sanctuary of Asclepios, doing the same thing for me. But let the pictures speak for themselves.

It was midmorning when we set off south for Damascus, skirting Aleppo to the west. It was at this stage that it was announced that the hydraulic dampers of the coach were leaking and that we would need to stop somewhere for a top-up or repair or both - it wasn't clear. In fact we ended up stopping three times in obscure towns and villages. I am not sure the problem was ever cured, but in total not more than half an hour can have been added to the day's travelling, and though the driver may have had to take things a little easier we passengers were not affected at all.

However the delays meant that it was nearly 3pm when we arrived at our planned lunch stop in the village of Maaloula, 40 miles northwest of Damascus. The place is a scruffy little town nestled at the bottom of an escarpment. The lunch was nice, I have to say, and took place in a restaurant perched over a drop looking out over the plains, but the real purpose of our stop here was to visit the monastery of St Sergius and Bacchus at the top of the escarpment overlooking the town.

Now the claim to fame of Maaloula is that it is one of just three villages whose native language is still Aramaic, the native language of Jesus. The monastery has a fourth century church, with an altar which is supposed to predate Nicaea in that it is in a form which we are told was banned by that Council. The top of the altar is a flat marble rectangular slab, around 30 inches wide and four feet long. One of the shorter ends, nearest the congregation, is right angled, the other is rounded like an arch. The whole has a lip all the way round, so that the blood of the sacrifice did not run all over the place. In other words, this is a pagan altar in form, which is why the Council prohibited their use. How this one came to be retained is a mystery.

I would love to have been able to show pictures of this fascinating altar, and the wonderful church. However, the monastic authorities see fit to ban photography in their church. For me discovering that prohibition was the low point of our whole visit to Syria. I have complained before, in my remarks on some Romanian churches, of the stupidity of church authorities in doing this. You can understand banning photography in the past when film cameras always had to use flash inside buildings. That is annoying and distracting and the bright light can harm works of art. But these days digital cameras work as well or better without flash, so it would be easy and sensible to prohibit flash photography but allow people to photograph without flash.

It is also argued sometimes that photography should be banned so that visitors have to patronise the wares of the church shop. That would be all very well if what was sold was any good. The postcards the monastery of St Sergius and St Bacchus had of their historic altar were pathetic overexposed apologies of photographs which did it no justice. I, and I would have thought most tourists, would happily pay 50 Syrian Pounds (around £5 Sterling or US$10) for the privilege of taking photos. The visitors would be happy and the monastery would make some money. No-one would be inconvenienced. As I say, I was angry and disgusted at this petty ban.

Shaking the dust off our feet we left Maaloula and were taken to Damascus for a last night, this time in an hotel within walking distance of the old city.

So on our last day, the Monday, we had time to wander around the souk again before our flight home. This time there was a TV screen in the plane showing our flight path, but as it was cloudy all journey (and I was over a wing) it didn't help a lot. We arrived back at Heathrow to teeming rain - a typical English Bank Holiday.

At the end of it all I thoroughly recommend a Jules Verne Apostles to Crusaders holiday

The Guide Book.

I said I would have something to say about Syria, the Bradt Travel Guide by Diana Darke. We used the Bradt guide to Lille to great effect last year, so were tempted to buy this, especially since it was published more recently than either the Lonely Planet or the Rough Guide books.

In some ways this was a perfectly good tool for the job. It seems to cover all one would want covered. I particularly liked the Arabic proverbs which accompany each chapter heading - such advice as Trust in God, but tie your camel, and He who takes a donkey up a minaret must take it down again (though I am not sure what that one means), and It is better to endure the wind of a camel than the prayers of a fish.

Where the guide falls down is in the really bad editing. Neither the author nor the copy editor (if there was such a person) properly read the finished text, so that there are several places where various recensions of the text are just printed one after the other, like the P and Q sources in the book of Genesis, so that you get the same description twice in slightly different words. An example comes in the last paragraph on page 185, at the end of the section on Ugarit.

Look out near the two temples for a black basalt stone in a triangle shape with three holes, which was an anchor used for tying up ships. Ugarit's gigantic anchors were celebrated. They weighed up to half a tonne each, giving an idea of the size of the ocean-going vessels. There used to be lots of these stones, but most have now been stolen. The whole site has now been fenced to prevent theft which has become a bit of a problem. Look out for a black basalt stone in a triangle with three holes, which was an anchor used for tying up ships. There used to be lots of these stones, but most have now been stolen.

That repetition is annoying and unnecessary. There is another example three quarters of the way down page 229 where advice is given twice in two paragraphs about the necessity of arriving in Palmyra by sunset. There were others too, but I am not going to re-read the book just to find them.

Then there's the dodgy spelling. We are told on page 202 that there is a crenulated rampart walkway at Krak. The word is crenellated according to my Oxford dictionary. That's another one which is down to the editor.

However, the biggest howler in the book is the explanation given on page 263 of the meaning of the word Mesopotamia.

The name Mesopotamia is thought to be made up of a conglomerate of meanings in the Sumerian language : 'me' means female, 'so' means ancestors, 'po' means crops, 'ta' means fields and 'mia' means temples.

I don't think so. In Greek meso is between, and potamos is a river. Mesopotamia is the land between the rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Every schoolchild used to be taught that at an early age. I think we have to blame the author for that one, though a good editor would have picked it up.

NORTH YORKSHIRE

2008-04-24T17:21:00.016+01:00

We spent last weekend in North Yorkshire, part of the world that I have hitherto only passed through on the A1. My father loved the Dales and now I can see why.

We arrived in Ripon late on the Friday afternoon and had time to see the cathedral. It is one of those (relatively) small northern cathedrals, more picturesque from the outside than inside. Though there is a crypt reputed to have been built by St Wilfred around 680AD. (It is apparently very similar to the one in Hexham Abbey which is definitely his.) The crypt was for relics, and of course there was a church over it, but that and several successors have been destroyed, so that now it is under a rather larger edifice than Wilfred could have imagined. Like Hexham's it is accessed by stairs and a narrow passageway. The chambers at the centre are not as large as most suburban bathrooms. Alas the relics are long since gone, so it is rather bare.

The only other feature of the cathedral that took our attention inside was carving on the choir stalls and their misericords. There is a griffin which might have come right out of Tenniel's illustrations for Alice in Wonderland. People have wondered if Lewis Carroll was influenced by the carvings. He certainly knew the place - his father was a canon there - but since he didn't do the illustrations for the book himself this seems doubtful.

As it happened the Bed and Breakfast establishment that the Tourist Bureau found for us was in a building which in the nineteenth century was a boarding school attended by Charles Dodgson (to give Carroll his real name) when he was a boy. We were told that Henry Liddell, the father of Alice Liddell, the child to whom Carroll first told the story of Alice in Wonderland, had also (before Dodgson) been a pupil at the school.

Ripon has a tradition going back to medieval times that every evening at 9 o'clock the Watchman blows his horn in the town square. Unfortunately it took rather long to pay our bill in the restaurant so we arrived in the square in time to hear the last blast but not soon enough to actually see the man.

Next morning we went to the market again for the Continental Market, a jolly affair. We bought three tins of cassoulet, one of my favourite stews from Provence (pork sausage, duck and haricot beans) from a stallholder from Normandy, and some Sicilian cakes. Delicious.

Then it was off to Skelton-cum-Newby, a village three miles away, to see the church of Christ the Consoler. In around 1870 the son of local gentry was part of a party ambushed by brigands between Athens and Marathon. The kidnappers first demanded 50 000 pounds as ransom, which was collected, but then they decided that what they really wanted was an amnesty from the Greek government for their previous crimes. That wasn't forthcoming, so they killed the hostages, including young Frederick Vyner.

The family had this church designed and built by William Burges at enormous expense to remember him by. It is set in a field on the edge of the family estate, is very beautiful, and redundant in every sense of the word.

Then we visited Newby Hall itself. It has Adam interiors and Chippendale furniture and gardens going down to the River Ure along which there runs a miniature train line for the amusement of the children. The house and gardens were used in a recent production of Mansfield Park. Not sure if I saw that one. There's been a bit of a Jane Austen glut recently. The place was well worth visiting. Highlights - the gardens, the chamber pot museum and the views of the Ure Valley from the upstairs windows.

The day was bitter, but was clear. After lunch we drove north up the Ure Valley, stopping at random. Masham church proved to be quite ordinary apart from one window of St George. The dragon looks almost puppyish, like a Pekinese (or is it now called a Beijingese?) dog.

Then there came Middleham, a small village with the ruins of a large castle. Here Richard III grew up under the eye of Warwick the Kingmaker, who was big in these parts. Alas, since the Civil War of the 17th century when it was ordered to be slighted it has not been lived in since.

Wensley, the village after which the dale is named, has one of the most depressing churchyards we've ever seen. It is completely let over to rabbits, which brazenly cavorted in front of us. The ground is all humps and bumps like a warren, and several gravestones lie flat on their faces. Once can only hope the rabbits that undermined them got squashed underneath when they fell.

Inside the church is the most enormous curtained double family pew. Legend has it - and I don't believe a word of it - that a seventeenth century duke fell in love with an actress at Covent Garden and she agreed to marry him if he bought the box he had first seen her from. I'm surprised the rabbits haven't had it for a hutch.

We ended at Askrigg, high up Wensleydale, and quite near to Hawes, notorious for its nineteenth century inhabitant Branwell Bronte and his literary sisters. We didn't get as far as Hawes, but did walk the hills, ending up at the very scenic Mill Gill Force, pictured here.

My last two pictures are not of real places at all, but railway models, that we came across on our travels. Somehow they look more realistic than lots of real places.

Fincham Church, Norfolk

2008-03-01T20:40:00.002Z

We stumbled on the church in the village of Fincham in Norfolk a couple of days ago. There was nothing really to say it was anything different from a thousand other medieval churches in England, though the book did mention a crude Norman font. So, as we were going through anyway we stopped to have a look.

And the font really is a treasure, and in not that bad condition, apart from the fact that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the serpent in this first illustration have had to be replaced. They have done it sensitively so that there is no question as to what is original and what is replacement. Both Adam and Eve are clutching themselves - even groping themselves it might be said. The recent legal decision in Italy that it is an offence for men to touch their private parts against the evil eye would mean that Adam would be carted off to jail there.

You have to look twice at the carvings to make out what they are trying to depict. This next one, of the Nativity, had us puzzling at first as to the grouping on the right. At the bottom is the baby in the manger, and at the top the chrysamthemum shaped object must be the star. The two objects between, looking a bit like feet, made us think at first that the whole carving on this face of the font was of the Ascension. But then it dawned. The scene is the Nativity, and the two strange objects are the heads of the ox and ass, just sticking into the picture.

Joseph is on the right, holding a staff, and Mary stands stiffly in the middle.

These are the Wise Men, all holding up their gifts in their right hands.

The last side depicts the Baptism of Jesus, though the Jordan he is standing in looks more like this square font than the river it is supposed to be. The dove which is divebombing his head looks rather like an oven-ready chicken. The figure on the right is probably John the Baptist in his animal skin garments; the figure on the right could be anyone.

I have seen a suggestion on one website that the font came from another church in the parish when it was demolished in the seventeen hundreds, and that it is in fact Saxon, rather than Norman. That would figure. I have not seen such crude Norman carving before.

The church is well worth a visit just for the font, but we will stop next time we pass anyway, as we apparently missed a wonderful collection of gargoyles on the outside of the church.

Optimistic Seller

2008-02-17T19:57:00.002Z

Woman phones me up yesterday and says she has some books to sell. I ask the usual questions - why does she possess them, how old are they etc. She tells me that she was a schoolteacher preparing pupils for A-Levels and university entrance but is now long retired. She tells me what some of the books are.

I tell her that they are rather out of date.

"They are," she admits. "They are totally out of date. That's why I am selling them."

I try to explain that that is why I have no interest in buying them, but she can't take this in. She seems to think students will buy them. Eh?

I try and explain some more.

"So next time you are in my area" (on the other side of the country) "will you drop in and look at them?" she asks.

No, I am afraid I won't. The poor woman at last rings off obviously confused and somewhat disappointed. Oh dear.

It would be nice though if I did have the ability to buy in old and out of date books and miraculously transform them into saleable commodities. I'd make my fortune and please lots of owners of old rubbish. I'll let you know when I do.

Late again.

2008-02-15T09:03:00.004Z

So much for my resolution to write this up more often!

It is Friday and the website should have been updated on Wednesday, and it isn't. Got down to the garage on Weds morning to find that the internet connexion wasn't working. It goes down briefly quite often, but this time it wouldn't come back, so I phoned the broadband company. A nice young man in Cardiff patiently talked me through all the bootings and rebootings and pulling out of connections, and I patiently followed his instructions even though I had done those some actions myself several times before phoning.

After twenty minutes he said he would have to phone me back, which he did, and after another ten minutes he admitted that there did appear to be a fault in their line and said he would book me an engineer. My heart sank, as last time this meant a wait of ten days, during which time my only access to my emails and orders was through the local public library. But on looking he found an engineer who could come round that morning. And what is more, the chap arrived within a quarter of an hour.

More tests, which in the end he said only proved that I had some undefined fault in my own system. He went and got his laptop to show me that it would work fine. He got it. He plugged it in. He fiddled. He fiddled some more. It did not work. He went off to attach it to the junction box down the road. After ten minutes he came back and said there must be some as yet unreported fault covering a large area of Cambridge. Off he went.

I then had to find something to do with my day. Life without broadband is like a deadly dull limbo. You can't read emails so can't process orders. You can't check the news, listen to the radio, suss out the page of lies that the BBC calls a weather forecast. I opted for cataloguing books, but even that isn't easy if there is no access to Amazon, the Library of Congress and the British Library. Even if a book is already on my database, its current price has to be checked out on Amazon. And if it isn't on my database I need to download the details (via Readerware) from either Amazon or one of the other two sites I've mentioned above. So even the cataloguing option wasn't a complete operation.

When the postman came I had nothing for him, but at 3.50 the Virgin engineer phoned to say that he had been told that the system was up and running. He said he'd phone back in ten minutes to check if I had managed to get back online. Well I didn't, and he didn't, so after an hour and a half I phoned Virgin again. They checked, and told me that though the system was now largely up and running locally, there were still some problems with individual routing stations. Finally, yesterday morning at around 11am we went back online and I set to and processed the orders that had accumulated over the previous two days. And later this morning I will actually get to updating the website.

In the meantime Cambridge continues dull, breezy, and not all that warm. However, my internet connexion works, so all is bright in the world!

Late start to 2008

2008-01-07T11:15:00.000Z

We've just posted the catalogue update that should have been published the day after New Year. Things have been a little chaotic as a new computer arrived on Thursday morning and the last few days have been spent setting it up. As a computer incompetent I always put off buying new equipment as long as I can, but the time had come when I could delay no more. All the work has actually been by my younger son, Harry, a deft and patient solver of computer problems, who kindly put off his return to university by a day so as to be able to sort me out.

So apologies if you have been waiting for the latest books on our lists. To be honest, not much has been catalogued over the holidays, but we shall be back in production over the next week as I catalogue further boxes of the early church archaeologist and historian William Frend's books.

Last year, 2007, was a good one for us. I chronicled our visit to Sicily in an earlier blog. What I never did get round to recording was a weekend in Lille, Northern France, at the end of November, to see the Christmas Market and generally enjoy being in France for a few days. Now that the Eurostar trains start their journey at St Pancras, right next to King's Cross, the station where trains from Cambridge come into London, we are in a position to be whisked effortlessly across the Channel without a tedious cross-London trek.

My other highlights of the year include my turning sixty, the wedding of our eldest, George, and acquiring two new bicycles. The first is a Brompton, a folder which can be taken on buses and trains and in the back of the car and is proving very useful, and the other a big solid Dutch bike with a huge front basket and panniers, just right for shopping and carrying things back and forth from my allotment (another new venture this year). On the cycling front it is disappointing to have to report that the rotten weather and certain weekend family commitments have meant that I did not do as much recreational riding this year as in the previous few years.

If I have one New Year resolution, it is to write this blog more often. We shall see. Happy New Year to my readers and customers.

Support a Great New Walking and Cycling Scheme

2007-11-05T17:28:00.000Z

I'm not a lover of the idea of a national lottery, but we have one, and this December there is going to be a contest between four worthy causes on ITV. There will be a national vote, and the winning project will get 50 million pounds. The losers will get nothing.

All the projects which have reached the final are worthy. They are The Eden Project in Cornwall, the Black Country Urban Park, Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, and Connect2, a walking and cycling initiative. The special thing about Connect2 is that it is not limited to one small part of the country as the other three are - rather it involves 79 different schemes dotted around the whole land. As such I think it deserves our votes. I append a summary provided by its organisers.

Connect2 needs your vote!

Would you like to see fifty million pounds invested in walking and cycling across the UK?

Sustrans needs you to vote for Connect2, one of 4 projects competing on TV in the Big Lottery Fund's: The People's 50 Million Pound Contest this December. There will only be one winner - your help is vital to make sure it is Connect2.

If Connect wins, millions of people will be able to travel in a healthy and environmentally-friendly way because Connect2 will create new walking and cycling routes for the journeys we all make every day.

In 79 cities, towns and villages, new crossings and bridges will be created over busy roads, railway lines and rivers, linking into new networks of local paths to get you to the shops, school, work, the park or to see family and friends. Connect2 will take you directly and safely to where you want to go.

With Connect2 schemes planned in Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England there's likely to be one near you. If you'd like to see Connect2 happen please register today so we can get in touch to let you know when and how to vote. Visit www.sustransconnect2.org.uk or text the word Connect2 to 80010. Alternatively, call 0845 058 13 73.

Cymbeline - Shakespeare's Melodrama/Soap

2007-10-04T20:56:00.000+01:00

I suppose it is because I reckon myself something of a literary person that I insisted, when I saw it listed as one of the forthcoming plays at the Arts Theatre, on booking for Cymbeline. Degree in English and all that - can hardly miss out on a chance to see a Shakespeare play I have never read, let alone seen. Sense of duty and all that - must tick it off the list.

Reading up on the play beforehand did not lead me to believe we were in for anything but a dutiful evening. Samuel Johnson was very rude about it, and Bernard Shaw thought the last act was so awful that he wrote his own version of it. And the plot is so bad that it could be an opera.

As it was we had a thoroughly enjoyable evening. Cambridge University's Marlowe Society, a hundred years old this year, always produces a slick and well-acted play. This year they had Trevor Nunn, former director of the RSC and the National Theatre, as director. As a student he was in the 1960 Marlowe Society production of Cymbeline. And the talent was prodigious. Not a weak actor in any role.

Alright, the plot is ridiculous, but the language is lovely and you are carried along by good actors into the spirit of it. Cymbeline, the British king, is supposed to be a contemporary of Augustus Caesar, but those scenes which take place in Rome do so in a thorougly Renaissance atmosphere, so there is some dislocation there. I saw lots of inverted parallels with Hamlet in the plot and characters. The king, a widower, is married to a wicked queen who is plotting to have her son Cloten marry the king's daughter by his first marriage, Imogen, and so gain the throne for him. Unfortunately for him she has already married Posthumus an impoverished nobleman who has been exiled and gone to Rome for his presumption.

There is also a wicked Iago-like character (Iachimo) who pretends to have seduced Imogen and so puts her husband against her, a Roman invasion, and two lost brothers of Imogen who were stolen as toddlers by a disaffected nobleman. They, with their kidnapper and Posthumus (illegally come home to Britain) are the means by which the Romans are routed, and all live happily ever after eventually. I say eventually because it takes the whole of the last act that Shaw so disliked to sort everything out.

Of the actors, Lizzie Crarer as Imogen was both talented and beautiful. Patrick Warner, playing Cymbeline in a long wig was the spitting image of Peter Sellers, so one kept expecting Goon-type voices (which he was wise enough not to deploy). Rory Mullarkey played a thoroughly yobbish Cloten whose head one wanted to get on the stage and smack. Not that he didn't get is just deserts. By the end of the second act his head has been struck off and appears on stage bloodily carried around in a sort of string bag. A pity the printed programme was so rubbish. It didn't even have a list of the scenes, let alone an attempt at summarising the plot.

I would see this play again. No longer is Cymbeline on my list of Shakespeare plays to be seen once and then never again. I can't understand why someone like Verdi didn't base an opera on it. I see some lesser composers have done so, but I'm afraid they don't count.

Anyway, long live the Marlowe Society of Cambridge University!

Astronomy & Postal Strikes

2007-10-02T16:47:00.000+01:00

I have had my annual missive from Yellow Pages, wanting us to advertise with them. I did try years ago but it really wasn't worth it for our kind of business.

They are very persistent though. And very persistent in what they think our business is about. Note the Type of business - Astronomy. The mind boggles as to the connexion in their minds between theology and astronomy. Are they taking the idea of the rapture rather literally? Or do they really think theology is like astrology but are too polite to say so directly? I did write to them the first year they did this but of course they took no notice whatsoever.

We are due for two postal strikes, running into each other, this week and next, so I can't guarantee when orders will arrive.

Churches of Northeast Norfolk - Acle, Trunch and Paston

2007-09-19T15:56:00.001+01:00

Our latest foray to buy books took us to the area of the Norfolk Broads, a low inland area dotted with interconnected shallow lakes (the Broads) which are the result of medieval peat digging on a large scale. Now they are a place for boating holidays. One of Arthur Ransome's 1930s children's novels was set here.

We only went to Acle because I misread the Satnav but it turned out to be worth it anyway. The font is quite a gem, though parts have had to be repaired.

There are symbols of the Evangelists with bits of the original paint.

And Wild Men.

This Virgin and child has had its heads replaced.

Part of a painted wall inscription probably dating from the Black Death around 1349. The words in Latin bewail the tyranny of death. It was discovered in 1912.

The Rood Screen.

The war memorials are unlike any others I have ever seen. For both the First and Second World Wars they consist of a framed group of photos. It is far more personal than a marble tablet with just an inscribed list of names.

Paston has a special place in English history as it was from here that the Paston Letters, between members of the family were written, giving such an insight into ordinary life of the time. Now it consists of a miserable group of houses, a huge medieval barn, and a church, virtually surrounded by a gas pumping station which processes gas from the North Sea.

The church has a couple of Paston tombs.

However, its chief characteristic is the damp, well illustrated in the foreground of this picture. What appears to be a green floor covering on either side of the central carpet is in fact a red tile floor, covered in green algae. Obviously the site is low and damp, but the congregation don't help matters by having no visible ventilation in the place, so it is no wonder it never dries out.

Trunch has one of the most beautiful medieval font covers in the land.

There is also an original rood screen. This picture was taken from the altar end, facing west towards the font. The strange white object amongs the pews are display boards on which they were about to fix pictures for an art exhibition.

The front of the rood screen with the usual disfigured paintings of saints.