28 December 2005 - End of year retrospect

I write on a grey and darkening afternoon in the middle of an English winter. There is a light sprinkling of snow on the ground and on the bushes outside the window. Despite a little excercise in the past few days I have probably eaten rather more than I comfortably should have. But the cheer of having all our children here, with partners/boyfriends/girlfriends, has added to the festive feel of our meals, so we have tucked in.

We have had a good year, with short trips to Italy and Vienna and a holiday in Shropshire. Our eldest is engaged to be married, another is in the middle of training to be a teacher and the youngest has just started an economics degree at York University. Admittedly selling books over the internet has proved more and more difficult as competition grows, but we continue to make a living. More importantly I continue to enjoy doing it.

Buying books is another area in which things are changing. Twenty years ago when I was starting out the clergy retiring and selling their books were part of the postwar boom in ordinations, then coming to an end of their ministry. There are now fewer clergy of all denominations, and consequently fewer books to buy. So it is all more of a challenge, which suits me.

Peace to you, and happiness, in the New Year.

21 December 2005 - York - Cromer - London

Here we are on the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. I shall be glad when the days start lengthening again from tomorrow. Its only three minutes a day, but that's 20 minutes a week. Even by the end of January things won't feel quite as bleak and dark here.

I've been listening to the Pickwick Papers on BBC7. Sam Weller makes reference to his father's age of fifty eight and calls him an old man. Well I am that age, but it doesn't count as that old these days. At least that's what I think, my children might say differently. But in the 1830s or 40s when Dickens wrote Pickwick it was a good age. The thing is these days if we are well-off Westerners the little ailments which in 1840 could be incapacitating are now so trivial we often don't notice we have them. And we eat well, perhaps too well. 2005 is a good year to be alive for us lucky ones.

It has been a good week. We went to York to pick Harry up. He was in a concert by the university orchestra on Wednesday night. Enjoyable despite there being works by Britten and Pert, two of my least favourite composers. Very high standard. We spent a happy afternoon and morning shopping in the city centre. Having got home on Thursday evening we then travelled on Saturday to Cromer on the northeast corner of Norfolk to see old friends. Cold it was, and it snowed around Holt both going and coming.

I got in a 30km cycle ride on Sunday on a quite reasonable winter's day in bright sunshine. And on Monday I took the day off to go to London where we were invited to see a Bernard Shaw play, You Never Can Tell. I can't say I had ever heard of it, but it was, like all of Shaw's work both clever and witty. A wonderful evening.

In the morning we had done the Wallace Collection, which I last saw about thirty years ago, and after lunch we took in, as they say, the Persian exhibition and the Samuel Palmer exhibition at the British Museum. The former was alright, if a little dull. Didn't compare with last year's Turkish exhibition at the Royal Academy. The thing is that the Turks are much nearer to us in time so we still have their clothes and textiles and wooden articles to admire; all that is left of the Persians are carvings, reliefs, statues. But it was interesting in its way.

However, the Samuel Palmer exhibition was a complete waste of time for me. I thought I liked his art, but now I realise that the two or three pictures I like are the only good ones he ever did. He was an artist of one trick, that of putting a strange light from a (usually) unknown source in every one of his pictures. Silly isn't the word.

So here it comes, the end of the year. I've sent off all the last-minute orders first class so they arrive in time for Christmas, and now I guess there won't be much to do for a week. Suits me. Being a one-man-band I tend to work overlong hours most of the time.

Again, a happy Christmas to all of you.

17 November 2005 - A Trip to Italy

At the beginning of the month Rosalind and I flew to Italy for a week. Ros has for years wanted to see the mosaics of Ravenna so that was the main reason for the trip, but we also fitted in Padua and Venice. In these days of cheap flights one can get anywhere in Europe relatively cheaply. I think our flights out on Ryanair were a pound each, plus of course taxes, but even with those added the cost was minimal. Coming back from Venice the fares weren't quite as cheap, but still a bargain.

Our first day was Wednesday 2 November and we flew from London Stansted in the morning, arriving in Ancona around lunchtime. At the airport our first and almost only mishap of the trip occured when we waited for half an hour outside the airport for a bus, only to see it leave from two hundred yards away. So we got ourselves to the real bus stop and had to wait another hour. The train from Ancona trundled happily up the coast. Much of the first part of the journey was within sight of the Adriatic as the train never seemed to stray more than a couple of hundred yards from the beach and quite often seemed as if it actually wanted to paddle! We did not arrive in Ravenna till after dark, around 6.20pm. However, we had already booked a hotel by email before leaving England.

Ravenna turns out to be a sweet little city, well pedestrianised in the centre and full of cyclists. Like so many European cities Ravenna appears to be streets ahead of us in terms of respect for pedestrians and cyclists.

Ravenna was for a short time from 402 AD capital of what remained of the Western Roman Empire, and thus seat of the imperial court. The first rulers were orthodox, but the Arian Goth Theodoric took it in 476. Some seventy years later Byzantine forces took it for Constantinople. All these built beautiful churches with wonderful mosaics which just glow off the walls and ceilings of the buildings.

The first building we got into (the first church we tried was closed, despite what the guidebook said) was the Arian Baptistry . A tiny round building, its domed ceiling with a mosaic of the baptism of Christ in the River Jordan and surrounding apostles is lovely. Much better in fact than the Orthodox (or Neonian, named after a bishop called Neon) Baptistry next door to the cathedral. The cathedral itself is a fairly miserable affair of the 1700s replacing an older one which fell down in an earthquake. It lost all its mosaics of course, though its museum has a few heads , pieced together from the ruins.

All these buildings are of course dotted around the city like currants in the proverbial workhouse Christmas pudding, but as it is really small there wasn't much problem walking between them. The only one which is further out is San Apollinare in Classis, the seaport of old Ravenna, once headquarters of the Roman fleet. We had to miss seeing that church as getting to it would have involved a bus journey and we ran out of time.

Also in the morning we went round the San Vitale complex. The church has beautiful mosaics in the chancel, including a very homely and friendly looking Christ in glory in the apse. There are also mosaics of Justinian and his wife, the former prostitute Theodora in all their imperial glory on either side of the chancel. The mosaics here are made of glass tesserae, set at angles to catch the light and they glow off the walls.



High on the left of the chancel Justinian and his court are surrounded by birds, fish and animals.

In the grounds there is a little building called the tomb of Galla Placidia . Very low, and the only natural lighting is through thick coloured panels of alabaster, but then as a tomb it wasn't expected to be visited by large crowds of people.

After lunch we finally got in to S Apollinare which was now open, as opposed to being resolutely closed at 9.30 in the morning. Two whole sidewalls of the nave contain rows of saints, women down one side, men the other, culminating at the chancel end in the Virgin Mary and Christ, one on each side. The Virgin is addressed by the Wise Men in rather silly leggings and Phrygian caps (though I gather the caps are a later substitution for their original crowns).

Later we walked out of town a bit, past the remains of a medieval fortress, and across the railway line to the tomb of the Arian Emperor Theodoric. A strange and rather ugly building, it is a present having a park created around it. The domed roof is notable for being a single huge block of stone; inside the empty burial chamber feels as cold and weird as Napoleon's last resting place in Les Invalides.

Next morning, Friday, we entrained for Padua. Unfortunately we had read the timetable wrong, and had to wait an extra hour longer than we had expected. We learnt after that to ask the ticket sellers, who were both English speaking and helpful. The train fares were incredibly cheap. Journeys that would have cost tens of pounds in Britain were a tenth of the price in Italy. We didn't have quite the flexibility we might have had if we had hired a car, but then we didn't have to worry about overnight parking and were able to use city centre hotels near railways stations.

When we got to Padua the Information booth at the station easily found us an hotel and having dumped our stuff we rushed off to see the Giotto frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel. The web and the guidebooks had been full of dire warnings about booking in advance, so we had done that online, but in the event November was not as busy as it might have been. The woman just ahead of us as we picked up our tickets from the ticket office had not prebooked but she got a ticket. You have to be there an hour early to collect the tickets, so we spent it looking round the splendid museum and art gallery next door.

The Scrovegni Chapel is one of the marvels of the world. Before they let you in you have to sit in a glass room watching a video for fifteen minutes while the air you have brought in with you is scrubbed clean. Then you have fifteen minutes to look at the chapel itself. It is worth all the fuss - the frescoes are magnificent. Giotto painted the little church in 1303-05 for Enrico degli Scrovegni. Dante had consigned his father to hell in his Inferno for usury. This was the son's way of using some of the ill-gotten profits to buy him out of hell. It deserves to have done so. Like in so many of the best churches in Italy, you are not allowed to take photos so the ones I use here is borrowed off the website.

It was getting dark before we started exploring the rest of Padua and found another marvel, the Palazzo della Ragione (Palace of Reason) started in 1219, between two huge market places. The ground floor has little shops. The upper floor housed courts of justice and was originally partitioned off, but once the partitions went it was for centuries the biggest upper story room in the world. The height is 27m and the length 81m. Multiply by 3 to get a vague idea of how many feet that is. Even now it strikes one as quite vast. Giotto painted the walls with an astrological theme a hundred years later, 1315-17. However, those paintings were lost in a fire in 1420, so a new roof and paintings had to be provided. In one corner is a huge wooden horse, made for a tournament in 1466.

Another great sight in the town is the Baptistry of the Duomo, containing a wonderful cycle of frescoes by Giusto de' Menabuoi painted 1375-1378. His work may not be quite at the level of Giotto's, but it is close enough that some of the paintings in the apse of the Scrovegni chapel are by him, and the Baptistry is wonderful. But again no photography.

We could have stayed days more looking at this town with the second oldest university in Europe. We spent Saturday morning in the Basilica of St Antony of Padua. Enormous place, eight domes, umpteen cloisters, filled with pilgrims. Odd.

Venice is only half an hour away on the train from Padua. Again the station information bureau found us a good hotel five minutes walk away. St Mark's square was 40 minutes walk away, but there was lots to see in between if one did want to walk, and if one didn't there was the vaporetto down the Grand Canal. I had never realised how beautiful Venice is. There are not just the big canals you see in the pictures, but lots of little ones, so the streets continually go over steep bridges . No traffic, not even bicycles, just lots of people walking.

We certainly walked ourselves off our feet. There are supposed to be some 200 churches. We did not see anything like all of them, but we saw quite a lot. We only had Saturday afternoon, Sunday, and Monday. The artists are right, the light is different in Venice. I took nearly three hundred photos on the trip, most of them in Venice despite the fact that it rained heavily all day Sunday. We heard two concerts in San Vitale church near the Accademia bridge. We did a guided tour of three of the five synagogues in the Ghetto. Very moving. As was St Mark's Cathedral covered inside in wonderful mosaics. Unfortunately again no photography allowed. When at noon they switch on the lights in the church the mosaics shine forth most wonderfully. What a building.

We also managed a short trip across the Lagoon to Murano the island of the glassmakers, where there is a wonderful Virgin in mosaic in the apse of the cathedral. The cathedral also has a rather strange external gallery at the east end.

It was unfortunately in Venice that the only two sour notes of the trip were sounded. On St Mark's square by the edge of the water we sat down on what were obviously public seats and were moved off them by some gondoliers who claimed they were "private". And walking over a bridge one evening we saw and heard a gondola come through below us with a group of Japanese passengers. The Gondolier was singing to them, not opera arias or Italian folksongs, but Old Macdonald Had a Farm. The Japanese obviously didn't know any better, but we thought it was disrespectful on the part of the gondolier to his customers.

Ryanair does not fly from Venice Marco Polo just across the lagoon on the mainland from Venice, but from Treviso, twenty miles inland, so we took a train there on the Tuesday morning and spent a couple of hours looking at the sights, a vast church, San Nicolo, the crypt of the cathedral (someone bombed the rest of it flat during the war, so the upper bits are all quite recent and boring), and a museum with some rescued frescoes of the story of St Ursula and her 12000 virgin companions, all martyred in Cologne. Her story, which I was not aware of, is that she was a princess who agreed to marry the Prince of Britain if he would be baptised and go on pilgrimage to Rome. It was on that journey that she and the girls met their grizzly end. History does not relate (to me at any rate) what happened to the Prince. I expect he married someone else less prone to martyrdom. The only one of the frescoes which is in anything like decent condition is the one depicting the prince's baptism. There he stands, stark naked, with all the court, ladies and gents and clerics, around him as the bishop pours the water on him.

And that was the end of our trip. The bus ride out from Treviso was a little hairy. It wandered through suburbs for half an hour or so, then industrial areas. I had just noticed a road sign saying Aeroporto when the bus stopped and a couple who looked as if they were also flying got off. So I bundled us off too. The other couple disappeared across the road and we looked around and at each other. We just seemed to be surrounded by factories with no sign of an airport at all. "Well", I said, "I appear to have got us off too early, but I did see a sign, so it can't be that far, we had better just start walking in the direction the bus went". However, before we did I thought I had better check across the road, and lo and behold, hidden by another building, and looking more like a cafe than anything else, was the airport terminal!

We really liked Italy. The people, apart from those gondolieri, were always helpful and kind. The batty, where they existed, seem to confine themselves to running restaurants. But their food was good, so why not?

Italians speak good English, but their written translations tend to the absurd. Here's a picture of a fire hose we saw on railway stations and in hotels all over the region.

26 October 2005 - Church Crawl

At a church crawl last weekend a speaker drew our attention to a stained glass window depicting St John the Divine seeing his visions as he sat on the island of Pathos. Oh dear, what does one do with such innocent ignorance? On the same day we picked up a leaflet from a local historical society. On the page listing forthcoming meetings there were two apostrophes that should not have been there. I gave up any idea of joining that society.

The church with the "Pathos" window is actually quite fun. Some Victorian parson and his son paid someone to paint the chancel with biblical scenes. The style is awful, but the overall impression of the colours is impressive. This is the chancel of Hildersham Church. There are some similar chancel paintings on the walls of the Anglican Cathedral in Grahamstown, South Africa, just as unsatisfying with regard to colour and form. But they do make a point, that we could well do with repainting the walls of our medieval churches so that they look like they did in their heyday. The medievals painted and repainted and repainted, so that when restorers come along they sometimes take off several layers of painting before getting to the earliest. Where paintings exist already we could paint on cloth over the walls with gaps showing anything original. That way our efforts could be removed if a later generation did not like them, but in the meantime our churches would look as they are meant to instead of the grey stone or whitewashed drearinesses we have today.

19 October 2005

This week's home page has a picture of the Tudor gatehouse of Stokesay Castle in Shropshire. It is so picturesque, though actually it isn't much like the rest of the castle, which is a couple of hundred years older. The whole place is a delight.

There were predictions on the radio this morning of this being a very cold winter. It was the Meteorological Office making them, so maybe they should be taken seriously. They were talking of temperatures being as low as the winter of 1963, which is the year that everyone here talks about if they are old enough. I missed it myself, not through being too young, but because I was then still at school in the warmth of South Africa. The previous really bad winter was that of 1946-47, but I was born in the April and so missed the worst of that one too.

I don't think I would mind a really cold winter. There hasn't been one in all the thirty years I have lived here. As long as our central heating and hot water system don't break down, like they did on Christmas Day last year. That was incompetence on the part of the engineers who serviced it in September.

The shops here are already filling with Christmas decorations. The temperature only has to go down half a degree and the artificial Christmas trees come out. Isn't nature wonderful?

28 September 2005 - Shropshire

I don't seem to have managed to write anything for a month. This was largely due to our holiday in a cottage on the Shropshire - Welsh border for a week in the middle of the month. What with the preparations beforehand and picking up the pieces since I have not had much time. All the photos I took are still in the camera too.

We were in a converted barn in the middle of nowhere near Bishop's Castle, a sweet little town with two breweries and a very steep High Street. Then everything in that part of the Marches is steep. When we first had sight of our barn at the bottom of its valley we thought the track to it so steep that if we went down we would never be able to drive back up again. We were half a mile from Offa's Dyke and the long-distance footpath that runs along it from the south Wales coast to north Wales. We walked quite a lot.

It was a good holiday. Since then I have been out buying books in Essex (rubbish) and Kent (very good). The week after next I am going to be in Bury, Lancashire and Liverpool. If you are anywhere in that direction and have some books for me to buy I will try to fit you in.

17 August 2005 - Churches - Houghton on the Hill

We seem to have had another weekend of churches. Sunday afternoon was another of the Cambridgeshire Historic Churches Trust "church crawl" to three of the most northerly parishes in the county, right up on the Lincolnshire border beyond Wisbech. The first was Tydd St Giles, notable for having a tower some 30 or 40 feet. I reckon some medieval committee decided that too many church towers were falling down locally, taking out part of their churches, so they would play safe and have their tower well out of the way. Very pretty, but quite bizarre.

The next church was at a place called Newton in the Isle. An unprepossessing building from the outside, partly clad in cement render. Apparently, after the last war the parish were told by the diocesan authorities that they had to protect their stonework with a coat of render. So they put a layer on. Now of course it is all falling off and looks horrible. The current diocesan official came along, looked at it, and asked why on earth the parish had ever thought of putting a cement render on. You just can't win! Inside the church has a rood screen, a late Victorian construction, not very notable, except that it is the first rood I have ever been able to climb up to. Apparently early roods just had a wooden ladder as access. Not till the late 1400s did parishes start hewing rood stairs out of the fabric of the church. Well, the steps were so steep and twisty in this one that I think I would have felt safer climbing a ladder. I salute the medieval priests who climbed them to do whatever it was they did in them. This is the view from the top. The church also possesses a set of really awful 19th century stained glass. All the windows would win prizes for sheer badness.

Our last visit was Leverington . Its great glory is a Jesse window which I failed to take a decent photo of.

Then on Monday we had another day of churches. We had to go to Cromer on the north Norfolk coast, partly for business and partly for pleasure, and of course the latter included some churches. On the way we called into Swaffham church. Enormous, light, beautifully kept. Oliver Cromwell's grandmother is buried there and commemorated by a monument on the south wall. She appears to have been a lady. Her grandson was certainly no gentleman. There's a legend attached to Swaffham, of a man leaving there to seek his fortune in London, and being told his fortune was back at home. He's called the Swaffham Pedlar, and there is a lovely benchend with him depicted.

On our way home we visited Houghton on the Hill near Swaffham. This church, basically Anglo-Saxon, lost its village over the last few hundred years. Then in 1916, to add insult to injury, a passing German Zeppelin dropped some bombs which badly damaged the tower. By the 1930s the church was no longer being used and began falling down in earnest. Then in 1992 a woman on a ramble came across the ruins and told her husband. I won't go into the whole story because there are places on the web you can look it up. But the long and the short of it is that Bob Davey has spent the last fourteen years repairing and rebuilding. He's a retired water engineer, which has helped with some of the technicalities. He's discovered medieval painting with Anglo-Saxon ones underneath. We spent a fascinating two hours with him showing us what he has done and found and restored. The churchyard is a lovely garden, planted with shrubs. Here are some of my pictures. There are more on the other sites.

11 August 2005

A busy week this. There's a Cambridge Music Festival on at present. On Tuesday we went to the Fitzwilliam Museum to hear the Schola Gregoriana of Cambridge under Mary Berry singing various plainchant pieces connected with the death of Thomas Becket in 1170 and also music by Guillaume de Machaut. Last week in the same place we listened to a group called Medieva. Tonight we go to Trinity College chapel for another programme, I think on the music of Venice.

Last night we travelled 20 miles west to Great Paxton on the banks of the Great Ouse to hear a talk and be guided round the church by the chief county archaeologist, Quinton Carroll. He gave us a brilliant summary of the historical background of the eleventh century before the conquest by the Normans in 1066. His contention was that Edward the Confessor, whose mother Emma was Norman and who spent many years in exile on the Continent before assuming the English throne in the 1040s, had started the Normanization process well before the Conquest itself, importing Norman barons to settle the Welsh border, appointing a Norman archbishop of Canterbury, and encouraging Norman culture in England, including architecture.

Mr Carroll contends that Great Paxton, a royal manor on the Great North Road, was financed by Edward who used masons steeped in the Anglo Saxon architectural heritage but who also were able to bring in Norman methods. The building is therefore a transition between the two styles. I'm not competent to explain the intricacies of the argument, and unfortunately my photographic skills aren't really up to the task - compounded by the church being full of people. And though there are Anglo Saxon elements, like the great pillars and arches, there is also a lot of later work, like new aisles and a tower which was built on part of the Anglo Saxon nave.

But it was a fascinating evening, finished off with a nice meal in a pub in a village up the road. (Unfortunately the local pub was only serving haddock and chips, and I don't eat much fish, so we went elsewhere.)

We've also managed to fit in a family funeral this week, and to cap the disjointed nature of the week the washing machine went wrong last night and I am off to try and buy and fit a new drive belt this morning.

For the ten days up till Monday this week we had nice German young man staying with us as part of the annual Cambridge - Heidelberg - Montpellier orchestra event, which culminated in a concert in the Guildhall on Sunday evening. Last year we organised our summer holiday so as to be able to attend the concert in Montpellier, but I think this year will probably be our last as Harry is now 19 and off to university this autumn. So no visit to Heidelberg next summer I am afraid.

In the midst of all the chaos last weekend I didn't cycle at all, but the previous one I broke my record again with a circular tour round Cambridge of just over 60 miles. Actually it was meant to be 100k, but I misjudged it and it only came out at 97k, hence my quoting the distance in miles.

I am trying not to neglect the book business in the midst of all this. Luckily it is a quiet time of year, so the odd evening off doesn't matter - I can still get the orders off in good time.

20 July 2005

My cycle ride this weekend was the second longest I have every done, 71k, or 45 miles, from home in Cambridge to friends in Chelmsford. Not much in terms of the 200 or so kilometres Tour de France cyclists do every day for three weeks, but good by my standards. It was a hot day, and I was plagued by a front tyre that kept going down. In the end I did what I should have done at the start of the trouble, which was to replace the inner tube. I had tried mending the puncture but was obviously too impatient, so that didn't work. The route, through Saffron Walden, Thaxted and Great Dunmow, involves a bit of climbing, something recumbents aren't ideal for. In the end I was on the road five hours, with three and three quarters of that actually in the saddle. Needless to say the bike and I got a lift home later.

Surprisingly I was fit enough to walk after lunch that day, and we looked round the pretty village of Writtle west of Chelmsford. The church has a stained glass window commemorating the first commercial broadcast, by Marconi, from the village. Unfortunately I have mislaid my camera, so photos will have to wait. At least we didn't go into Chelmsford itself. Apart from a nice little Cathedral the town must be the ugliest and most unprepossessing in England. The glories of Essex are in such delightful villages as those I mentioned above which I cycled through in the morning. They are all hilly, one of the prerequisites for a pretty village or town.

Nothing exciting has happened on the book front this week unless you count the fact that my office chair back broke off earlier this morning while I was on the phone. I managed to avoid falling to the floor. Looks like there will have to be a trip to an office equipment store to get a new one.

7 July 2005 - Bartlow Hills

Ros and I spent an interesting evening yesterday at an archaeological site on the Cambridgeshire/Essex border which we hadn't managed to visit before. This was another of the Cambridgeshire County Council Archaeology Service's excellent walks. Bartlow Hills are a series of very steep burial mounds. Originally there may have been eight, in two rows about 50m apart. Philistine nineteenth century landowners flattened several of them so as to grow more crops, and a railway company destroyed another in 1864, but there are four left. Unfortunately the site is heavily ringed about with trees so you can't get far enough away to take a decent photo with more than one and a half in it at a time. The tallest is higher than any other Roman burial mound in Europe.

They are quite a sight, and must have been even higher and wider when they were built around 100 AD. The grave goods found when the nineteenth century "archaeologists" dug the mounds came from all over northern Europe. It would appear that they were native Britons who were quite Romanized.

Bartlow church looked interesting too. It has one of the only two round towers in Cambridgeshire. However, at 7pm yesterday it was locked so we couldn't get in to see the medieval wall paintings. What there was in the churchyard were a couple of interesting tombs. This one looks like a water cistern. The text has so worn away that you can't read who or what is in the tomb but it is still very pretty.

22 June 2005

After all my complaints about the weather summer has finally come. We had a scorching weekend, just the sort of weather I love. As it happened we spent most of Saturday and Sunday in different parts of the country, a lot of it in churchyards. An English churchyard is one of the nicest places to be on a hot summer's day. You get a bit of cool from the yews and other large trees which tend to flourish and the twitters of the birds and the drowsing insects lead to a calm which can verge on sleep.

My Saturday started with a 22km cycle ride through some Northamptonshire villages. Though only just after 9am it was extremely hot until I got to the cycle path which goes along the bed of an old railway which is protected on both sides by high hedges. The cool was only broken when the track crossed and recrossed a little river, a tributary of the Nene (pronounced Nen in Northants but Neen nearer the coast). In the afternoon we found ourselves in Flore at the church. Incidentally, all the tombs in the middle of the picture in front of the porch are Rosalind's family - ancestors and other relations. Quite a pretty church inside, and there was a flower festival on.

On Sunday we went quite the other way from Cambridge, east this time to Suffolk.Escaping from a village hall filled with some eighty people (and hot with it) I found myself in the churchyard of the village of Whitnesham talking to a fellow escapee, a jolly lady of 94. It had everything - the old trees of many varieties, the birds, the insects and lots of interesting graves. The day before I had found a gravestone at Flore depicting a mechanical digger - presumably the job of the inhabitant of the grave. In the Whitnesham graveyard I found one with the insignia of the Suffolk police and the deceased identity number. A nice touch in both cases. We could do more in the way of individualizing gravestones. Most are pretty boring.

Later that afternoon we found ourselves going past the gardens of Helmingham Hall , a beautiful Tudor brick house which we have never managed to find open before. This time they were. You can't get into the house itself. It belongs to Lord and Lady Tollemache, and has been in the family's hands since they married into it in the 1580s. The house is moated. Unusually the kitchen gardens next to it are also moated. It is suggested that that moat originally enclosed an Anglo-Saxon manor, and that some time in the medieval period the present house was built within a new moat next to it. Good gardens, and deer in the park. Suffolk really is a most beautiful county.

You will have seen my note about our being closed next week while the garage is fixed. I am going to have a busy few days between now and then clearing as much as I can out of the garage into the house. While the work goes on I am supposed to be painting a downstairs loo, but I hope to find some excuse... Perhaps the weather will be too hot.

23 May 2005 - Vienna

This time last week Rosalind and Harry and I were coming to the end of a delightful four days in Vienna. We flew from London Stansted our local airport 35 minutes away on the Thursday morning and were in Vienna in time for lunch. We'd hired an apartment just to the east of the city centre in Josefstadterstrasse near the Neues Rathaus. Very good and comfortable it was, and on the top floor, but the lift mostly worked. There were tram and underground stops within a couple of hundred metres and a supermarket just along the road. You could walk into the centre in 15 minutes. I'd be happy to give the email address of the owner to anyone contemplating a visit.

We crammed in almost all the famous sights in the four days - a walk in the Vienna Woods , Stephansdom (the cathedral), numerous other churches, a concert in the Musikverein, and visits to museums and galleries. The Brueghels in the Kunsthistorisches Museum were something I had always wanted to see, and this was made even better by there being an exhibition of Canaletto's work in adjoining rooms.

One of my favourite places was the Kaisergruft under the church of the Capuchins where the Habsburgs have been buried since 1633. Most of the 142 bodies lie in freestanding bronze coffins, ranging from the relatively simple to the fantastically Baroque. Quite a place!

I ate quite a lot of goulash in my four days - all very good. A slight disappointment for Harry and me was that we have both been learning German this last year, but we got very little chance to try it out in conversation. We were often addressed in English even before we had opened our mouths. It is all very well foreigners complaining the English won't learn their languages, but if they won't let us practice what is the point?

One slightly surprising thing about Vienna was that we found few places that accepted credit cards. Not even the big museums and galleries did, so we had to draw cash from bank machines more than we had expected.

Mid May was a good time to be in Vienna. It was a good deal warmer than England and what rain we had all came at night. For guide books I would recommend first the Rough Guide to Vienna (1-84353-411-8). Good meaty text and maps. The Eyewitness Guide to Vienna (0-7513-4829-5) is more colourful, with good little area maps and building plans. If I could only take one book it would be the Rough Guide, but ideally having both would be best.

4 May 2005 - Ely Cathedral

On Saturday and friend and I had the pleasure of going on a guided tour up the Octagon of Ely Cathedral. The Octagon is the structure just to the right of centre in this picture

The city of Ely (meaning island of eels) stands on a low ridge of land rising out of the Fens, now rich farmland but until the drainage schemes of a couple of hundred years ago a web of swamps and narrow waterways. In the late 600s a Saxon queen, Aethelthryth, whom we know by the Latin version of her name, Etheldreda, founded a double monastery for monks and nuns here. By the time of the Norman invasion in 1066 there was a large church and a thriving Benedictine community on the site. King Edward the Confessor had been educated in this rich and important monastery by the monks whose shrine to St Etheldreda was a centre of pilgrimage from far and near.

At the invasion by William the Conquerer (or the Bastard, as he was known till his lucky break at Hastings) the Isle of Ely became the last refuge of Saxon resistance, set as it was in the midst of its impassible fens. But by 1072 it had surrendered. William visited Etheldreda's shrine and put an abbot of his own choosing, from Normandy, in charge. He was followed in 1081 by prior of Winchester, a man who had already started to build a new cathedral at Winchester a couple of years before. This new abbot, Simeon, was already 87, but he started a building plan on the same lines as the one he had already been involved in. By the time he died at the age of 99 the building was well on, though it took some 60 years to finish the Norman cathedral.

Just a few years after the start of building, and long before it was finished, the abbey became a cathedral when the pope created a diocese of Ely out of the eastern part of the diocese of Lincoln. That was in 1109. The bishop of Lincoln can hardly have noticed the loss. Until the Reformation his diocese still stretched all the way down to Oxford, taking in what are now the dioceses of Peterborough and Oxford.

By the early thirteen hundreds the cathedral was a magnificent structure with a huge tower over the crossing, under which the monks had their quire. In 1321 the monks started to build a big Lady Chapel next to the cathedral. Digging the foundations seems to have destabilised the ground near it. The Norman bell tower began to crack. The monks abandoned their quire stalls in the following months, with some reason, because just after they had gone to bed on the night of 12 February 1322 the tower fell down.

It was replaced not by another heavy masonry tower, but by the octagonal lantern we went up last week. What you see from the outside is a masonry shell, and within it sits a wooden frame built from massive tree trunks. What you see here are the vertical trunks, recased in the nineteenth century in lead.

When you stand inside the church at the crossing and look up you see a curving vault with above it an octagon with painted angels and above them stained glass windows. The ceiling above that is painted to represent heaven, with Christ in the centre.

The painted angels are on hinged panels which open out as you can see in the corner of this photograph. The present angels are Victorian and from the look of the doors they are painted on it would appear that the originals must have been thrown out and new wood used. From inside you can see the great height of these doors. Also visible in this picture is part of the complex carpentry frame which carries the structure. The views into the transepts and nave are rather disquieting, it all being quite high above the floor.

Out on the roof all traces of the great wooden frame disappear under the leadwork. Looking west you see the roof of the nave, the western tower and in the distance St Mary's church. At this level you are on a curved roof which ends just above the painted angels and above which is the stained glass level. These windows are between the upright lead-encased timbers which are such a feature of the Octagon as it is viewed from a distance. Above the glass and the ceiling which can be seen from the nave there is a belfry, now bereft of bells. We did not get that far up. In fact the only access is by ladders inside the timbers, and I gather it is quite a tight fit.

One last picture from the roof of the Octagon, looking south. These are some of the former monastic buildings which are now partly inhabited by the clergy of the cathedral and partly by King's School.

24 March 2005 - Little Snoring Church

Yesterday we went to Norfolk and on the way to Cromer visited a delightful church at Little Snoring . It has a Saxon round tower quite separate from the present church, built a couple of centuries later. They are actually only a couple of metres apart so it is hard to get a picture which shows the gap. Inside there are interesting painted boards listing the victories of the air fighter squadron which was stationed at the nearby airbase in 1943-44, and also a pair of boards listing the medals and Mentions in Despatches awarded to personnel at the airfield during those years. These boards are on the west wall of the church, above an unusual set of broad steps which run the whole length of the building. Perhaps they were put there for the parish band in the days when that was how the music was provided. The chancel is wider than the nave, which is unusual. It is bare and whitewashed and with all the light coming in the clear windows felt like some French country chapel.

The porch has a curious arch which must have been a round arch in the previous church on the site, but was reused and made into a more fashionable pointed arch when the present church was built. If it did come from the Saxon church, which is dated in the early ten hundreds it is curious that it should be what we know as a "Norman" arch before the Normans arrived in England. But who knows, it may have come from some later building and not from the Saxon church at all.

The font is Norman and as you can see, rather handsome. The roof is of black and green pantiles, and to my mind looks ugly. The pitch is such that one can imagine there having originally been a thatched roof.

16 March 2005

I notice that I didn't say anything about our trip to Cornwall at the end of last month. Well, it was successful both from the buying aspect and as a short break. The cathedral in Truro is more impressive than one might imagine for something only a hundred years old and is compared by many of the guide books with the cathedrals of northern France, which seems a fair comparison.

The city also has this little lane near the cathedral. It wasn't that narrow, but if we all continue getting as obese as they tell us we are then perhaps in time it will start being a problem for us. We spent a night in Loswithiel, a sweet little town, once the capital of Cornwall.

All over the county there were lots of Cornish flags to be seen, and in one place a local pointed across a river and said "That's England across there". The river being the Tamar, the boundary between Cornwall and Devon.

We saw last night English Touring Opera's Cosi Fan Tutte. Absurd plot, but heavenly music sung by a very strong cast. We go tonight to their production of Mary Stuart by Donizetti, a work I haven't seen before. We are hoping the theatre will be fuller tonight. It seems a shame for wonderful music to fall on empty seats.

9 March 2005

Just finished reading one of my Christmas presents, Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale. It is a journey back in time through all our ancestors to the primordial soup from which we must assume life came. Dawkins writes in a lively manner, keeping up the interest through the whole chain of life. Admittedly there are some bits of complicated genetics which I only understood a bit, but that didn't detract from the overall enjoyment of the book. It has over 500 pages, so it is not one to read in the bath.

One of the interesting facts I learnt is that you can be one of a particular person's descendents and yet still have none of their genes. It works like this. We inherit half our genes from each parent. But our parents' genes are inherited half and half from their parents, and so on back through the generations. Say 5% of my father's genes are inherited from his great grandfather. My father passes half his genes on to me, at random from all his genes. The fifty percent of his genes that he passes on to me don't have to contain any of those genes from his great grandfather. And so I can be descended from my great great grandfather and have none of his genes. I will of course have genes from that generation of ancestors, just not his. I don't think I have explained that as well as Dawkins does. If it doesn't make sense you will have to read him.

2 February 2005

Took a day out last week and went to London. A quick three quarters of an hour at the British Library which is so conveniently close to Kings Cross station was not really enough to do more than whet our appetite for more of the marvellous manuscripts they hold, but time pressed. We then attempted to look at Thomas Heatherwick's wall of glass beads at the Wellcome Trust building almost opposite the BL, but it is only open to the public on Friday mornings apparently, so we just got a glimpse. Then I had lunch with a friend while Rosalind went to her meeting.

After lunch I was at a loose end for a couple of hours and so found the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Ennismore Gardens near the Albert Hall, but it was closed. Then I tried to get into a synagogue with a museum also in the area, but that too was closed despite Thursday being one of the days it is advertised as being open. Admittedly it was Holocaust Memorial Day, so they may have had other things to do, but there was no notice on the door to inform visitors what was happening. A bit of a frustrating afternoon thus far, especially as I had given the map to Rosalind and so got lost quite a bit in that part of London. In the end I got a bus to Piccadilly where we had arranged to meet to see the Turks exhibition which has just started at the Royal Academy.

My impression before I went, having read, or perhaps misread, the reviews, was that the exhibition dealt with the age of Turkey that we most know about, from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to around the battle of Lepanto (1571) and after. In fact it encompasses the art of anyone who ever ruled by the Turkic tribes from around the 600s when they were somewhere on the borders of China. A lot of that early art was Buddhist and quite Chinese, and from now on I don't think I shall ever look at Turkish art without seeing the Chinese art that lies behind it.

The most amazing of the artifacts were the kaftans which various sultans wore in the seventeenth century. These seem to be as fresh and unworn as if they had been tailored yesterday. One has visions of great wardrobes of clothes stored for centuries in the palaces and harems of Istanbul until discovered after the revolution of the early twentieth century. Anyway, an enjoyable and informative exhibition.

Our evening was spent at the Playhouse theatre in Northumberland Avenue, seeing a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company of a translation of a seventeenth century Spanish Mexican work by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. She was an interesting lady in her own right, and this comedy is a delight. House of Desires provided a most enjoyable evening's entertainment, with a strong cast and good production, which is a good thing because there was nothing else that tempted me on the stage in London last week.

26 January 2005

The view of the garage I keep my books in is no more. The picture on our home page this week shows me sitting one summer's day in 2001 in front of a riot of wisteria and ceanothus. But now both those plants are gone. I reported last summer, I think, that when we got home from our holiday in France a small crack near the window had widened to an inch. Well since then our insurance company has had a firm of structural engineers monitoring the problem. They have been coming every six weeks to measure the gap, and I am pleased to say it has closed by 5mm. Not much, but at least it is going in the right direction.

However, one of the things they told me to do was to get rid of the shrubs, especially the wisteria. Apparently it is notorious for drying soil out and shrinking it, so causing walls to crack. The whole idea of the shrubs was to keep the place cool in summer. That wall faces west and the garage used to become an oven on hot days until I grew the leafy shade. Now all I can think to do is to paint the wall white and reflect some of the heat.

Come April builders are supposed to be coming in to stabilize the wall, and fill the crack too, I hope.

19 January 2005

Boughton parish church, Northamptonshire

When I came to live in England it was to Notting Hill Gate in London that I first stayed, courtesy of a friend, in a community called Bickersteth House, which housed a mixture of youngish people, some students, some not. It was convenient for getting into the centre of town by tube and we were close to lots of quiet pubs and to Holland Park, a vast and gloomy shrubbery.

Like many visitors from the colonies I might have stayed years in London and never seen anywhere else, but having acquired a girlfriend I was soon introduced to other parts, most notably a small village near Northampton, and spent many weekends there. And eighteen months later we were married in Boughton Church. We still visit and thirty years on the village hasn't changed all that much. A bit of infilling of vacant plots, a bit of tarting up of old cottages, and that's about it.

The church, as shown in the pictures, isn't all that interesting, just a rectangular box with a tower, but that is because is was only built as a chapel of ease. The real church is, or was, half a mile out of the present village, built in a little valley over a holy spring. Two hundred and fifty years ago it was a substantial building with a spire, but it has all fallen down now. There's one wall about thirty feet high with a window arch and a few other walls still stand a few feet high, but that is it. People stopped using it, the roof gave way, the stones were robbed, the rest fell down.

Once a year there's a service for St John's Day (21 June) and people sit in the steep churchyard looking down on the choir and preacher in the remains of the nave. This is a story which has happened all over England over the centuries. Sometimes the church survives and is still used, despite standing by itself out in the fields a long way from the village, but ruined churches are also common.

A very good website called Norfolk Churches and its sister site on Suffolk Churches are the best things I know in this line. If you know any others for other counties I should be glad to hear of them.

13 January 2005

The picture on our home page this week is of a work of art, or architecture, by Thomas Heatherwick, a latterday Leonardo, whose sculpture B of the Bang was unveiled yesterday in Manchester. The B of the Bang is the largest sculpture in Britain and is meant to represent the statement by Linford Christie, the runner, that he tries to start each race at "the B of the Bang" of the starting pistol. I predict though, that the official name will be replaced in popular thought by something less formal. Just as the Angel of the North in Gateshead is popularly known as the Gateshead Flasher I suspect that Thomas Heatherwick's work will be known as the Manchester Porcupine . Anway, it is a bit of fun.

To get back to the home page picture, that is of Thomas Heatherwick's Sitooterie (the word is an Anglicized or Scotticized version of the concept we usually use a Latin name for, a Gazebo. You "sit oot" in it to look at the view.) He built this small summer house on a farm in Essex a few years ago. Another recently work is a wall of glass beads on the facade of the Wellcome Trust building in London.

Thomas Heatherwick is an artist - or designer or architect, take your choice - who adds to the gaiety of the nation.

On the subject of fun, there has been an awful lot of fuss here because the BBC broadcast Jerry Springer - the Opera last weekend. Certain "Christian" groups have protested strongly at this, to the extent that they even published on the web the addresses of some BBC executives, presumably with the intention that oponents of the broadcast should besiege their homes or do them violence. This gives an indication of the sort of "Christians" these people are. They are in same league as those who in the name of "the right to life" go out and murder abortionists.

We watched the Jerry Springer thing. Just turned it on to see a few minutes to see if it was as bad as they said, and ended up watching the whole thing. It was fun. The music was good, it was witty, it made some good points. Sure there was some swearing, but I'm a big boy and could cope, and no-one was forcing me to watch. And the blasphemy? What blasphemy? Sure there were some characters acting God and Jesus, but in the same sort of way as they are portrayed in the medieval morality plays. It was all rather innocuous we thought.

5 January 2005

We woke up on Christmas morning to find our boiler was broken and there was no hot water in the taps or the radiators. Fortunately we own a couple of independent electric heaters so we could heat up a couple of rooms, and as we spent both days with relations anyway the lack of hot water didn't matter too much, though some of us (not me, I am a morning showerer) like have a hot bath before we go to bed. They came and fixed it on the Monday, so it wasn't as bad as it might have been. It all started in the middle of December when we made the mistake of having our boiler serviced. It didn't work for two days after that either, and the engineers who came to fix then it obviously did no such thing.

Harry and I have spent much of the last couple of weeks trying to complete Su Doku puzzles. For those of you who haven't come across them they are a sometimes fiendish logical puzzle which the Times has started publishing every day. Just the thing to set the mind working. The Times one can also be found online.. There is also a Su Doku website were there are tips on how to tackle the problems at Sudoku. But please don't me if you never do a proper day's work again.

The Asian tsunami has been a devastating occurrence for the communities it has ravaged and our hearts go out to everyone, local or tourist, who has been affected. But one thing I do not understand. Why is it that westerners who have lost families members should expect the authorities in such countries as Thailand to preserve unburied their bodies so that they can be identified later? Surely our common humanity demands that those who have died together, whether rich westerner or poor Asian should be accorded the same treatment in death - anonymous burial. Why, in the light of the financial and human disaster which has hit their countries should governments be expected to waste public money or donated money on running deep freezes to keep corpses for DNA or dental identification?

But then I also don't understand people who insist on bringing their dead relatives back for burial in their own country when they die abroad. What is the point of spending lots of money on transporting a corpse round the world? There are some very stupidly sentimental people around.

Previous Editorials 2004
Previous Editorials 2003
Previous Editorials 2002 and earlier