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Lund Theological Books -- Editorials 2006 |
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A Happy New Year to you all.
Had my annual letter from Yellow Pages recently. Company: Philip Lund Theological. Type of Business: Astronomy
They always do this. I did write to them the first year to point out the mistake, but they took no notice, and I don't advertise with them anyway. Could be worse. They might have put astrology. They probably meant to but got the word wrong.
Good wishes to all of you for the Christmas festival.
There must be some surprises to visitors coming to Cambridge when they get on one of those tourist buses which promise an open-top ride around the sights of the city. The first being that the centre of Cambridge is closed to most traffic during the course of the day between 10am and 4pm, so the buses can't get anywhere near most of the older colleges. And the other surprise must be that the buses trundle right out of town, away from all the "history" right out into the countryside and up a long hill.
But at the top of the hill, through some trees, stands a sight which is quite rare. It is the
American
War Cemetery 
, containing the bodies of thousands of military personnel killed in the Second World War.
For some time such war dead have been transported home, but in those days many ended up here, on a gentle
north-east facing hill from which you can see the spires and pinnacles of Cambridge and its colleges.
At the top of the hill stands a huge flagpole separated by a walkway nearly five hundred feet long from
the chapel. The inside of the chapel contains two great maps and a mosaic, none of which unfortunately
measure up to the dignity of the rest of the site. However, the great bronze
doors 
do do justice to the
building.
As you stand in the middle of the walkway you have to your left and right the flagpole and the chapel.
Behind you is the
Wall of the Missing 
on which are
inscribed the names of 5125 combatants whose bodies
were never recovered. Before you, down the hill, stretch the graves of nearly four thousand war dead. Most
are surmounted by a Latin cross, though stars of David mark the graves of Jews.
It is very moving to walk down that hill, through the
graves 
, and to read the names of those whose surnames
and forenames reflect a nation which is an amalgam of people from many diverse parts of the world.
We visited Eltham Palace 
in southeast London on Sunday afternoon. It's a mile or two south east of
Greenwich and can be reached by train from London Bridge station in a quarter of an hour. You then have to
walk up from the station to the top of the hill, through the centre of Eltham, to the site of the palace
which stands on the edge looking towards London.
It belonged to the English kings from 1305 and was a royal residence up to the time of the Civil War.
It was the place Henry VIII grew up in, and parliament met sometimes in its great hall, reputed to have
the third best hammer beam roof in England, after those at Westminster and Hampton Court. The royals threw
money at it, but after the execution of Charles I it was sold off by Parliament in 1649 and the new
owner knocked most of it down.
The
great hall 
alone remained
and was used as a barn for the farm built
in the ruins.
In 1933 Stephen Courthauld, a member of a rich textile manufacturing family, took a lease from the
government and built himself an Art Deco house, centred on a sort of rotunda which has huge marquetry
pictures 
on the walls.
The glass and concrete dome 
above the room looks as if it is made of old vodka bottles.
I am assured the house is
very beautiful, but all I can say is that it is not to my taste.
This is an example of the
bedroom 
accommodation.
The Courtaulds only lived there till 1944
and from then till the nineteen nineties the place
was left to the mercies of the Army Education Corps. English Heritage has spent vast sums on
restoring it, going as far as having a replica made of the
rug 
originally in the centre of the rotunda
(and now in the Victoria and Albert Museum).
And they have found some really good furniture. How about this
settle 
in the Great Hall?
A really nice bit of carving on that.
The Great Hall is magnificent and the gardens, based on the still surviving moat, are lovely. I saw a kingfisher and the trees were full of the calls of the bright Indian parakeets which have gone wild in south London.
There's a website here here
The fact that the Democrats have won the House of Representatives and may even win the Senate is good news. The world does not sleep easy when the Republicans are in power. The president will be slightly reined in by this reverse and we have to hope his party will lose the next presidential election in two years' time.
Our first really cold day this winter and I have had to put the heat on in the garage. My excuse is that I don't want the books to get damp, but it's as much for my own lungs. Not that I have any trouble with them, but I bear at the back of my mind that one of the reasons my family emigrated to South Africa in 1950 was to spare the bronchial lungs of my father and me. The climate soon cured us of that. My only thoracic legacy from infancy is a sunken chest, the classic symptom of rickets, the vitamin D deficiency disease.
We had New Zealand cousins to stay last week. Having spent four months travelling Europe they are now on the last lap of what has been quite a long trip. They flew yesterday to Nepal for a twenty-three day hike up the foothills of the Himalayas to Everest's Base Camp. Apparently it's twenty days up and three days to come down. Sounds to me they will be issued with tin trays and told to sledge down on their bottoms, but they say no, you have to take a long time going up so as to acclimatize yourself to the great height and lack of oxygen. It must be a very beautiful walk, though with my flat feet I doubt I could do it. Cycling is more my thing, though not up mountains.
Despite the cold and a stiff breeze the sun is out here and it is streaming in low through the bamboo thicket I have planted in front of the window. Anyone got a spare tiger to live in it?
A further report on English Touring Opera's visit to Cambridge. Friday night's performance started with Carissimi's Jephte. It is an oratorio, but the nine singers moved around the stage with a bit of interplay. Only takes around twenty three minutes for the whole sad story of Jephta's vow to be revealed. It is a Hebrew version from the book of Judges of the Idomeneo story. Military leader makes vow to his god that if granted victory over the Amonites he will sacrifice the first of his possessions he sees when he gets home. He wins, he goes home, and it is his "filia unigenita" - his only daughter - who comes out singing a song of triumph in his honour. Much grief, but daughter accepts her fate, only asking for a two month respite that she may go with her companions into the mountains to bewail her virginity before being offered "in holocaustum" - as a burnt offering to God.
A sad story, set by Carissimi to the haunting and beautiful music. It tears the heart. When I was twenty I had a friend who recommended this as his favourite piece of music. He didn't actually have a copy of it, and we lived in the middle of Rhodesia far from shops. But a year or so later I did acquire a recording, and have loved it ever since. ETO's singers sang it ravishingly this week.
Then came Purcell's Dido and Anaeas. What a strange hotpotch this is.The first recorded performance was at a school for young ladies in Chelsea, run by a dancing master, which probably explains why it is so short and disjointed. There's a theory that it may have first been written as a court masque and was cut down for the school performance. That would make sense. As it is, though there are a few lovely bits of music it is on the whole an unsatisfactory work which requires more plot and more music. But ETO did it well and Dido was sung by a wonderful Brazilian singer, Joana Thome, whom we last heard a few months ago as Rosina in the Barber of Seville. She is beautiful and has a voice to match.
Then last night we saw Monteverdi's Orfeo. Again, beautifully sung, but again a slightly odd production. Gloomy. One realises that small touring companies have to use as little in the way of props and scenery as they can so there isn't so much to cart around the country, but this doesn't mean that the sets and makeup and costumes have to be drab and ill-lit. This was particularly the case for the Orfeo and the Tolomeo this week.
But those are quibbles. We have had four evenings of wonderfully sung music. The highlight? Erismena definitely. And hearing Miss Thome again.
English Touring Opera is in town. This is great in one way, but it does mean that you have to go to the theatre four nights in a row. A bit like London buses - you wait an hour then several come along at once. If we lived in London where there are two permanent opera houses we could go once a month or so. Here in the sticks you have to grasp what comes whenever it comes. The consolation was that the Arts Theatre gave a substantial discount if you booked for all four nights. Which is a good thing as the prices in Cambridge are higher than at any of ETO's other venues on this tour.
Last night it was Handel's Tolomeo. Not one staged very often, and one can understand why. Miserable doom and gloom throughout. The plot, too numerous to mention, involves the exiled son of Cleopatra, Ptolomeo (spelt wrong you will notice) and his efforts to be reunited with his wife on Cyprus where they have both ended up. She poor girl is harassed (note the accent is on the first syllable, not the second as Americans will have it) by the ruler of the territory, while Tolomeo is harassed (ditto) by his sister. Tolomeo and wife are a pathetic pair who don't even manage to recognise each other when they are the only two people on a beach. After much violence and some lovely singing they are successfully united. End of story. I admit it was sung beautifully, but as operas go it is one of the sillier, and nastier.
The great and the good turned out in force last night for Tolomeo. It was a full house. The night before the theatre was perhaps only three quarters or less full for Cavalli's Erismena. Which was a pity, for it was a much more enjoyable evening than last night. I suppose people were put off from spending their £35 on an opera they had never heard of by a composer they hadn't heard of either. I did have the advantage of having heard of him because a friend once lent me a tape of a ravishing performance of his Callisto filmed at a performance in Brussels. Cavalli wrote popular operas for the theatres of Venice in the mid sixteen hundreds. This isn't stuff for rich patrons. It is for a wider audience who wouldn't come and wouldn't pay if they weren't amused, and it shows.
The plot is no less ridiculous than that of Handel's Tolomeo. It can be summed up by saying that the hero turns out to be the long-lost daughter of the king his enemy. Where it scores over the Handel is that there are a couple of comic characters including a nurse/maidservant played by a bass in drag. Which is a change from all the women playing men and the counter tenors playing men. There's also a fickle and very flirtatious young lady who constantly falls for the latest thing in trousers to come on stage. She gets her comeuppance though at the end. Having discovered that her current enamorata, the hero, is really a girl she is a bit upset. But not for long. Her newly discovered brother (an old boyfriend of hers of course) no sooner reveals himself than he gives her hand to another of her suitors. She has no say in this. This is entertainment, with laughs, intrigue and passion as well as lovely music. All you can say of Tolomeo is that it is a vehicle for good singers to belt out their all.
In an editorial on 3 March 1999 I wrote the following:
This week I have read the most inspiring book I expect to read this year, probably the most inspiring I have read in years. It is by a man who may well have done more for the poor of the world than any other this century, and whose influence may shape the course of the next century far more deeply than any American president.
I went on to explain the reason for my enthusiasm for the book Banker to the Poor by Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economics professor who founded the Grameen Bank in his home country. The bank (Grameen means village) lends money to the poorest, with no collateral demanded, and has transformed the lives of millions both in Bangladesh where it started and in other parts of the world where the concept has been exported.
Last week it was heartening to read that Muhammad Yunus has been awarded one of this year's Nobel Prizes for his invention of the Grameen Bank. He is a worthy winner and it is to be hoped that the prize will make this concept known to parts of the world where it has not yet been heard of. My only surprise is that the Nobel Prize awarded is that for Peace, rather than for Economics. But I suppose the prize committee know what they are doing.
There's a lot of fuss in the media here in England about the presence of Muslims in our country. They are seen as a separatist and threatening group, with strange religion, strange customs, and a strong reluctance to blending into the British way of life. The emergence from their ranks of the tube and bus bombers has not done anything to endear them to the majority population.
There are two tendencies here one has to note. First, it has ever been the custom of immigrants and longterm visitors to a country to preserve their own religion and build places of worship for the proper carrying out of their religious rites and duties. Think of Latin merchants in medieval Constantinople with their own churches. Or, nearer in time, think of the large gothic cathedral (designed by one of the ubiquitous Scott family) plonked in all its Anglican pomp in the small university town of Grahamstown near the southern tip of Africa. There can be no problem with people keeping their religion of birth, however bizarre, as long as they do no hurt to the rest of the population amongst whom they live, and as long as they abide by the traditional ethical consensus of their new home.
Then there has been the tendency to keep one's customs and diet and traditional costume. The British in India never did take to the sari, did they? But it has to be said that Western dress has become the norm even among the native inhabitants of much of Asia and Africa. And most European Jews (apart from a certain minority, particularly visible in parts of London) tend to wear what everyone else wears. Cultural assimilation happens. Where it does not there tends to be a problem. Minorities, like the Tamils of northern Sri Lanka, or the Saxons of such eastern European countries as Hungary and Romania, who do not assimilate tend to become states within states, with disastrous consequences for their adopted homes, and ultimately for themselves.
I would go as far as to say that in this age of mass population migration if people choose to live in a foreign country then they should put their hearts into that country or else go back whence they or their parents came. We have a large minority of people from the sub-continent of India who need to make up their minds where they belong, and where their loyalties lie. They cannot forever cling onto cultural habits like arranged marriages and honour killings and expect to attract the respect of their fellow citizens. These things are totally against the ethos of our country, and if they cannot live with that they should find somewhere else to live. On the question of clothing though I think there should be more tolerance on the part of non-Muslims. Should a few of their women choose to wear the full veil most of the time I think we should not make a fuss. It's them that look silly, not us. But where they come into come into contact with authority we should surely insist that they uncover themselves and prove who they are. If you are claiming benefit, or going through immigration, or say, talking to your Member of Parliament, you need to prove who you are by showing yourself.
In case it should be argued that it is more than can be expected that people who have grown up here should return to the country their parents came from, I contend that though difficult it is possible. I myself left South Africa at the age of twenty six because I chose not to live under the apartheid regime any longer. I came back to a country that I had left at the age of three and made a new life. It wasn't easy. England was not as familiar as I thought it would be. But I persevered and have made my home here. It is open to people of Indian and Pakistani origin who hate this country also to go back to the lands of their ancestors.
This week's home page picture is of part of the Doom in Wenhaston Church, Suffolk. Sometimes Dooms (depictions of the Last Judgment) were painted directly on the wall above the chancel arches of medieval churches. St Andrew's Chesterton, half a mile down the road from our house has a fine, though damaged, example.
However, in Wenhaston the painting was done on boards which would have filled the arch. The cross on the rood screen would have stood in front of it. Come the Reformation rood screen was destroyed, along with the crucifix and figures of Mary and John on it, but the painting was whitewashed over and then forgotten for centuries. Then in 1892 the church was refurbished and the wooden infill of the arch removed and dumped in the churchyard. There it got rained on and the whitewash dissolved away, leaving one of the brightest and most colourful dooms in the country. They didn't put it back in the chancel arch, but attached it to one of the side walls so that now one can go right up to it and see it in all its glory. See a fuller account and more pictures at the Suffolk Churches website. I took my photo some years ago, and discovered the negative this week when looking for something else.
Well that was August. July was so hot that it felt like we were going to have a really good summer, but August has beeen a total washout. More rain than I can remember, and quite cool. An early autumn really.
As I type I can hear in the background the guitar that our youngest is playing in that plaintive way that electric guitars have. He is just back from the Leeds Pop Festival which was not as wet as usual. I expect he's been inspired by all the "talent" there to try again to get his band going. He's welcome. I listened to pop music when I was young a bit but now I am an adult I would no more voluntarily listen to the stuff than drill holes in my head with a gimlet.
I can't understand people of adult age liking that sort of thing. There's so much good music out there to listen to. Yet even respectable newspapers review the stuff. Most perplexing. And annoying to find oneself an old fogey.
TOPRosalind and I took last week off, not to go on holiday anywhere far away, but just to have some time together and to go on a few day trips to places within an easy drive of Cambridge.
So on the Monday we went to Knebworth House, a stately home we are always passing as we go down the
A1 and which we have been promising ourselves to visit for years. On the way we stopped at a rural
Hertfordshire church in the village of Anstey, notable for its
medieval lych gate
and its "merman" font.
The lych gate is quite wide, and at some time the locals decided to brick up one side of it to use
as a lockup for the local drunks. Perhaps it was felt that a night next to the graves in the churchyard
might instill a bit of sobriety. As to the font, the authorities can't agree whether the figures are
mermen
or ships' prows or something
entirely different. I think they are just a fanciful decoration.
Hertfordshire is an awful long way from the sea for the maritime suggestions to be very plausible.
Knebworth is one of those medieval farmhouses added to by the Tudors then tarted up yet again at the
beginning of the nineteenth century. So full is it of gargoyles
and other silly statuary that it was
used as a conveniently close to London publicity venue for the Harry Potter films. The family were the
Lyttons, of whom Bulwer Lytton, the Victorian statesman and prolific novelist (including The Last Days
of Pompei, filmed in around 1950 in glorious technicolor), two Viceroys of India, and a noted suffragette.
Unfortunately one had to trail round the house with a rather indifferent guide whose knowledge of the
(admittedly complicated) family kept letting her down. And she kept telling us to "take your time to
have a look in this room" and five seconds later would be chivvying us into the next.
Tuesday we went northeast to Cromer on the coast. I took a hammer to look for fossils at the bottom of the famous cliffs but all we got, apart from a nice lunch with friends, was soaking wet in a sudden heavy shower. Admittedly I don't know the sort of rocks you are supposed to hit to find fossils. All I seemed to be doing was flint-knapping.
On the way to Cromer we called at Reepham and Cawston. The former is noted for having
two churches
in its churchyard. Apparently there were once three, but all that now remains of the third is a wall
which we could not find. One of the churches is used as a church hall now, and was locked, but we saw
the other. And it was full-sized - they both are.
Cawston has a good angel roof,
medieval benches
,
and a rood screen
. Notice
St Matthew
, wearing glasses.
Wednesday I think we had a rest. Thursday we went to
Southwold,
where since we last went they have built a
pier. Southwold is a place the rahs go, where the
beach huts
sell for thousands. This must be the prettiest.
On the pier I was stopped and accosted twice by people asking if I was someone or other. It appears there
was some kind of a radio competition and you had to find this bearded person. I was not he. In the
town I found a
road sign
which confirms
my belief that some Methodists are not as teetotal as they pretend. It is quite blatant to call
one's chapel the Brewery Methodist Church, isn't it? On the way
home we stopped at Bramfield, another lovely Suffolk church.
I enjoyed my week off. Pity to come back to work, especially as not much happens in the way of orders in August. It's always our quietest month.
I have been reading again that strange and amusing book, Small Talk from Wreyland, by Cecil Torr (Cambridge UP, 1918). Torr was a barrister and squire of the Devonshire village of Wreyland and the book is a collection of family reminiscences from the letters and diaries of himself, his grandfather, his father, and his brother. He writes about local customs, local happenings, famous people the family met, travels abroad, and anything else that comes to mind.
In the course of a discussion on cider and cider making in Devon he launches into a diatribe against tea drinking which rivals William Cobbett's statement that the man who lets his wife and daughters drink tea might as well take them straight off to the brothel immediately, as that is where they will end up. Here is Cecil Torr's whole paragraph on the subject.
On the whole, less harm is done by cider than by tea; but cider gets more blame, as its ill effects are visible at once, whereas tea works its mischief slowly. Nobody says anything against tea drinking now; but Parson Davy in his System of Divinity, vol xix, page 235, which he printed at Lustleigh in 1803, spoke with indignation of "the immeasurable use of that too fashionable and pernicious plant, which weakens the stomach, unbraces the nerves, and drains the very vitals of our national wealth; to which never theless our children are as early and as carefully enured, from the very breast, as if the daily use of it were an indispensable duty which they owed to God and their country." And in his Letter to a Friend concerning Tea, published in 1748, John Wesley spoke of tea-drinking as tea-drinkers speak of drinking alcohol now:- "wasteful, unhealthy self-indulgence" - "no other than a slow poison" - "abhor it as a deadly poison, and renounce it from this very hour."
Well I suppose if tea-drinkers go straight to hell as these venerable theologians seem to imply, there will be all the more room in heaven for me. Though of course there may be a special circle of Hell reserved for the flippant, in which case there go I.
Following last Tuesday's attendance at a concert by Emma Kirkby we went to the Barber of Seville on Wednesday and a Spanish play on Thursday. We are just overdone with concerts and theatre at this time of the year in Cambridge. We could go out every night this month to see some Shakespeare play or other, often in lovely College gardens, though this year we seem to be concentrating more on music. We are off to another concert tonight in Trinity College chapel, and also to one on Friday night.
The Barber we saw at West Road concert hall was Opera East's production, part of the Cambridge Summer Music Festival. It was a sparkling effort, with a good cast, but what made it particularly enjoyable was that the Rosina not only sang beautifully, but she looked the part as well - young and extremely pretty. So often opera singers look too old for the part. The singer was Joana Thome, a Brazilian, and I would happily travel a long way to hear (and see) her again.
The Spanish play on Thursday evening was Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna. De Vega is the Spanish Shakespeare, but I had never seen any of his works performed. This production was by the Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club, and if all his works are as good as this I would happily see more. It is sad that with so much total rubbish on the television there isn't an effort to put on good classical plays. The obvious playwrights would be Shakespeare, Wilde and Shaw, my favourites, but there's a whole world of Jacobean revenge tragedies, Restoration comedies and lots of nineteenth and twentieth century stuff, let alone the plays of other nations, all just crying out to be shown regularly on TV.
The theatre was most terribly hot, worse than the Fitzwilliam Museum two days before, but the acting was very good and the translation was likewise. The play is set in 1476 in Fuente Ovejuna, a Spanish village dominated by a corrupt Commander who belongs to the Order of Calatrava, a military order originally set up to fight the Moors but now just another alliance of landowners. The Commander, a useless strategist as well as a bully, despises the villagers, has his way with the women, and interferes with every aspect of village life. The mayor's daughter spurns his crude advances and eventually he abducts and rapes her. At this the villagers at last show some fight, they lynch the Commander and put his bully boys to flight.
Their appeal to Ferdinand and Isabella to come under their direct rule is met by a closing ranks of the ruling caste. The king and queen send a judge to find the perpetrators of the assassination of the Commander. He tortures the villagers one by one, but they all stick to their agreed story, that Fuente Ovejuna killed the Commander. In the end he admits defeat, and Ferdinand and Isabella recognise that they will get no further with the investigation and accept the overlordship of the village.
If that sounds like a gruesome evening, it isn't. What shines through the play is the question of honour, what it is and who should have it. The Commander's idea of honour is that it goes with being a gentleman like himself and that it gives him the right to do anything he likes to his social inferiors and to feel insulted if they ever question his actions. At the beginning the villagers, downtrodden as they are, have no conception of their having any honour, but as the play progresses they see more and more that they do have honour, as people, and that they must uphold it, even to the extent of killing the Commander.
One could draw a parallel there with the people of Gaza and the muslims who support Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon. They too are beginning to kick back at the Israeli jackboot which has so abused and humiliated them this last sixty years. Shame on our government and that of the USA that they support the oppressors.
Yesterday a cutting fell out of a book I was cataloguing. It is undated, and I cannot tell which newspaper it was from, but a reference to the opening of a new building in Leadenhall for Lloyds Insurance must date it to May 1928. It is a report by Dean Inge of St Paul's Cathedral on a three week visit he had just paid to the United States of America.
Inge was clearly impressed by the country and its people, and most of what he says seems fair and non-controversial. However, the end of the article highlights some really awful racism and derogatory attitudes, not by his hosts, but on the part of Dean Inge himself. This is a man who according to the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church was one of the best-known churchmen of his generation, a celebrated writer on Christian mysticism.
The attitudes he displays in his newspaper article are appalling, even given the time he lived in. He rails against "lowgrade immigration" to America by people from "South Italy, the Slav countries, and even Armenia". He applauds the introduction of a Quota System and goes on to say
"I was delighted to hear that under the revised regulations... the English contingent is to be largely augmented, the Italian reduced, and the Southern Irish, who are spoken of as an unmitigated nuisance, are to be cut down to a very small number. The Americans are wise; but when shall we, in this overcrowded country, have the sense to pass an Irish Exclusion Act? Lancashire and Western Scotland are already flooded with these undesirables, who will come in greater numbers when they are forbidden to to to America."
What strikes me is that the mean British attitude to Jews seeking to flee Hitler's Germany a decade later is the more understandable in the light of the ethnic intolerance evinced by Inge.
We spent last Saturday in Gloucestershire. Bit of a hack across country but there was a ![[Photograph]](graphics/editorials/bamboo1.jpg)
Bamboo
Society "do" there. Actually all it was was a visit to first a nursery which sells bamboos, where
I was tempted but did not inhale, i.e. I didn't actually buy any.
After lunch in a pub we took ourselves off to a private garden west of Gloucester. Five years ago it was a field, now it has the makings of a great garden. The owner has a flair for landscape, and his plantings are not confined just to bamboo. It looks good now. In another ten years the place will be stunning. I did point out to the owner that the one thing he has forgotten to do is to build a car park. In a few years the cognoscenti will be beating a path to his door.
We did not have enough time at the end to go into Gloucester to see the cathedral so we consulted
Jenkins's Thousand Best Churches.![[Photograph]](graphics/editorials/highnam5.jpg)
and found Highnam, a village a couple of miles west of Gloucester. The place is kept locked so
we were lucky to get in on the skirt tails of someone who had already been and fetched the key.
![[Photograph]](graphics/editorials/highnam1.jpg)
It is high Victorian. Thomas Gambier Parry not only commissioned it, he painted the murals, in which the building is covered, by himself. It is dedicated to the Holy Innocents as all his children, bar one, failed to reach adulthood. The one who survived was Hubert Parry, the composer.
Parry, pere, wasn't all that good an artist but he did invent a method of applying frescoes which would last in the damp of our climate, and so the quality is very good.
![[Photograph]](graphics/editorials/highnam2.jpg)
![[Photograph]](graphics/editorials/highnam4.jpg)
Last Friday I spent the morning fixing water saving devices to our two loos. It is a clever little gadget called the Interflush which enables one to control the length of the flush. You hold the handle down as long as you need to clear the pan, then when you let go it stops flushing. It works on syphonic cisterns, which are what most British houses have installed. The makers claim you can save 30 litres of water a day per person, half the flushing water normally used. At last year's British Invention Show 05, at Alexandra Palace in October, The Interflush™, out of 200 inventions, won the Organisers Gold Medal for Best Invention.
They say that if you are a competent person you can fit one in less than half an hour. Well I have to admit it took me an hour and a half to fit the first one, and an hour to fit the second (which included phoning them up for advice). Plumbing makes me nervous, I always fear I will do something wrong and cause a flood, so I was very cautious, going over every step of the instructions several times before carrying it out. Electricity doesn't worry me - I rewired our house when we bought it - but plumbing is another matter. Actually there were no real problems apart from the fact that the screwdriver supplied in the kit was rubbish, and they admitted it when I phoned them up. But I did find I had a better quality one, and that made things easier.
The main thing is that they both work, and I feel I have done something to save a bit of water for the planet for a cost of less than £20 per installation. Well worth thinking of both at home and at the office.
TOPI looked up a book called Ladder of the Beatitudes on Amazon recently. At the bottom of the entry the following appears.
Customers interested in this title may also be interested in:
* Midland Ladder Co. Ltd
Nationwide ladder supplier. Huge stocks, online ordering, competitive prices and free UK delivery.
* LaddersRus for Ladders
A range of industrial, trade and domestic ladders in alloy, timber and glass fibre.
There's a sermon in that somewhere.
We spent The first ten days of May on a Saga tour of Romania . Before we went we had two reservations about the wisdom of going on the trip. First, Saga is a company that only caters for the over fifties, and we wondered if we would find ourselves a group of people with older interests than ours. Secondly, we weren't sure about how we would survive ten days on a coach. As it happened, though we were both the youngest couple on the holiday, and the only ones still working, we got on well with a fine bunch of people. And the coach travelling was fun most days. The countryside is so different from here that we watched the scenery eagerly all the way.
The National Express coach Cambridge to Heathrow was hot and stuffy. The Romanian airways plane was an old bucket (Boeing 737 for the technically minded) with extremely uncomfortable seats. But we got there, which is always a bonus on a plane ride I think. (I was once on a glider that crashed while taking off, but as it crashed at the end of the runway I suppose that counts as getting there. And though the plane was a write-off I only broke my ankle. But that's another story.)
Romania's southern boundary is the River Danube. North of the river is a plain and the capital, Bucharest, sits about 30 miles north of the river in the middle of the plain and that's where we landed. We were immediately taken off north into the Carpathian Mountains to stay at Sinaia, a town in a valley which becomes a pass into Transylvania. The hotel, like all the ones we stayed in, was horrible to look at from the outside, quite out of keeping with its surroundings, but comfortable as far as bedrooms were concerned. That first night was marked for most of us by the barking of dogs. Every house has several, and waves of barking engulfed the town all night. The second night there it wasn't so bad. We thought that perhaps this was because it was colder and the dogs stayed in their kennels.
Sinaia is a holiday resort with ski lifts up into the mountains (they weren't working when we were there).
In the summer hiking is the activity people come for. Early May the skiing snow is gone though there is some
still on the peaks, and the summer activities haven't really started. But what we were there to see was
a monastery and two royal palaces. They are set above the town near each other in parkland. The monastery
has an old church, closed and under repair, and a new church. The palaces,
Peles
and Pelisor (little Peles)
are nineteenth century affairs built by their first kings. We had to wait to get into Peles as the Austrian
president and entourage arrived just after we did (which explained why the place was crawling with soldiers).
The motorcade had to park in line in the drive (and presumably back out after the visit as the palace
is at the end of a cul de sac) so the people in the last cars had to walk the length of the queue to get
to the castle. The ambulance at the end of the motorcade was a couple of hundred yards from where any
action might have been. One car disgorged a lady in black academic gown and the reddest, most dayglo wig you
have ever seen. Would have loved to know who she was. Was she President's Mistress, Minister for Silly Wigs, or
hair stylist to the wife of the British prime minister?
It transpired that there was no intention of taking us around Pelisor, so while the rest of our party went and had coffee Rosalind and I slipped in at the end of a Russian party going round, and saw the place. It is smaller than Peles, and was only built because the wife of the heir to the first king did not get on with her uncle-in-law. She was daughter of a Duke of Edinburgh and became Queen Marie of Romania eventually. She designed all the furniture and it was fun. Dated about 1900 I think. I said we were following a Russian party. That isn't quite true. Between us and the Russians there were a group of security men with mirrors on sticks checking under all the furniture for bombs before the Austrians got to that castle. Since they were checking in front of us I suppose we could happily have deposited bombs after them, but we didn't have any on us, security at Heathrow having been somewhat strict the day before.
We made our way out to find our guide looking for us as the rest of the party had by then got into Peles. Rosalind says it is in the Neuwanstein style, but I don't know what that is, never having been to Germany. Heavy.
That was the morning. As we couldn't go up in a ski-lift to walk in the mountains we spent the free
afternoon walking the steep
streets of Sinaia, drinking in the novel
architecture
and talking to the ubiquitous dogs. I cannot be
described as a dog-lover but these mongrels were friendly muts. We also came to grips
with the currency. Or tried to. Romania revalued their currency at the beginng of the year. However, they
are keeping the old notes in circulation with the new ones for the time being. The designs and colours are the same, but the new ones
are smaller, and of course have the new values on them. The revaluation consisted of knocking four noughts
off the end of each number, so an old 500 000 lei note is the equivalent of a new 50 lei note. Which is
all very well, but the Romanians themselves haven't come to grips with the changes and still ask for
payment in the old figures. What is more, they complicate matters by not mentioning the thousands. So you
would buy some drinks and the waiter would ask for say 75 lei. At which I would throw a fit. 75 new lei is
about £15, which is a lot for a couple of drinks. But what he actually meant was 75 thousand old lei which is
7.5 new lei, which is more reasonable. The leu (singular)
is worth 20p, or 5 to the pound. Prices are very low. A main course at a restaurant was usually about 15 lei,
three pounds English.
After our second night in Sinaia we completed the journey North across the Carpathians into Transylvania.
The scenery was so interesting. In the fields people hoed or walked behind horsedrawn ploughs. You often seen
little farm carts, pulled by one horse, in the fields and on the roads bowling along with two or three people
in them. Apparently they are a menace at night as they are never lit. The
horses
always have bright red tassles
behind the eyes, like enormous dressing gown cord ends. They said it was as blinkers but they are worn too
far behind to be any good. Probably a talisman against witchcraft.
The houses are interesting as well. Of course they differ between areas, and we didn't see lots of parts
of the country, but by and large the village houses all seem to conform to a pattern. The house runs down one
side of the plot with just an end on to the road. The gateway
is tall and in some villages carved.
In most places there is always a well, just like the ones
in children's picture books, with a crank and bucket, but with a fancy roof as well. There are barns across
the bottom of the garden, and hen houses, maize stores and the like. And everywhere, except in the largest towns,
the bright yellow gas pipes run along the fences at about four feet above the ground, with bends to take them
over gateways and other obstructions. Roofs tend to be of sheet metal (corrugated iron hardly appears at all)
either brightly shiny or rusty. Some houses have clay tiles.
Our lunchtime stop-off was in Sigisoara
. Now a typically modern industrial horror, it does have a citadel with
most of its walls intact. Inside the walls it is a treasure. It was built by Saxon settlers in the middle ages,
one of several such trading villages. The native Romanians were kept out at night. Since the Second World War
the German presence in Romania has shrunk tremendously, but Sigisoara still has a high school where the medium
of study is German. It is on the highest hill inside the citadel, and stands next to a huge medieval
Lutheran church, bare and feeling somewhat underused. There's a long flight of
steps
up from the town to the
school and it is covered, most attractively, with a pitched roof all the way up. This was our best lunchtime
stop. Many of the others were in modern tourist restaurants which were a bit grim. Here's a street view
The night was spent in
a spa resort called Sovata with little to commend it unless you like mudpacks and hot lakes. The lake wasn't open to
swimmers yet, too early in the year, but was pleasant to walk round, and we saw a treecreeper and a nuthatch.
Romania doesn't seem to have many birds. There are sparrows and chaffinches, but out in the country you don't
see the large numbers of such birds as crows which we have. But we did see a few
storks
in their nests, either
on telegraph poles or people's chimneys.
Next day we travelled north again to Bistrita where we had lunch and I tried unsuccessfully to find the
little wooden synagogue where the Baal Shem Tov is reputed to have ministered. There wasn't much time and I
misread the guide book, so we didn't see it. Then we turned east over the Carpathians again, through
beautiful alpine meadows, with cows and the lovely Romanian haystacks
, like tall mushrooms built around a wooden
pole. At the top of the pass there is an incongruous hotel called the Castel Dracula. You may have noticed
that we have crossed the Carpathian mountains twice already. You have to imagine the range as a backward
shaped L. First we crossed the bottom line from south to north, just near the corner, into the inside of the letter,
(Transylvania) now we have
crossed the upright in an easterly direction. Later in the holiday we were to cross back west again into Transylvania
and at the end we crossed once more, south through Sinaia back to Bucharest. I expect that explanation is about
as clear to you as Romanian currency was to me.
This was now the Friday night. We were supposed, according to the itinerary, to visit the first of our painted monasteries (the whole reason for going to Romania in the first place) but it did warn that the visit might be put off till the next morning. In fact we didn't get to Voronet until the Sunday morning, by which time the rain had set in badly. My pictures rather reflect this.
So we spent Friday night in a dump called Gura Humorului. The hotel is comfortable, but the only virtue the
town has is that it is within striking distance of several of the painted monasteries. Moldovita was the first
we visited the next morning. The facade of the building is covered in scenes from the lives of saints, scenes
from the old testament, and scenes from history. All three monasteries we saw had these basic ingredients. I
think they all had trees of Jesse
, and wonderful judgment scenes. All three were solitary churches in the midst of
a fortified garth.
The paintings, where they last, are wonderful. I say where they last, because the elements have taken a terrible
toll of the paintings on the weather side of all these churches. Apart from perhaps a band of paintings just
under the eves the weather side
of all the churches is just a blank where the paint has washed away. And sadly,
on the sides where the paintings are still good, nineteenth century visitors carved their names carefully and
neatly into the paintings. All one can say is that when it comes to the Last Judgment their guilt will be there
in their own hand.
Moldovita monastery was built in 1532 and the frescoes were added within five years. The picture of the
siege of Constantinople
in 626AD is special,
the Persians being shown wearing contemporary Turkish costume. Within,
the church is small and dark, and the paintings difficult to make out. One thing does become clear, and that is
that the Orthodox venerate a large number of saints who were beheaded. I particularly liked the pictures where
a row of headless bodies
(usually with a bit of spurting blood) knelt before their own haloed heads lying on the
ground.
The monasteries were originally built for monks, but the Austrians drove them out and closed the buildings in the late 18th century. Having lain derelict for a long time they are now lovingly looked after by nuns.
Sucevita
,
our next stop, was built in 1584 and painted in 1596. One wall contains a lovely
Ladder of Virtue
in which flights of angels assist the righteous into paradise and sinners plunge off the rungs to Hell. We had
a good hour or so the wander round drinking in the pictures and the Orthodox ethos. We picked up several books
and postcards. The books tend to be very badly translated, but not so bad that one cannot appreciate a faith
which is quite different to that of Western Catholics and Protestants. If we talked like that it would sound pi,
but their faith is at a different intellectual level. One illustration - a picture of the infant Jesus being
encountered by Simeon in the Temple is explained in one of the books. It tells how Simeon was one of the
72 translators of the Septuagint, and for his work on it was promised by God that he would not die till he
had seen the Saviour. He spent the next three hundred years hanging about the temple in Jerusalem till Jesus
was at last brought in by his parents. Knowing that, one can appreciate how heartfelt his "Now lettest Thou
thy servant depart in peace..." must have been.
Our last stop that day was to a tacky little village called Marginea where pottery is made. We stopped and were expected to buy pottery. I thought it was ghastly stuff (mostly black) but Rosalind bought a couple of pieces as presents for unsuspecting relatives. We would have done better to go to another monastery - both Humor and Putna are nearby, but I suppose the average traveller in our party wasn't perhaps as interested as I am.
Next day, Sunday, it rained, as I said, but we saw
Voronet
monastery anyway. It was built in 1488, but
not painted until 1547. The overwhelming impression is of blue, obtained by using ground-up lapis lazuli, that
semiprecious stone from Afghanistan which was used for the cloak of the Virgin in so many western Renaissance
paintings. The
Last Judgment
on the western wall is wonderful. You see graves opening and the dead coming out.
And here are wild animals, bearing in their jaws the limbs they tore off people so that bodies can be united
and whole for the judgement. There is also a little elephant, which doesn't seem to have eaten
anything off anyone, at any rate he isn't carrying anything.
The rest of the day we spent going south away from the border with Ukraine, and back across the mountains to
Brasov which we had passed
through briefly at the beginning of the trip. It was the longest day's travelling, and I was dead tired,
having had a bad night, but I managed to keep awake to watch the scenery along the roads. One doesn't want to
miss something one has paid for, does one? Eventually we reached Poiana Brasov, a mountain resort above Brasov,
for a three night stay. Like Sinaia it is popular in the winter for skiing, and in the summer for hiking.
It has a wooden church
in the Ukrainian style, all wood and with a spire, quite unlike what we had
seen before. When we popped in on our second evening the church was empty but within a minute had filled up with young
men in football gear who proceeded to pray and kiss icons. When we got out we discovered the bus of the
Brasov football team and later on our walk they all passed us a couple of times as they ran round the resort
to get fit. The rest of the architecture varies from horrible hotels put up in the Communist era to
horrible hotels put up more recently. Ours was comfortable and fortunately hidden in the trees on a hillside
so it didn't spoil the view as much as it might have. The woods are supposed to be full of bears but
we saw none. I did wonder about covering Rosalind in honey and tying her to the tree outside our bedroom,
as bait, but then I remembered that she was the one who could cope with the currency, so scrapped the idea.
Pity to miss the bears though. Next time I will take a calculator.
Monday was spent in Brasov. Like many cities in Europe, and indeed Britain, it has an old interesting core
within a boring modern city. It was originally one of those fortified trading towns built by the Saxons who
were invited in during the high middle ages. The local Romanians had to live outside in their own settlement
(sounds just like pre-apartheid South Africa). We visited that part of the city first. The trip was billed as
a visit to the first schoolroom
for the education of children in Romania. Though it sounded dire it was
a treat. It may have been a school, but what it is now is a church-run archive of all sorts of interesting
early Romanian books and such artifacts as icons painted on glass. The priest who lectured us (in Romanian,
translated by our guide) was so jolly, and so enthusiastic that most of us bought the booklet he has
produced in English - he has a printing press as well - and left a bit extra for the running of the place.
He has national treasures and no state help. Given that valuable books and documents are rumoured to have
disappeared from the State Archives in Bucharest since the Revolution I don't blame him for wanting to
keep the church's collection independent. The church attached was modern, and quite pretty, but we ran here
into a Romanian trait that really annoyed me as a tourist - a blanket ban on photography. We were told
that this was because some churches thought they could make more money selling their postcards and illustrated
books than they could out of selling permits to photograph, but given that so many guide books are badly
illustrated and even worsely (I know!) translated into English, one wants to take one's own pictures. You
can ban the use of flash - today's digital cameras take good pictures in even pretty poor light - and
charge a photography fee, and everyone would be happy. I really dislike coming away from somewhere with gaps in
the photographic record of what I have seen. Some places were enlightened in this respect. The painted
monasteries charged a modest entry fee and a much heftier photography fee.
We next went to the centre of the old German town of Brasov. Here there is a Lutheran church of cathedral-
like proportions, finished in 1477 after nearly a hundred years in the building. It is locally known as the
Black Church
after its appearance after its firing by an Austrian army in 1689. These days it is whitewashed
but full of Turkish prayer mats hanging from the walls, gifts from merchants returning from the East over
the years. Some are quite rare. Again there was a ban on photography. What shocked and annoyed me even more
though was the fact that the guide who lectured us had a sort of uniform which included a cap which he wore
even in the church. Whether it was just him, or whether Lutherans as a whole do not obey the Pauline injunction
to keep one's male head bare in church I don't know, but somehow I found it really offensive. There are
only a few hundred of the Germans in Brasov now. A sharp shower of rain after the Black Church drove us into
the nearest restaurant, a dash across the large main square, where as usual we had a much nicer meal than
the rather bland ones provided in our hotels. The afternoon was spent relaxing back in Poiana Brasov. Some
of us went on a walk around the place.
Next morning we had been promised a quick trip us a ski lift to the top of the mountain behind the resort to see the view. As it happened the cloud was down but we went up anyway for a quarter of an hour. Cold it was and snow was on the ground. What surprised me as someone who has never ski-ed is how steep the slopes are that people use. The mountainside appeared to slope down at about 60 degrees. No wonder people injure themselves.
For the rest of that morning we were at Bran Castle
, situated at the bottom of what used to be the only
pass south from Transylvania into Wallachia. It guarded the route, and customs dues were collected. It was
prettified at the end of the nineteenth century by Queen Marie (see Pelisor Castle, Sinaia, above) and is
a bit reminiscent of Lutyens' revamp of the castle on Lindisfarne. We had a lovely guide, very fluent and
amusing, who mocked the tourist industry's billing of Bran as Dracula's Castle on no other
authority than that it looks the part. The place is very tall and narrow, with only a couple of rooms on each
floor, which makes taking touring parties round a nightmare, both for the guide and the tourists. The
best bits are the galleries round the courtyard and the roof verandah where there are views north into
Transylvania. This week one of the Habsburgs, a New York architect, has been given the place back. I can't
work out how he is related to the previous owners - no-one seems to be claiming he is the king in exile -
but it seems a pity to give what is a national treasure back to some individual. They ought to have
a couple of million old lei (about 40 pounds sterling) and told him to get lost.
Castle over we were bussed up the pass then off into a side valley to lunch at a huge eatery at Moiesia
de Sus which was
full of Americans. Poor things, they were supposed to be on a Danube cruise but because of the floods
couldn't go on it, so they were having a mystery tour of Transylvania instead. I can't say I understand why
they couldn't cruise. You'd think that with a flooded river you could have more cruise rather than less.
Lunch was billed as a Romanian ploughman's. It was about as genuine as a so-called ploughman's in England.
Not bad, except the Romanians really do salt their cheeses. Lunch was settled by a brisk trot down the
valley in traditional
farmers' carts
. As it was raining at the start the more fainthearted followed in the
coach. The rain stopped soon anyway, and we enjoyed clip clopping along. The only alarming bit was the
getting in and out - like boarding a rowing boat with very steep sides. Then we walked further down the valley,
just for the fun of it. With my usual grasp of the subtelties of languages I worked out that the name of the
place meant Moiesia of the Pigs, but it turned out (and should have been obvious to me) that Sus means Upper.
It is further up the valley than Moiesia itself.
Next day we retraced our journey of the beginning of the tour and travelled from Brasov south across the
mountains into Wallachia, passing through Sinaia again, and landing up in Bucharest. Quick coach tour of the
city. There appear to be a few nice late nineteenth century boulevards a la Hausmann's Paris, but not
a lot to laugh at. If I had the time I might spend two days looking at the museums. We saw the government
building that Ceausescu demolished a sixth of the city to make space for, the
Palace of Parliament
. They say that the
only administrative building in the world bigger than it is the Pentagon. Lunch in the most
horrible modern shopping centre you can imagine. Worse than the Grafton Centre in Cambridge. But there
was a bookshop in the basement and we found some tatty copies of a series of good books on Romanian
churches and monasteries. Having bookshop experience does have some uses - I looked on the shelves under
the display and found their stack of spare stock where there was a set of the three books sealed in plastic
and with a CD of photos at a price somewhat less than the sum of the parts. So we bought it. We spent
what remained of the afternoon in a village museum on the outskirts of the city. It is one of those
places where they assemble buildings from all parts of the country to give an idea of the various regional styles
of domestic architecture. It rained, which probably jaded my judgment, but I didn't think it had half the
atmosphere of the brilliant village on the Zuider Zee (I think the place is called Doorn) that we visited once.
The trip ended that night with a dinner at a posh club. It was meant to be high-key finale, but didn't come off. We were at tables of four in what was quite a snooty place. What would have been nice would have been some local bistro where all thirty of us could have been at one long raucous table. We had got to know one another fairly well over the ten days - at one level anyway. People were fairly cagey about themselves in some ways, which led to speculation on my part about what they might have been in real life. Though I had to give that up when I discovered that the man who seemed so obviously to me to be a retired archdeacon turned out to have actually been a professor of physics.
Our last morning found us on the bus by 8am and back at Heathrow by 12.30. It took another three hours to get back to Cambridge on the bus, via Luton and Beachy Head (the rolling road that rambles round the shire if you know your Chesterton).
Despite minor quibbles about the holiday I would certainly travel with Saga again. The whole thing was planned down to the last detail, and what they said would happen, happened. When we planned this trip we thought of it as a one-off. We would go to Romania, see some painted churches, and never go again. But we have come away having fallen in love with the country and realising that we have lots more of the churches to see as well as whole areas of the country. The rail network looks pretty comprehensive, so I can see us going again and doing what we did in Italy last year, travelling from place to place. we haven't seen the Black Sea yet, or Constanta on its coast where Ovid was exiled and died, nor any of the west or northwest of the country.
As well as the pictures in the article there are others on Flickr and you can see them here.
Our Holy Week and Easter Weekend were full of family. Two were home from university anyway, and more came over the weekend.
In King's College Chapel we heard Bach's St Matthew Passion. The Academy of Ancient Music played, Kings provided the choir, and the singers included James Bowman, Emmy Kirkby, and several we heard sing there last year. A good occasion only marred by the fact that the chairs in the chapel are not up to sitting on for three and a half hours. I was in agony at the end of the evening. Its not the seats, but the backs - they just don't support you properly. On Holy Saturday we were there again for a concert of mixed Mozart music.
This meant missing the Holy Saturday liturgy, which was a pity. The Maundy Thursday mass we went to at St Andrew's Chesterton was very thinly attended. I know from my own experience how hard it is to convince otherwise observant Anglicans that the services of Holy Week are the most important of the year. Such a shame, when they are so beautiful and meaningful.
I cycled 25 miles in the hills round Newmarket, and we had a short walk on part of the Devil's Dyke. It is only about 11 miles long, going from the edge of the Fen at Reach to the hills southwest of Newmarket where it would have come up as far as thick forest and so presumably didn't need to go any further. There's little know about its history, but it appears to have been an Anglo-Saxon boundary between tribes. you can walk its length along the top. From there to the bottom of the ditch must be 30 feet in places. The view are good - you can see the towers of Ely Cathedral on a clear day, and at one point you look down onto Newmarket race course. We saw hares running about the fields.
On the subject of wildlife, a pair of jays seem to have taken up residence near us. I have only seen them a few times, mostly near London, so it was quite a surprise when they started landing in our garden last week. They are one of the most colourful of European birds.
![[Photograph]](graphics/editorials/dartmouth3.jpg)
Dartmouth
A very pleasant trip to Dartmouth in Devon last week, buying books.The river Dart widens to an estuary deep enough to take small warships, which is presumably why the naval college is situated there. The picture above shows the view from the top of the town over the houses to the sea. You can just make out on the righthand point of land the castle and a quite large church. Also in the picture down to the left is the present parish church, St Saviour's. The original parish church is further up the hill behind the place I took the photo from. I suppose it is still used, but it was locked when we tried to get in.
The castle used to guard the entrance to the harbour with cannon. There was also a chain which could
be stretched across the entrance to another fort at Kingswear on the northern side of the mouth.
The
view
from the churchyard
up the river. The slightly odd thing about this church is that it is bigger than the castle.
The people of Dartmouth keep fit by walking the incredibly steep hills. I asked a postman we passed toiling up a hill what he thought of the Post Office's failure to provide him with a bicycle. He said that on the whole he was glad - he didn't fancy trying to cycle. Dartmouth must be unique in that it used to have railway station, but no railway lines. Due to some geological problem the Great Western Railway could not be built on the south side of the valley. The company did however manage to get lines to Kingswear on the north bank. Having promised Dartmouth they would have a railway all they could then do was to provide a station and a ferry across the river. So you bought your ticket in Dartmouth and then took a ferry to Kingswear to actually get on the train. Nowadays the ticket office is a cafe and the railway line is a private one, having been closed down in the 1960s.
Getting to Dartmouth from Exeter in the North is quite complicated. Going, we kept inland and crossed the River
Dart near Totnes. Going back we went the much shorter way by ferry. Dartmouth has two car ferries and a
passenger ferry. The one we used is just a pontoon holding around half a dozen vehicles, pushed across
the river by a tug
.
This part of Devon is lush, wooded and steep and one of the most beautiful areas of Britain. Mostly the
hills go straight down onto a rocky coast. But a few miles further south there is a long stretch of
shingly coast,
Slapton Sands
. Our hosts
drove us out in the evening to see them. It was there that a sad
incident occured in April 1944, during the Second World War. In order to practice for the Normandy landings a
flotilla of landing craft packed with American troops set off one night from Plymouth, a bit further west,
with a view to effecting a landing on the Sands. Plymouth is quite close to Slapton, so to simulate the
sort of distance they would be travelling across the Channel to France, the boats sailed east past Slapton Sands
as far as Portland Bill, then turned back to their destination. Unfortunately during the operation the
Germans in Cherbourg picked up radio signals and sent out motor torpedo boats which intercepted the flotilla
and sank a number of boats, drowning 749 American troops. On view now at the western end of the sands is
a Sherman tank
recovered from the sea.
It was the end of term at York University last week so we went up to York on Wednesday to attend the university orchestra's end of term concert.
On the way we spent the afternoon at Castle Howard
, one of England's statelier homes. Its a bit of a tourist trap, so it was nice to be there on a quiet but bright winter's
day when there weren't too many people around. Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited was filmed there in the 1970s and
that added to its popularity. The architect was Vanbrugh, the playwright, who seems to have been able to turn his hand to anything his
friends wanted. He filled the grounds with lakes and conceits, including this
Temple of the Four Winds
. Unusually for Britain, this is
a stately home with no titled owners. It did belong to the earls of Carlisle, but at the end of the nineteenth century the earl and
his countess were Liberals who believed in a fair distribution amongst their many offspring. So the eldest son, who of course inherited
the title from his father, got Narborough Castle, the other family home, in Cumbria, but Castle Howard went to a sister. She didn't
want it (her husband was an Oxford academic) so she passed it on to another brother.
Back in York in the evening the orchestra played just one work, Mahler's 9th Symphony. It's long, just over an hour and a half, but it engages the passions all of that time. They played well too, so it was an enjoyable evening.
Then the dreaded Bed and Breakfast establishment.They are always such a gamble, and we haven't found the ideal one in York yet. We'd found this one on the web and taken it on the grounds that it had off-road parking. The furniture, apart from the bed, was all falling apart. We didn't dare sit on the chair. Its great advantage turned out to be that the provided a top sheet as well as a duvet on the bed. I find duvets too hot usually. If you have a sheet as well you can use that to cover your shoulders and have the quilt on only part of you. So despite the wonky furniture we slept well.
We had to stick around till Friday for the actual end of term, so on Thursday we went north east to the coast at Scarborough. A place whose charms I am afraid we did not appreciate. The castle, on a promontary in the middle of the town looked fun, with extremely long perimeter walls, but I had forgotten to bring with me my English Heritage membership card so we resorted to what was really Plan A anyway, which was visiting the local bookshops. This involved traipsing all over the town, and on the whole it wasn't worth it. One or two were good; most were appalling. When I am Prime Minister I shall enact a law for the ghettoization of bookshops. In every town the bookshops will all have to be in one area, preferably next to each other in one street. It will save me a lot of walking.
So we gave up on Scarborough and went north to Whitby
, as nice a little town as you will find anywhere, with a harbour and a ruined abbey and a Synod (though that,
if I remember correctly was in 664AD, a long time since). St Hilda's Abbey was trashed by the Vikings, so the ruins you see
on the hill (behind the parish church) are of a later 12th century monastic establishment. The River Esk broadens into a harbour. On the
right as you face the sea the cliff top is almost bare apart from the ruins of the Abbey and the parish church and its graveyard,
much visited by Dracula fans, for it was in Whitby he landed when he came to England in Bram Stoker's novel.
The town covers the bottom of the valley on both sides of the harbour as well as the top of the hill on the other side from the church
and abbey. We found a bed and breakfast establishment a couple of hundred yards from Captain Cook's statue and with a view across the
valley to the church
on the
other side. Not only was the view lovely, the place itself was immaculately kept and tastefully decorated. But (there is always a
but with Bed and Breakfasts) the room was hot and unventilated - if you opened the window all the gales of the north sea proceeded
to try to push their way in so that wasn't an option - and the quilt was thick and hot. So I alternately froze or boiled all night.
There are lots of shops of a touristy kind. One was reminded a bit of the streets between the Rialto and St Mark's Square in Venice. But whereas in Venice they all sell glassware, in Whitby they all sell jet, that black stone polished and used for mourning jewellery in Victorian England. And it appeared that every shop claimed to be the "original" Whitby jet shop. Whether jet is undergoing a revival generally or that it is particularly popular amongst the goths and other Dracula fans who visit Whitby I could not make out.
After a good supper in a superior fish and chip establishment called The Magpie and the rotten night mentioned earlier
we set off next morning up the steps to the church which is one of the strangest in England. If you walk round the outside you
notice that bits have been added higgledy-piggledy all round, and that the roofline includes two skylights which look like aerial
greenhouses. When you get inside you see why. There is woodwork everywhere, from
box pews to pulpit to galleries
. No wonder they had to
put skylights in the roof to let a bit of light into the middle. The galleries even go across the chancel arch
, and the pulpit,
a three decker, stands in the centre of
the building. All very eighteenth century, and you can see just where their priorities were - the Word rather than the Sacraments. When
we arrived there were a couple busying themselves around the place. He was filling and lighting a coal stove which stands in the
centre, right next to the pulpit. She, dear lady, rejoices in the title of Church Maid. One of her duties in the
past was to go round after services fixing canvas covers over all the box pews to protect them from any coal smuts which might
have blown in from the town below.
Clipped to the back of the pulpit are two curious
leather funnels
which narrow to tubes. With the tubes
joined they formed a primitive
hearing aid so the deaf wife of a one-time incumbent could sit in the rector's pew below the pulpit and hear what her husband was
preaching.
Its been a good couple of weeks for music. We heard a wonderful Cambridge University Opera Society Marriage of Figaro at the West Road concert hall. The singers, all young and at the beginning of professional operatic careers, were outstanding. We also went to hear The Sixteen singing a Victoria Requiem in St John's College Chapel. They too are heavenly, though the seats St John's provides are a slow form of torture that I am sure is confined by international treaty to American prison camps for Muslims.
We also went to West Road to listen to the Academy of Ancient Music doing C P E Bach, Haydn and suchlike. They play beautifully, but unfortunately I do not enjoy that sort of music as much as I ought. If the human voice isn't involved then I am afraid I just get a bit bored. Almost a flaw on my part, I hear you say. Not so, I don't do flaws (though my family for some reason do not agree with that self-assessment).
On Saturday visited two small towns on the banks of the River Ouse northwest of here. St Ives is a pretty place with a medieval bridge with a chapel on it, and an impressive and obviously loved church. When we arrived a wedding was just leaving, and inside the ringers were giving it all they had at the end of their bell-ropes.
Hemingford Grey, just up the river, is more of a village than St Ives. From the outside the church is even more spectacular than St Ives's, being on the bend of the river, with the tower just a few feet from the brink. But inside the church is bare and unloved. The congregation is obviously very Evangelical and they seem to care nothing for the beauty of the place. They would presumably be as happy to meet in a barn or a modern industrial unit - anything that kept the rain off - as in that splendid medieval church. Its a different form of religion, and one is supposed to be tolerant of the "other" but I can't help but think that an emphasis on interior religion and one's own salvation is to miss part of the point. Christianity without its history and without the Tradition is on a par with those Muslims in Saudi Arabia I was reading about recently who care so little for their past that they are quite prepared to knock down ancient houses, some connected with the Prophet, to avoid any sort of idolatry. Sad.
No photos of St Ives or Hemingford Grey - I couldn't find the camera on Saturday. It has since quietly slunk back to where I looked for it in the first place. Devilish cunning these cameras.
My son Harry complained about the picture I had of myself on the home page. He said it made me look grumpy. I am grumpy, so what's the problem? But he provided another, and I think better one, which I am now using. I had to crop it a bit to hide the oven glove over my shoulder - I must have been cooking at the time he took it - but you can still see a bit of it. Looks like something vaguely liturgical, but it isn't.
We spent Saturday and Sunday in London. On the Saturday afternoon we walked in Epping Forest. Muddy but nice. How clever of the Corporation of the City of London to buy it for its citizens in the late nineteenth century.
Sunday morning we went to the 11am Eucharist at Southwark Cathedral. I must make a note to sit nearer the front next time so as to get more benefit from the incense. Our local churches don't use it any more - great pity. I have but one complaint about Southwark and that is that one is enjoined on the service sheet to kneel at various points in the service (the Prayers and the Lord's Prayer) but the seats are too close together to do so. Our parish church here in Cambridge has gone as far as removing the kneelers from the backs of the seats, so one is forced to sit for prayers like a Methodist.
Southwark houses some interesting memorials, including ones to Shakespeare, who worked locally, Sam Wanamaker, and John Gower, Chaucer's friend. But the oddest is the one to Lionel Lockyer, whose epitaph contains no useful information on the grounds that he was so well known a man that everyone knew all about him. In fact he was a quack doctor, a purveyor of dodgy pills. He got a jolly dodgy sculptor to do his monument too - he's a very funny shape.
Here Lockyer: lies interr'd enough: his name
Speakes one hath few competitors in fame:
A name soe Great, soe Generall't may scorne
Inscriptions whch doe vulgar tombs adorne.
A diminution 'tis to write in verse
His eulogies whch most mens mouths rehearse.
His virtues & his PILLS are soe well known..
That envy can't confine them vnder stone.
But they'll surviue his dust and not expire
Till all things else at th'universall fire.
This verse is lost, his PILL Embalmes him safe
To future times without an Epitaph
After church we had lunch in a Southwark Peruvian restaurant. No guinea pig on the menu as one might have expected but good food
all the same. An then down the river to Greenwich where I at last managed to see the Painted Hall in Greenwich Palace. Also saw the
chapel where I was shocked to find that a collection of wall paintings of the apostles included a
St Philip
whose name is spelt with
two LLs. Where on earth did they get that? As I have complained before, anyone who knows any Greek knows that an extra L must change
the meaning of the name from Lover of Horses to Lover of Fat.
We didn't try to see the whale, and it was dead by Saturday evening anyway, poor thing.
