Catching up

Spent our last morning in London in the launderette where the woman in charge, with some amusement, was letting one of her customers show us how to work everything. The women were all giving each other cheek and generally enjoying themselves.

Before we left London, we had a cup of coffee in a café run by a man who was more than a little off the wall. He sang, and he made ridiculous jokes, and claimed that the old woman assistant and the attractive young assistant were both madly in love with him. He had a voice like a door in need of oiling, and appeared to do far more talking than working. But it was fun to be there watching and listening.

Onto Northampton to see Celia’s two sisters and their husbands for a couple of days. This is the last time we’ll catch up with them and it was all a bit sad when we left. Watched the latest James Bond movie on DVD because my brother-in-law is a mad Bond fan, and has all the movies in his library. (When he came to NZ a few years ago he watched most of my son’s collection of Bond movies…!)

We also went to see Ratatouille, which Celia had been keen to see for a while – even though it’s an animated movie and she normally falls asleep during them!

Stopped off in Cambridge on the way back, a place we’d talking about going to see a couple of times previously but hadn’t ever managed to do so. It’s different to Oxford, which appealed straight away, but it has its own charm – and when we went exploring St John’s College (pretending we were students rather than tourists) we discovered just how pleasant it must be to attend University there. The buildings, dating from the late 17^th century, are certainly very pleasing to look at, and have been built to delight the eye. We didn’t explore a lot more (apart from a wonderful bookshop and the market) because it was getting colder and colder and a chilling drizzle was starting.

It's also a bit strange wandering around a town that has an area called Jesus.

And so back to Attleborough, by which time a cold that’s been hassling me for a couple of days decided to get itself into full gear.

Bits and pieces

We took the scenic route from Köln to Heidelberg, which meant we were travelling alongside the Rhein for a good deal of the time. And built along the Rhein are dozens of small towns, villages, and a few cities. Nearly every place had its own castle up on the hill above the town. Some of the them were more like fortresses, some had those delightful turrets that look as though they should belong in a fairytale illustration.
The more you travel around the more you wonder about all the people who live in these places, and what they do and how they all make a living. It’s strange how communities thrive in one place and not in another, how cities come into being in one place when another place never seems to grow. Just seeing the neverending crowds in the streets here is mindboggling. Where do they all come from? Do they all have homes somewhere? How did they come to be in this place at this time?
And as you travel along in the train you seen the endless building work that’s gone on: houses, factories, skyscrapers, railway lines by the million, train stations galore - and all the paraphernalia that goes with the presence of humans. We certainly make our mark on the earth.
And then there are the beggars. It’s very difficult to discern whether some of them are just conmen/women, or whether they have a real need. I determined not to pass another beggar by when we were in England, even if it was only to hand over a pound or two, but it’s become an impossible task here in Europe, where begging is a full-time profession for many. And as Celia says, some of them are so well-dressed. What are they doing begging?
How do you reconcile what Jesus says about caring for the poor when you’re overwhelmed by beggars on every hand? Do you have a right to give to one and not another? How much should you keep for yourself? The questions go on and on, and I don’t find the answers coming very easily.

Norwich Cathedral

I only realised after my brother-in-law queried it, that the dates on these posts are in NZ time, not British. Consequently we’re sometimes managing to do things eleven hours before they’ve happened.
Yesterday we finally went and had a look at Norwich Cathedral. It dwarfs all the other churches, even the big ones, that we’ve been to so far. Not only that, it’s like a collage: piece after piece and layer after layer has been added on. Other pieces have become hidden under Time, pillaging, spires falling, the Dissolution and so on. People who existed and died in one century lie cheek by jowl with those who died two centuries later. Brasses have been removed from most gravestones now, as seems the custom generally in England because they were getting rubbed away. Splendid art work from three or four centuries ago rubs shoulders with something done in the last few decades. A glittering museum of gold and silver plate is reached by a narrow spiral staircase inside stone, and there’s a rope, grimed with thousands of hands, to haul yourself up by.
We discovered that the innumerable bosses on the ceiling (not those sort of bosses – even in England they don’t banish bosses to the ceiling) are not all the same, but highly individualised. This discovery came about because each boss has been photographed and put on a CD Rom. It’s the only way you can see them clearly at all, since the Cathedral is virtually three storeys high.
It’s also like two separate churches. Half way down the centre is a kind of narrowing, a bottleneck almost between wooden structurings, and then the church opens out again into a second section as big as the first. I suppose you could have two separate services going on at once – quite apart from the services that could be going on in the Jesus Chapel and the Mary Chapel and the who knows what other chapel. All around the edge of the Cathedral is a kind of walkway, where there are doors and passageways and rooms. It would take a year to become familiar with the place. We were there for maybe an hour all up – and that included having tea in the Refectory: the name of the café but also the real name for the area that used to exist there where the priests and monks would have had their meals. It’s now a modern structure hung between the walls of the Cathedral on one side and the old Refectory wall on the other. A theological library sits up along the end of this section (this is all on a first floor level) and in the middle of the library is a piece of the original wall, about three foot by one foot in size.
It’s a church we’ll have to go back to. For starters we didn’t have the camera with us, so it just exists (barely) in memory at the moment.
We came out of there into Tombland, a street presumably named after an area that was once where graves were. Each shop in the street is called Tombland something (newsagent, bookshop, hairdresser). We went into the secondhand bookshop, but it was very expensive overall. Certainly there were some good books there, but it was geared for those with plenty of money in their pockets, like the old man who was buying up large and handing over wads of notes as he did so. We found a copy of one of the two boEllis Peters’ Brother Cadfael books we’re missing out of the series but at £10 it was just a bit pricey. Celia said, ‘Phew…!’ and that confirmed my feeling about the price!

Footnote: Norwich Cathedral is apparently named The Cathedral of the Holy and Undivided Trinity. And I forgot to mention that it has proper cloisters, in very good condition. Obviously Henry VIII didn't manage to get his nasty hands on those.