Thanks for the generous comments from those who have read this so far. As is usual, life at home overtook me, and this piece has been put on the back burner. I do intend to finish it, and include some of Deirdre's wonderful photos from the trip. Patience, please.
August 1st, 2002 –
Courtesy of a generous travel grant from Dad, Deirdre and I were lucky enough to be able to go to England for the month of August.
Our plan: to visit old friend John in Bristol for a few days, venturing out from there to points in Somerset and Wiltshire, then on to a visit to old friend Forrest in The Netherlands, first stopping for a couple of days in Paris.
Our goals: See some old stuff – cathedrals & Neolithic stone sites; do some bike riding; and, when in Paris and Amsterdam, see Notre Dame and some Rembrandt and Vermeer
After a hot, airless and cramped 10-hour flight from San Francisco to Heathrow – insert airline joke here; it’s the same as it ever was, more cramped than ever; what should be a space-age delight, soaring through the clouds is now a gruelling test of endurance – Deirdre and I battled our way from the depths of Customs to the surface air and boarded an express coach to Bristol. As the bus sped west through increasingly lovely countryside, we were finally able to catch a few winks, exercising a new-found ability to sleep while sitting up, now that we could do so without breaking into a full-body sweat.
Upon reaching the Bristol bus station I bought maps and procured some change, and, taking a mere 20 or so minutes to figure out how to use the phones, was able to reach John, our host. I met John in 1986 on my first visit to England. Stanette and I were hitchhiking from Wells to Bristol; he picked us up and shared his home with us. He has since hosted me on several subsequent visits, as well as visiting here in the states several times. Recently he was working here in the States, and moved his family here for two years. John walked down to meet us within a few minutes and we took a taxi to 148 Lower Cheltenham Place, our home in Bristol for the next 4 weeks.
No. 148 is a fairly typical home for the area, built for the middle class of the Georgian era; built of stone about 150 years ago, narrow, with 2 stories above street level and one below, connected by narrow, steep flights of stairs. As Lower Cheltenham Place is near the bottom of a gentle hill, street level is actually at first floor level, or as we Americans say, the second floor. Down one level, the kitchen opens onto a lovely back garden, adjoining the back gardens of all the other houses on the block and the street opposite. John was in the process of getting the place ready for renters who would be moving in in September, so it was mostly empty. He and his family were living in a city council-owned house about a block away. We made a bed of pads and sleeping bags on the floor of the master bedroom, then set out with our host on a brisk 3-mile walk to pick up his wife’s car at the garage. Jet lag had not yet set in, and we wanted to keep going for as long as possible before we succumbed to the need to sleep. Our hike gave us a chance to look around and realise we were really in England. Here’s our view out the front window.
I’m Large. Hey,
It’s Old Here! Look Right – Right, Not Left!
“In America, a hundred years is a long time. In England, a hundred miles is a long way”, says John.
Britain is an island, and it’s been inhabited for a long, long time. Its roads grew from cowpaths, with the odd Roman road cutting across. Americans built with the idea that space was infinite, so why not make a road 70 feet across? It takes about 8 strides to cross your average English street. Because most streets and roads are so narrow, people actually drive in the middle, only on the left when someone’s coming the other way; then vehicles pass with a gnat’s whisker clearance between them. Maps are deceptive; distances are smaller than they look. Many times in our rambles, we would consult the map only to find that we’d gone much further than we thought, and missed our turning because it looked like a blind alley or a private walkway. In corridors and stairwells, my shoulders brush the walls, and stairs are so steep I have to grab the rail and haul myself along. Curiously though, ceilings disappear into the mists. Walking down the streets, it’s hard to see very far, the buildings crowd so closely, the streets so winding.
Did I mention? People have been living here a long, long time! You know how your house gets after awhile – when was the last time you saw your walls, or your floor, or the back of your closet? Well, the whole country’s like that here. There is, sad to say, a lot of litter in the nooks and crannies. There are a lot of fences, walls, sheds, houses, and churches where you get the impression that a lot of people over the years have said: “Oh yes, we must get around to fixing that…after it stops raining. Come to tea now, dear.” But a wonderful aspect to this is that a majority of structures were built when there was no such thing as a building code[1]. So, unlike America, they’re not all the same scale and dimensions, all nice and clean and painted and boring. Roads twist and turn; buildings are built upon buildings, leaving little wedge- and trapezoidal-shaped spaces, where little sheds and rooms are then built. Then little penthouses and dormers are built on top of those. All the house have names, but apparently only about 3 of the streets do. And hundreds of years is enough time for the elements to write their names on a structure…it adds character.
When you step off the curb – I mean, kerb – look right – NO, stupid, right! Then, when you reach the middle of the street – LOOK LEFT! When in doubt, run! – the street’s only 8 steps wide anyway.
After a trip to the local supermarket for provisions, we had dinner with John and his family, which included his wife Daphne (Daf), kids Saphron[2] and Freddy, aged 4 and 7, and Timmy and Marc, 18 and 20. Daf, an accomplished painter and cellist, works at IKEA, Timmy just got top marks on his A-levels and wants to be a DJ, and Marc, an ex-Chinese chef, works for AOL tech support. Saphron (Pie-zy) and Freddy (Shreddable) are employed as manufacturers of cuteness and noise.
No trip to Bristol is complete without a visit to The Buttery. It’s one of the first things John introduced me to on my first visit 17 years ago, and it’s the first of our bona-fide sight-seeing stops the next day. We ate there probably 7 times over the course of our stay. Officially known as Brunel’s Buttery, it’s a little brick hut by the side of the River Avon, which flows through the city centre after being divided into several canals. The Buttery features a limited menu specialising in excellent and cheap bacon sandwiches. It’s not the kind of bacon we’re used to in America, which would be called rashers in England; it’s more like Canadian bacon, but less smoky. If you’re lucky, they’ll burn it a bit. Their chips – fries to you – are good too, served in a paper cone which you stick in a hole in the top of their picnic tables. Enjoyed with their peculiar version of coffee – made with steamed milk, powdered coffee, and sugar – seated outdoors canalside, watching the little tour ferries and various private craft sail by, it’s a uniquely Bristolian treat. The weather was hot and muggy, with a thick overcast which periodically spattered raindrops on the proceedings. We amused ourselves by watching the seagulls, swans, pigeons fighting for crumbs and scolding each other. For some reason, though aggressive, the average Bristol gull can’t hold a candle to the sheer rapacity of those at Fisherman’s Wharf back home. Freddy immediately bounced his bouncy ball into the canal, where it snuggled between a private boat and the canal wall.
At this point it would be relevant to note that the concept of “tea-time” has never died in England, although usually it’s not observed anymore by a cessation of all other activities; multi-tasking has arrived here too. Based on statistics which I’m going to go ahead and make up, the average English person probably has tea about 9 times a day, some of those instances involving multiple cups. Teabags are dead cheap – you can buy a package of about 100,000 for about a pound – and good, not the teahouse floor-sweepings we drink in the States. Magically, tea does not keep one up at night, even if you drink it right before bed, yet is still good for a pick-me-up when you need that. Toast is a popular accompaniment to tea, and the bread that’s available is very good as well. Even the little 7-11-type shop around the corner from our house had whole unsliced bakery loaves for something like 79 pence ($1.20). Every English house has its electric kettle, which seems to boil water in under a minute. Why can’t we have them here? Other than the fact that they would probably cause major power outages, I mean. So, tea, milk, bread, butter, marmalade and Marmite are the staples, without which life would be unsustainable.
The rest of the EU converted to the Euro several months ago but England still uses pounds and pence. Magically, this brand-new currency was created and suddenly came to be valued at exactly one US Dollar! (give or take a cent or two). A pound, on the other hand, always hovers at about $1.50. This contributes to a subtle, constant sinking feeling, resulting from the underlying knowledge that you’re spending 1 ½ times as much as you think you are.
Pounds are pronounced “pinds”, with a long “i” – like “pine-ds”.
House is pronounced “hise”.
No is pronounced “naoh”, or “nay”. “I know you” sounds more like “I nay you”. Sonoma would be pronounced “Suhnayma”.
Pence is pronounced “p”; the word “pence” is never really spoken. One p is one-one-hundredth of a pind, so it’s like a cent, but worth 1 ½ cents.
“Innit” (literally, “isn’t it”) can be added before, after, or in the middle of any declarative sentence. For example: “Well I din’t know the kettle was going to short out, innit?”, or “I got to stay home, innit, and watch the baby”. I read about the usage of this word in The Guardian, but never actually heard anyone other than Deidre or myself actually use the word. We ourselves used it a lot, though, to make up for that. I had also read that it was instant cause for a fistfight to say “Oo-arr” to any Bristolian, owing to its implied casting of aspersions on the recipient as being a West Country bumpkin. We completely forgot to test this out in practice[3].
John took us on a short totter around the city centre, where a good deal of new building had accompanied the recent turning of the millenium. There was another huge sculpture evoking masts and sails, a tribute to Bristol’s seafaring past[4]. Among the yuppie wateringholes there was a new museum, with a Discovery wing reminiscent of San Francisco’s Exploratorium, and a new footbridge over one of the canals. A life-size bronze statue of Cary Grant, a Bristolian native son, appears to be caught in mid-stride on one of the plazas. There are fountains and low pools crossing the plaza everywhere, with a giant silver sphere housing a movie theater sitting in one of them. Some girls and photographers were engaged in a fashion shoot in one of the fountains. It was all very “dirty old industrial city shows a new, aware, hopeful face to the future”, don’t you know.
Bristol is a small but cosmopolitan city, smaller even than San Francisco. The downtown area is filled with a twisting maze of small streets intertwining with canals, remaining from the days when it was a major port, hosting cargo ships that made their way up the Bristol Channel from the west. The older waterside buildings, warehouses and factories, dating from the 19th century, are being converted into condos and office spaces, with staggering rents. There are a few of the usual blocky, monolithic office buildings, and a couple of theaters hosting live musicals. Lots of elegant, jewel-like little houseboats are tied up along the canal banks, and several larger boats function as restaurants and dance clubs, all of them verdant with potted gardens on deck. One can also take small tour boats around the canals. On a previous visit, I had had the privilege of living for 2 weeks on a 75-year-old pilot boat John had purchased, tied up in the middle of town at the Prince St. swing bridge (the boat, not me). Ah, now those were the days! Making coffee and privitive sandwiches over the tiny stove, repelling drunken boarders that fell from the quay on Saturday nights, reading C. S. Forrester by candle-light.
We walked on to Bristol Cathedral, our first instance in what was to be a parade of completely awe-inspiring Gothic stone piles, each more incredible than the last. England has giant stone churches the way America has gas stations; there are simply bags of ‘em[5]. By the way, it’s a cathedral if it contains a Bishop’s Throne; otherwise it’s just a church, no matter its size or impressiveness. And in related nomenclature, a settlement is a city if it contains a cathedral; otherwise it’s merely a town.
Many of these churches and cathedrals were constructed over a period of several hundred years, some beginning as far back as the 10th century. Typically they were built in stages, with any one section taking 100 to 400 years to finish. Nowadays, we think of a long-term project as something that takes 2 to 3 years; a project like the new Carquinez Bridge, where I live, is taking forever at an estimated 4 to 5 years. Seeing these buildings immediately stretches your sense of time. They give you a perpective on the impermanence of our own culture, how little we plan for the future. The people who constructed them were not in a hurry; many of them, along with their children, might have worked on one cathedral their whole lives. The people who planned them thought in terms of lifetimes, probably longer.
Many of the churches are also ruins, due to a little fun-fest called The Dissolution, in which Henry VIII and Cromwell seized and looted all of England’s monastic properties, beginning in the year 1536.
“There are now in England several thousand churches which were
originally Catholic sanctuaries . . . The treasures contained in these churches
were of marvellous richness, beauty and historical value . . . The priceless
objects disappeared, like leaves before a swarm of locusts . . . Mobs stalled
their horses in the nobly decorated cloisters, melted the consecrated bells,
broke stained-glass windows, and sold . . . precious libraries to tradesmen, to
serve as fuel for their stoves! . . . Many of the most beautiful ruins in Great
Britain, such as the once exquisitely sculptured Melrose Abbey, are eloquent
reminders of Protestant iconoclasts and pillagers.”
{John Stoddard, Rebuilding a Lost Faith, NY: P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1922, pp.132-133}
Bristol Cathedral is made of the yellowish sandstone native to the area, and typical of the style, sports gargoyles, chimera, saints and kings wherever you look. As I was to find out later, the name gargoyle is only applied to those creatures who protrude from the higher elevations, whose mouths serve as waterspouts, whereas a chimera is a monstrous creature who serves no other function than decoration and intimidation. The curvy, ball-like leafy decorations are called crockets. Then there are your saints, angels, kings, demons, devils, frogs, dogs, lions, eagles, as well as just plain people, usually looking very put-upon – a natural look for someone who’s usually found holding up part of a building[6]. On Saturday afternoon, when we viewed it, a mass was taking place, and a wedding was either just beginning or ending, so we did not spend much time examining Bristol Cathedral.
The next day, after a proper mid-day repast of salty, porky goodness and sugary, milky caffeine at The Buttery, we visited St. Mary’s Redcliffe Cathedral. It was here that our cathedral tour really began, as it was deserted, and we were able to experience St. Mary’s at a leisurely pace. Let’s see:
Gothic – check!
impressive – check!
awe-inspiring – check!
gargoyles, chimera, crockets, kings and saints, animals – check!
Deirdre took many pictures.
[7]Aside from the incredibly impressive, awe-inspiring stonework of the inner and outer walls of a typical Gothic cathedral, once you get inside them the mass of detail and accumulated evidence of passing time is overwhelming – you feel as if your ears are being blown back by the winds of time. There is complex detail everywhere you look, including right under your feet; throughout the life of these buildings, people have been interred under their floors, with huge horizontal slabs of stone marking their graves, some simple, some carven with elaborate reliefs. There are often stone sarcophagi in niches along the walls, sometimes with carven knights or angels reclining on them, the resting places of influential friends of the church.
A typical ceiling will be vaulted and ribbed, sometimes elaborately painted, with intricate bosses at the rib junctions, and rising at least 30 to 40 feet above you, sometimes much more. There is always a huge organ, with the longest bass pipes ranging from 10 to 15 feet in length and at least a foot in diameter (unfortunately, we did not hear any organs being played on this trip). The seats for the choir[8] will typically be of ornately carved wood, and often the whole choir area will be enclosed in a lacy webwork of stone or wood arches. Some cathedrals, such as Notre Dame, have a series of small chapels around the walls, each dedicated to a different saint and effulgent with spectacularly wrought decoration and sacred art.
In St. Mary’s, the pulpit is made of dark wood and 9 feet tall. Around its faceted base are a series of intricately carved figures of saints, one holding a saw. A beam of afternoon sunlight burned down from a window high above, throwing him into high contrast. A huge bouquet of orange flowers blazed in front of the pulpit.
Unfortunately, while we were there, the Undercroft Café (literally under the church) was not open. Too bad; take a look at this picture – what an amazing place it would be to have coffee! If you could stand the old ladies, that is.
Stained glass is of course a major aspect of Gothic churches. I was under the impression that line graphics on the glass pieces themselves – pictures drawn right on the surface of the glass – was a modern innovation, but as I later found when we got to Wells Cathedral, this technique was in use well before the 16th century. Simple black lines were used up until the mid 1500s, at which time the technique of painting the pane with colored ground glass in a liquid medium, then firing, was discovered in the Netherlands. As one might imagine, due to the fragility of glass, stained-glass windows are a high-maintenance furnishing, but a surprising number of churches still have much of the original glass in their windows. One of St. Mary’s pleas for donations cites the fact that, due to the major range of temperature changes that the walls endure, the leaden window frames are buckling.
Leaving St. Mary’s, we then proceeded to walk ourselves silly (about 10 miles by the time we got home, I reckon), starting by going east along the Avon Riverwalk towards the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Here’s a picture of the beginning of this walk, with St Mary’s in the background; we walked along the opposite side of the river, to the right. Here’s a map of the beginning of our walk. Note the place where Deirdre found a 5-pound note on the ground!
The bridge spans the Avon Gorge, a spectacular canyon several hundred feet deep and about a quarter-mile wide. The River Avon flows its last couple of miles through the Gorge before it pours into the Severn, a much larger river which eventually becomes the Bristol Channel and leads out to the Celtic Sea. Wales is on the north side of the Severn, Bristol on the south. Spectacular vertical cliffs, favored by rock-climbers, make up both sides of the Gorge.
Before we reaching the gorge, however, we had the fortuitous circumstance of being stricken with a craving for a little sit-down and some ice-cream. A little brick hut – Bristol must abound with them, that’s two so far – hove into view along the path, evidently a café with a bicycle theme judging by the two-wheeled machines and the stacks of cycling magazines strewn about the place. I had been planning to acquire a pair of used bicycles to assist in our recreational pursuits, and through email communication with the nice people at the Mud Dock bike shop had the telephone number of a Bristol Cycle Hire, reputedly the only place in town with rentals and used bikes for sale. By sheer luck we had stumbled upon the very place! Chris, the proprietor, ran the place as part of a deal with the Bristol City Council, which had created a bicycling incentive program and then discovered that no one in the city rented bikes. He was able to show us a pair of used Raleighs (pronounced “rally”), the perfect urban bikes in that they functioned perfectly and yet discouraged theft by being really ugly. We tried them out, fell in love with them, and made arrangements to buy them the next day.
Continuing on the Riverwalk, we were treated to a spectacular panorama of the bridge, the river, and the Gorge. A row of now-shabby Georgian townhouses on the far side looked out upon the river, just yards away; what a gorgeous place to live, if you ignore the high-speed road just in front of your door. More Georgian townhouses in the elegant Clifton district, were visible just above them, on top of the cliffs. Jeans and sundresses, drying in the sun, hung from apartment balconies, bicycles parked behind them.
We found ourselves on the opposite side of the Gorge from home, as well as a couple of hundred feet below the bridge, in a nature preserve called Leigh Woods. Although there was a perfectly good trail leading through the woods towards the top, I deemed it to be too roundabout, and started climbing straight up the hillside (cliffside, really) towards the northern anchorage of the bridge, figuring I couldn't have been the first person to desire a more direct route. Though there was indeed a trail at first, it quickly petered out and we found ourselves climbing at an angle of 45 degrees or greater, grasping at ivy vines to steady ourselves. We grabbed a couple of pointed sticks to act as climbing staves, avoiding such debris as the several traffic cones that had been humorously tossed from above, and made good if strenuous progress until about 20 feet from the top when we hit the stinging nettles. Ow. OW. OW!! A bemused couple eyed us uncertainly when we finally hopped over the low stone wall at the top, all scratched and sweaty. "Want to buy a set of encyclopedias?" I said. They laughed and said we looked like we had climbed mountains all the way from San Francisco.
We sat for awhile and recovered, then walked on across the Clifton Suspension Bridge, back towards home. The bridge was designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, kind of a patron saint of Bristol. He was the man who designed and built the railroad from London to Bristol; he also designed ships, buildings, and the Bridge. He transformed Bristol; hence, his name appears everywhere. Completed in 1843 after his death, the bridge was a precursor to the Golden Gate, as it was the first large-scale suspension bridge ever to be built. It's about 1/4 of a mile long; it's 'cables' are actually not cables at all, but gangs of long, narrow, hinged plates, like a series of bicycle chains with really long links.
August 6th, 2002
Having picked up our bicycles, we set out on them for the train station, across town. Destination: the historic city of Bath. Bristol is utterly confusing to navigate through; the city centre is wrapped in the coils of several huge roundabouts, and I quickly got us lost, to the extent that we found ourselves cycling on the M32, a major freeway! To the accompaniment of many honking horns, we managed to get off at the first exit, and set off again through one of the more 'colorful' sides of town, where I was propositioned by a “kerb-crawler” (working girl) even while coasting by at a speed of 20 mph. After much sweating and map-consultation, we eventually made it to Temple Meads station, a gloriously Gothic pile also designed by Brunel. We bought tickets and loaded bikes and selves on the train to Bath, 13 miles and 20 minutes away.
Bath is one of the most famous, beautiful, and historic cities in England. Its “crescents” and “circuses” – curving and circular rows of stately Georgian townhomes – have been featured in countless movies, especially the Jane Austen stories which have been so popular over the last few years. Many of Austen’s stories visit or take place in Bath. The city itself is named for the Roman baths complex, Aque Sulis, which was located here almost 2,000 years ago. Though the Romans left and the baths were lost and buried, Bath continued to grow as a city until it became quite a fashionable place for the upper class to live and vacation in the Georgian and Victorian eras.
We had a delicious lunch at Sally Lunn's, known for its huge, soft bread buns and reputed to be the oldest house in Bath. We then meandered our way up to the Museum of Costume, something I know all of my re-enactment fair friends would like. The exhibits cover English and some American fashion from the 16th to the 20th century, and there are hand-held audio guides to give detailed explanations of the exhibits. A current special exhibit is of 14 of Queen Elizabeth II’s gowns, lent by Herself for Her Jubilee celebration. Her special-event wardrobe runs the spectrum of the after-dinner mint bowl; pale yellows, greens and blues, each gown uglier than the last, despite their pounds of pearl and diamond decorations.
After coffee and a cream tea -- little scones with a bowl of clotted cream, and strawberries -- we wandered down to the Weir and the Pulteney Bridge, first stopping briefly into another stunningly impressive Gothic church (yawn[9]). The Weir is a low, horseshoe shaped terraced waterfall effect in the River Avon, with the bridge and its shops crossing over it in graceful arches. By then it was almost 6pm: time for a torchlit tour of the Roman Baths.
For history and archeology nuts, this is a must-see, a truly incredible experience. Despite our aching legs and feet, the magic of the museum quickly took us over, and we drank in the sights and audio narration. It’s hard to say what makes the Roman artifacts so intriguing; perhaps it’s the sudden perpective shift that occurs when one gets that close to pieces of a highly sophisticated culture from two millenia ago.
Dating from about 43 AD, the baths were not rediscovered until 1880, when the basements of the houses built over them began to flood. An archeologist was able to get the authorities to buy and tear them down, and the entire original Roman Great Bath and surrounding temple complex was unearthed. A beautiful Neo-Classical, (Romanesque) structure was built over and around them to protect and exhibit them, adjoining the Pump Room, which had been built a century earlier as a place for the well-bred to socialize and take the healing waters of the spring.
While the newer buildings are gorgeous in their imitation of Rome, they pale in comparison to the fascination of the actual Roman artifacts and ruins beneath them. Just like a health club of today, there were several rooms for bathing, therapeutic soaking, massage and steaming. These chambers were heated either by water directly from the hot spring, or by air heated by wood fires, circulating through hollow floor and wall tiles. In the center of these was the Great Bath itself, a place for lounging, swimming and socializing. There was also a temple dedicated to the goddess of the spring, and an oracle. After an hour's walk through the archeological museum with an audio tour guide, we had a live guided tour of the Great Bath area itself. Our guide Jonathan was excellent, and we got to ask questions of him and hobnob afterwards. Can’t get enough hobnobbing, y’know!
We ended our wonderful day in Bath with fish ‘n’ chips on the plaza, gawking at the magnificent Bath Abbey, another – wait for it – Gothic cathedral. The front face and tower, looming over us as we ate, features ladders carved on either side, with angels climbing up and down them. An improv comedy tour of Bath came by, the guide evoking great whoops of laughter from his flock. We walked back to our bikes, still moored outside of Sally Lunn’s, unlocked them and rode back to the train station just in time to catch the train back to Bristol Temple Meads station, from where we took an unnecessarily long time to muddle our way back home to No. 148.
August 7th, 2002 –
Today I rented a car and drove in England for the first time! It was hair-raising at first, but got easier very quickly, and we didn't hit anything, crash, or die. We drove 30 miles south to Wells, the smallest city in England, where the oldest Gothic cathedral in England stands. We squirted through the tiny lanes and eventually found a parking lot in the center of town. We wandered up the high street towards Wells Cathedral.
But first, shopping and coffee! Today was market day in Wells, and the main square was crowded with outdoor booths. There was a flea market in the City Hall. A CD booth played the Worst of country, Irish, pop, you name it, all appearing to be bootlegged copies displayed in no particular order. We bought a wallet and a coin purse from this vendor and two pieces of fudge, then ducked into a pub for a couple of espressos before continuing on to the cathedral. Click here for more pictures of the Wells market.
We approached by way of the gorgeous Bishop’s Garden, surrounded by a moat where the famous “mute swans” swim (aren’t all swans generally mute?), then on through the cloisters and the graveyard. I sat down on the lawn and savored the incredible peacefulness of the little enclosed yard, before crossing through the gift shop and café and around to the front door of the cathedral.
[10]Wells Cathedral has been in continuous usage for over 800 years, and is incredibly well-preserved. It had just been cleaned – there were still scaffolds up against the west front – and it gleamed a bright cream color in the sun. As we moved slowly through, the incredible wealth of detail and craftsmanship began to seep in, until we existed in a state of amazement. Wells cathedral has some of the finest stained glass in the world, as well as incredible examples of bosses (little faces and figures at the junction points of ribbing). A high tower was added in the 14th century, and to cope with its extra weight, a huge “scissor arch” was built to support it at the bottom. Although Wells is one of England’s smaller cathedrals, on this scale that’s a fairly meaningless statement. And there is such a wealth of relics and artwork contained here that one could spend days and not lay eyes on everything. What a privilege it must be to work in such a place!
I lit a votive candle for a friend back home, then ran back to the parking lot to pay the meter. On the way back, I gave some change to the sincere, road-worn guitarist playing in the arched Penniless Porch, built for beggars in 1456 by Bishop Bekynton. He rewarded me by launching enthusiastically into a monotonal version of Ticket to Ride – I knew that’s what it was ‘cause he said so.
Back in the cathedral, I viewed the large, 24-hour mechanical clock on one of the walls, with gilded, wavering sunrays. Every quarter hour, horses and riders ride in and out of a doorway as the chimes play. It’s the second oldest surviving clock in England, built in 1392. After the chiming, a priest invited all the visitors in the area to join in communal prayer. We continued in our clockwise meander through the building, drinking in the wealth of features and artifacts, past a young woman laser-mapping the vaulted arches of the side wall on a computer. The side chapels feature incredible stained glass, including images of King Arthur. Wells Cathedral seems to take the concept of cathedral-as-museum to an extreme – there are 900 years’ worth of church-related art and artifacts here, everywhere you look. You could spend weeks in the building before you saw everything.
Mid-afternoon led us to the City Arms, a pub where we had an excellent lunch and for myself, a couple of bottles of local scrumpy cider (7.5% alcohol). I haven't touched any intoxicants since July’s Ren fair, so it knocked me for a loop -- I got 'legless'. I couldn't drive, so I took a wonderful little nap in the yard of St. Cuthbert's Church. This is another huge church, nearly as large as the cathedral itself, but humbler, its glory diverted by the more famous building. St. Cuthbert’s achieved its current state in the mid-16th century, and I have to give its lawn full marks for comfort.
By then it was 5 of the clock, and we had another coffee to wait out the rush of tourists leaving town. We then drove west to the Cheddar Gorge, an impressive ravine between limestone cliffs, with a cute little village at the bottom where cheddar cheese originated and is still made. All the shops were closed – everything in England seems to close promptly at 5, although in summer it stays light until about 8:30 -- so we just drove through, first stopping to admire the cliffs and get a couple more nettle stings.
Continuing west and north, we came to Weston-Super-Mare on the Bristol Channel just in time for a gorgeous sunset. I wanted to go there not only for the sunset but because it was the hometown of Monty Python’s John Cleese. We zipped the legs back on our convertible pants, put on windbreakers and strolled along the beachwalk in the brisk sea wind. We strolled out the causeway and around the end of Knightstone, a semi-abandoned spa bath (later used as an asylum), and watched the last of the sunlight slant through the coffee-colored murk of the choppy, sandy water.
WSM started to become a fashionable resort town in the early 1800s, its population quickly growing from 100 to 20,000 with the aid of the new railroad and the King George III’s earlier endorsement of the health-giving properties of sea bathing. Its glory has faded, although there is still an amusement pier, a couple of major entertainment venues, and lots of ice cream and junk food shops. As everywhere else, there is plenty of eye-candy for architecture fans, with some wonderfully mysterious-looking derelict and decaying buildings. Deirdre got some great shots of silhouetted fairytale towers, floating above the sea in the sunset – a good album cover for somebody. Finally, back in the car and onto the M5 to Bristol, where I – surprise – got lost briefly before finding a parking spot right in front of our door. Thank you parking elves! Tomorrow: Stone'enge!
August 8th, 2002
“No one knows who they were, or what they were doing…”
-- Spinal Tap
Miss D and I got off to a late start, owing to a mild hangover (courtesy of Weston’s “Old Rosie” Scrumpy Cider) and a flat tire on the rental Vauxhall Astra. After the AA man installed the spare, we scooted over to the rental agency, swapped for a Peugeot, and hit the M4 east towards London. The weather was dark and overcast, with intermittent showers, and humidity of over 100%. Navigatrix McCarthy instructed me to exit onto the A4361, which would take us south into Wiltshire county. After speeding eastward for quite a long time, we discovered that there is no exit to the A4361 from the M4, and simply took the next road going south. We stopped in the town of Marlborough, because I had heard there was good shopping to be had there. We strolled up the wide main street, looking for objects to take our fancy, but our money remained quiescent in our purses.
At the far end of the high street, we ordered tea and coffee in a church that had been converted into a crafts shop and café in order to avail ourselves of the toilets there. This church was dedicated to a saint whose name escapes me, and was referred to on its signboard as a “redundant church”. Your guess is as good as mine as to what that means, but apparently it has something to do with serving coffee and snacks and selling the wares of local craftspeople and painters.
It is an astounding fact of life in England that even the smallest, most insignificant church here, even one that can be humbled to the role of redundancy, could beat most American neighborhood churches with one nave tied behind its back in a contest of sheer size and impressiveness. The Church and Café of St. What’s-His-Name is no exception. Looking to be at least 500 years old, it boasts thick stone walls, good honest Gothic design, and a ribbed and decorated ceiling arching at least 40 feet above the floor. The cash register sat on a table next to a narrow arched doorway in the stone wall, the beginnings of a steep spiralling flight of stairs visible beyond it, inexplicably ending in another wall just as it began to climb into the shadows.
We sipped our drinks and learned from Hello! magazine that Kate Winslet had recently lost 7 stone; either that, or that Sharon Stone had recently had an operation to remove her winslet. I went to the toilet, and while there, gave Deirdre a call on the walkie-talkies we brought with us to avoid losing each
other in crowds. Yes, they worked, even through walls of Gothic stone! Refreshed, we strolled back up the street, got in the car and drove on.
At this point, though our goal was Stonehenge, we were only a couple of miles from Avebury and so diverted our course in that direction. A guidebook D had brought along recommended seeing Stonehenge at either dawn or dusk for maximum atmospheric effect and minimum crowds, so we felt we had time before we needed to be there. Besides this, Avebury was high on my list of places to see, it being one of my favorite Neolithic sites. Not as well-known as Stonehenge, it is actually more impressive in several ways. First of all, it’s free! Secondly, it covers a much, much larger area, as well as some of its standing stones being much larger than any at Stonehenge.
Avebury is part of a constellation of Neolithic sites clustered in a relatively small area in the Wiltshire downs. “Neolithic” means “new Stone Age”, and refers to a period from about 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. Stone-age means, of course, that the people had no metal tools whatsoever; no shovels, no swords, no copper, bronze, iron or steel knives -- nada. Everything they did they accomplished with wood, bones, rocks, clay, leather, straw, spit, snot, etc.
Our first stop was the West Kennet Long Barrow. A barrow is a hump of earth used for burial purposes, not just an Irish joke with one wheel. This particular one is 125 meters long, oriented east-west along a ley line, a line of energy in the earth that people with dowsing rods and curly hair can find if you don’t distract them too much. Only the eastern end of the Long Barrow was used to bury people; over a period of about 1,000 years, 46 people were buried in a set of 5 chambers there. These chambers are very small, not even tall enough for me to stand up straight in, and only about 4 feet in diameter. The floor plan resembles a gingerbread man, with bulbous head, legs and arms. The chambers were excavated many years ago, and small glass skylights were put in to allow enough ambient light to see. The tomb is far from creepy, but it doesn’t really invite lingering either; there’s just nothing to do there, and if you stay long enough – usually about 3 minutes -- a family of tourists with 5 loud teenage children will start running in and out of the place, playing hide-and-seek. Which, if you think about it, is a perfectly reasonable use for a 5,000 year old tomb. On a previous visit, I was treated to the playing of a good dijeridu player, which is another perfect use of the place.
Why the original builders incorporated it into one end of a 125 meter long mound of earth is a mystery; maybe they thought they were going to extend the burial chambers the entire length of the barrow, and just realized what a hell of a lot of work that would be and gave it up. From what we know of them
however, that is unlikely. These people appear to have had very specific motivations for everything they did, based on a spirituality oriented towards the natural world around them. Unfortunately, very few clues survive from 5,000 years ago, so it’s impossible to explain their actions without conjecture and liberal use of imagination.
Less than a mile from the West Kennett Long Barrow is Silbury Hill. I have a suspicion that Peter Gabriel, who doesn’t live too far from this area, wrote his song “Solsbury Hill” with it in mind. Silbury Hill is one of the largest manmade objects in the world. Chris Witcombe, at
http://witcombe.sbc.edu/earthmysteries/EMSilbury.html, describes it as “a massive artificial mound with a flat top. It is approximately 130 feet (40 m.) high, with a base circumference of 1640 feet. It is composed of over 12 million cubic feet (339,600 cubic m.) of chalk and earth and covers over 5 acres. It was built in three stages, the first begun around 2,660 B.C.E. The last phase comprised the building of six concentric steps or terraces of chalk which were then covered with chalk rubble, flints, gravel, and finally soil to form a cone-shaped mound.“ Chris has more to say about it, as does his reference Michael Dames, who has written a couple of books about the area which I recommend if the subject interests you. Suffice it to say that it’s another mystery.
What’s intriguing to me is the very specific, purposeful construction. There are alternating and concentric layers of different natural building materials, almost as if they were constructing some kind of battery. Owing to pressing concerns of the bladder, we did not linger at the hill this time, but I have climbed it on several occasions in the past, and spent a good deal of time on the summit. If you were to ask if I noticed any effects while there, any personal transformation or perception of subtle energies, I would answer no. But perhaps it would be more accurate to say no, not right away. One thing I can say is that I’m much happier now than I was
when I visited there in the past...so maybe the hill did its job after all.
Avebury itself is huge, enclosing an entire village. It consists of a ditch 30 feet deep, rising to a dike 15 feet high, covering an area of 28 acres. Within these is a ring of huge standing stones; within these stones are two smaller rings of stones, side by side. Imagine two fried eggs in a pan, where the whites have merged into one and the two yolks in the middle and you’ve got the picture. There are 98 of these stones, huge boulders in their natural state, not dressed and squared like at Stonehenge. The largest of them weighs 60 tons! It is estimated that, using leather ropes and log rollers, it would have taken a team of 500 men to move each one, plus 100 more to move the rollers. To build Avebury would have taken generations. One must credit these stone-age peoples with an incredible vision and determination to have accomplished these staggering feats of engineering; either that, or come to the conclusion that they simply couldn’t have done it, and that wizards simply lifted these stones into the air and placed them into position. After seeing and touching these giant stones, I’m tempted to believe the latter. Deirdre says that in stone-age hunting and gathering societies, women did most of the gathering and household maintenance, while men did the occasional hunting and security duty, otherwise having a lot of free time. This arrangement would have left them with plenty of free time to do all that log-rolling and stone-dragging.
There are plenty of theories on the hows and whys of Avebury, but I’m willing to bet that there was a spiritual motivation underlying it; nothing else seems to provide the kind of drive that would have been necessary to involve so many people making so much effort for so long a period of time. What other structures are built in symbolic shapes and involve several hundred years each to build? Lemme think… For those who are interested, I recommend Michael Dames’ books and a visit – you won’t be disappointed. But I do not recommend the Standing Stones café – it’s overpriced and the food is lackluster, I mean lacklustre. The Avebury museums are a bit disappointing too.
After a romp ‘round the stones, a bit of picture-taking and a spot of lamb-petting, we hit the road again towards Stonehenge. Although it’s located in the midst of the Salisbury plain, the land rolls and dips enough so that you can’t really see it until you’re almost upon it. And though the vast flatness of the plain tends to dwarf the stones, nonetheless they are breath-taking. At this point however, this segment of our megalithic quest must come to a disappointing end; you see, we arrived 5,000 years and 1/2 hour too late and the site was closed for the night. We walked along the road and viewed the stones through the fence for a minute, but were forced back to the shelter of the car by whipping winds and rain as cold as a Mark Twain San Francisco summer. We will return next week for a real look.
August 9th, 2002
Today we set off back in the direction of Weston-Super-Mare, to take John to pick up a used van he had bought, down near Burnham-on-Sea. This van, a Vauxhall Astra, looks like a compact pick-up truck with an enclosed box on the back instead of a truck bed – tiny, yet capacious. They are used in England for all kinds of commercial trucking purposes, from florists to phone system maintenance. They are just one of the many small, gas-thrifty vehicles we in America are forbidden from buying. Fiat, Peugeot and Citroen put out similar small vans, plus a bunch of other vehicles like minivans and ultra-compacts, with gas efficiency of 47 to 90 mpg. Even Mercedes has a tiny little minivan. And the reason we can’t buy these here in America is what, again?….
Pie-zy once asked, if it was raining hard enough, could you swim up to the clouds? Well if ever there was a day you could’ve, this was it. Raindrops the size of golfballs kept falling all throughout the day.
August 10th, 2002
Glastonbury
We got an early start for Glastonbury, the skies still dark and leaden. In the English road system, the M roads are like our freeways, 3 to 4 lanes in each direction. Next come the A roads, which are the main surface roads from town to town. They are exactly two lanes wide – except where they go through a small town, where they narrow to 1 lane with a stone wall on one side, a row of parked cars on the other, with the scariest sign in English driving, which reads “Oncoming Traffic in Middle of Road”. Between towns, the A roads go through the real English countryside, which can be stunningly beautiful. In Somerset, the view varies between fenced pastures, forests, streams and hedges. Often you’re hurtling down a deep green tunnel formed by wall of hedge and ceiling of tree branches, with a line of people behind you who want to drive 75, making it an ancient, green roller-coaster.
Glastonbury is the Haight-Ashbury of England, someone once told me. But it’s much more than that. It’s also the Mill Valley of England, and perhaps the Santa Cruz of England. In a land of mystical places, it’s one of the most mystical. Perhaps the most famous aspect of Glastonbury’s mysticality is its association with the Isle of Avalon, the mythical island where King Arthur was taken after his death for healing and rest, until he should awaken in the hour of Britain’s greatest need. Glastonbury actually was more or less an island back in the dim times, since much of the surrounding Somerset Levels were covered by interconnecting shallow lakes and marshes until people gradually drained them.
It has been a spiritual center for thousands of years. The first known inhabitants were a Druidic college, who reputedly maintained a perpetual choir, singing 24 hours a day, “literally enchanting the land”. It is the site of Glastonbury Abbey, which claims the title of oldest above-ground Christian church.
Glastonbury sits at the center of a web of legends – seemingly, every feature of the landscape and most of the buildings has not one but many tales associated with it. Joseph of Arimathea was said to have visited here, perhaps even bringing his nephew, the boy Jesus, with him on a business trip, trading for lead in the nearby Mendip Hills. And look, over there – there’s where they became weary, and he stuck his blackthorn staff in the ground and it took root and became a thorn tree. Now that place is called Wearyall Hill, and the tree is called the Glastonbury Holy Thorn, which blooms on Christmas.
Suddenly we were there – the Tor and the surrounding lumpy little hills looming out of the mist. It’s a folded landscape here, and because of high humidity, visibility is often limited to just a couple of miles. It’s easy to feel that you have entered another hidden, internal dimension. There are, after all, gateways to the Underworld here, so they say….John told us later you can make a wish on the Tor when you first sight it. I took a right at the street that runs between the Chalice Well Garden and The White Spring.
It’s a rural lane exactly one car wide, heading straight up the Tor. There are signs warning of No Parking ahead, but I go on anyway, crawling along at 5mph. The lane is screened in by 8-foot-high hedges, and trees arching overhead to meet in the middle. Deirdre gets out to take a picture down the green tunnel, and gets bitten by a mosquito. The plantlife here is exuberant…so much green, it’s wonderful to see. I’m struck by a sense of how cute the landscape is here. Everything is on a small, convoluted scale, but as they say in real estate, it’s not cramped, it’s cozy.
We arrived at the Chalice Well garden just as it was opening. The well is the heart of the area. It is one of the oldest continuously used holy wells in Britain, traditionally associated with the Goddess. It still flows at a rate of 25,000 gallons per day, with cold, clear, iron-laden water. The well has also been known as a portal to Annwn, the Underworld (….world, world, world…). And its present name derives from more Arthurian/Holy Grail associations – one legend says that the Grail itself was hidden in the well.
Thankfully, National Heritage does not own the Chalice Well garden. It is privately owned and lovingly maintained as a place of meditation. If you’ve never meditated before, this would be a great place to start. No matter what pretension or negative attitude one brings with one – and I’ve brought a few, believe me – the garden seems to blow it away with a playful kiss, inviting one to just sit and be filled with bliss. Even in wintertime the garden has this effect. It’s extremely hard to be serious here.
The garden was ours alone as we strolled in. It was still drenched with dew or rain from the night before, and there were thick, grey clouds overhead. Within a few steps we were at the well itself, with its beautiful wooden cover, bound with the overlapping circles of the Vesica Piscis design, standing open, the sound of falling water coming from within, below a curtain of ferns and mosses. We sat there for awhile and were soon joined by a small group of German women, who also sat in respectful silence. Visitors have established a tradition of tying offerings of bright ribbons and strings, pouches and woven straw figures to the adjacent trees.
In the 5 years since I last visited, much subtle, beautiful development and landscaping has taken place in the garden. The original winding paths and secluded nooks and benches are still there, but there are two recently rediscovered calcinate springs which have been cleared and made accessible. Lovely little shrines of natural rock have been built around these, and the little meadow has had benches put in, so one can sit without getting one’s bottom soaked.
The water of the well is not accessible from the top of the wellhead, pleasant though it is to sit there. It runs underground from there to a lion’s head font, where three community tumblers reside, inviting anyone to take a drink. The water has a reputation for healing powers, of course, and there is a shallow pool a few yards lower down called the pilgrim’s bath where one can wade or immerse one’s self. Part of the well’s flow is diverted to a spigot that emerges from the outside wall, so that people can come to collect water even when the garden is closed.
This whole morning I have again been having the sense of being larger, or that my surroundings are smaller. I think part of that has to do with the fact that, on previous visits, I wasn’t as well-heeled; to get anywhere, I either had to walk, take a bus, hitchhike, or beg a ride from friends. I was also shackled to what was always an amazingly heavy pack, while wearing an airtight raincoat. This time, I was actually driving my own (rented) car! What was before a half-day proposition – taking the bus to Glastonbury – was now a matter of less than an hour. But now, even the garden seems smaller. Or, not smaller, but somehow easier to walk around, like I have better, longer legs.
After our Garden stroll, we cross the street to the White Spring, a calcinate spring that was recently re-discovered. The White Spring seems to provide a natural balance to the feminine-aspected Chalice Well, a male counterpart to her Goddess presence. Housed in an old stone building, the Spring was in years past used as a source of drinking water for the area. The Spring was lost for many years, until about 10 years ago when it was excavated and the building in which it rises was turned into a center featuring a café, offices of healers and diviners, and a gift shop. That venture failed and the building closed again, but recently it has been re-opened with a fresh start aimed at establishing a healing and spiritual center. We had tea and a vegetarian snack there, and listened to the owner and one of his helpers chanting a song about the Goddess of the Trees as they worked at something. Water from the Spring rises in a cistern and flows from there through various shallow channels throughout the building, exiting into the street. The management provides little boats and rubber ducks to play with in the water. Arguably the dampest café in the world, the moisture presents special problems in building maintenance and wiring. The ceilings are lined, tent-like, with white plastic sheeting. We leave and walk on to the path up the Tor, a few yards away.
The Tor is a very large, fin-shaped hill rising 520 feet above the Levels, and is easily the most dominant feature of the area. One can catch fleeting glimpses of it through the folded landscape as one approaches, the remnants of the single, ruined tower on its top seeming to portend some great power and mysticality.
The path skirts the White Spring property, curving left through a tunnel of vegetation to the edge of the pastureland that clothes the sides of the Tor. A pastel artist sits at the gate to the meadows, sketching and selling her wares. We walk on up the slope; as I turn to look back at the town, the sense of everything being smaller returns. I can see the Abbey Kitchen and St. John’s church seemingly a few hundred yards away, so close that I mistrust my perception and think they couldn’t be what I think they are. I can even see the Holy Thorn on Wearyall Hill, across town yet close enough to see the little protective wire fence around the tree[11]. Within seconds, seemingly, we are on top of the Tor. It’s hard to reconcile the speed of our ascent with the seeming hours of muddy toil that it took me on previous visits. It’s probably the distraction of wonderful companionship…
Now that we’re at altitude, the warm humid wind blows with almost gale force, prompting us to don our windbreakers. The top of the Tor is popular yet not mobbed today. Inside the 6 story tower (the only remnant of a church of St. Michael that fell in a rare earthquake circa 1100) proves to be a popular place for the enjoyment of cigarettes. One can look straight up the tower to the sky, all the floors having long since disappeared.
An elaborate engraved-metal compass rose monument outside allows one to get one’s bearings and identify landmarks in the distance – a view of almost 30 miles is possible on clear days.
Other than a sense of accomplishment at climbing the hill, one feels like one really ought to feel something more profound at such a place, but it’s difficult to get into a reflective state with the wind blowing and the tourists milling around. This is consistent with my feelings on previous visits, although one can pick better times for a greater measure of solitude – during winter, or at night for instance. We walk back down, retrieve our car from Cinnamon Lane, and drive to the center of town. Due to my familiarity with town, we’re able to find street parking not far from the center, avoiding the hilariously named St. Dunstan’s Car Park.
Glastonbury’s High Street is a thriving shopping district, with more New Age crystal shops per square yard than anywhere else I know. We wander in and out of the Faery Dress Shoppe, the Hemp Shop, the Faerie Shoppe, the Fairy Hemp Shop, and the Mystical Jewel and Pewter Crap Store (names changed to protect the easily-offended). I treat us to massages from Yvonne Fields at the Bridget Healing Centre, after which we stumble out, yawning, and cross the walkway to The Blue Note Café for espresso. During my session, Deirdre finds an book from 1919 with photos of Egypt. During hers, I find little leather zip pouches, perfect for organizing that stuff in one’s pockets. We drive home and collapse.
August 12th, 2002 - The Chunnel, Paris and
Beyond
One thing about travel that may seem blindingly obvious to those not doing it is that it is incredibly expensive. It’s a fact that I forget; driving a car, it’s easy to think in terms of the everyday bills for gas and tolls, ignoring monthly and yearly maintenance, registration and insurance expenses. So maybe travel abroad only feels more expensive than travel at home, because one doesn’t have one’s normal resources in place.
When Holmes and Watson would jump on the train to pursue “the game” all over England and beyond, money was never an issue. Let’s ignore the fact that H&S were fictional and had fictional incomes more than adequate for their fictional needs. John says that, up until the great mistake of privatizing and selling off the railroads was made, the national rail network went everywhere and was dead cheap.
Not anymore. That’s a shame, because of its convenience to foreign travelers and its environmental friendliness. But it basically costs the same to travel by rail as it does to fly or to drive. The most maddening aspect of this is that you cannot buy a one-way ticket. Sure, they offer them. But the rail ticket offices really, really don’t want you to buy them, so they price them higher than a round-trip ticket. It's actually cheaper to buy a round-trip ticket and throw the return half away! You are also penalized for not buying your ticket in advance. A ticket to France on the Eurostar bought on the spur of the moment costs something like $4,000.
Other theoretical advantages of train travel are that it’s environmentally friendly, it’s picturesque, and it’s romantic. The reality is, it’s very, very hot. Trains are not made anymore with windows that open, and trains themselves generate a lot of heat. It’s hard to be romantic when you’re slimy, and the heat-dead brain knows not the picturesque.
I know it's inelegant and lacking in empathy to complain about this, especially when friends are stuck back at home. But if you come to Europe, you must know the truth: it's run by the Ferengi. They've had hundreds more years than we to figure out how to milk every cent possible out of a tourist, and they’re not afraid to do it.
So we booked the trip to Paris on the Eurostar, the only train that goes through the Chunnel. It's a lot like flying in that it's hot and cramped and you have to go through customs and security and check in early, but there are no seat belts and food costs extra, and you have to stumble down the aisle to fetch it yourself. At least you can get up and walk down to the toilet whenever you want. For $75 per person each way, no one cleans up after the previous group of travelers exits the train, nor do they refill the soap dispensers in the toilet or empty the trash. But 5 minutes before you pull into the station a couple of stewards do distibute hard candies, which more than makes up for such oversights, I guess. The Chunnel itself, while a monumental engineering achievement, is no big deal to go through, unless 20 minutes of darkness outside the windows thrills you. The entire Eurostar trip takes about 3 hours.
We arrive in Paris at the same time as a heat wave. Like the New York subway system, the Paris Metro is kept at a temperature about 25 degrees higher than that of the upper airs, but fortunately only a short ride was necessary to get to our hotel. There was music everywhere in Paris; while switching subway lines, we came across a Ukranian quartet consisting of a violinist with an 18-inch waist, swingin’ lounge lizard shoes and an Afro, an accordionist, a guitarist, and a stand-up bassist. They were fabulous, oscillating between instrumental pieces and songs - they simply kicked butt, playing right there in the station within the confines of a painted rectangle, seemingly a space reserved just for musicians such as them.
We stayed at a wonderful little place called the Hotel Residence Monge, at 55 Rue Monge in the Latin Quarter. I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is a building like almost all of the other buildings in central Paris that are not giant cathedrals or other historic megaliths: 7 to 8 stories tall, wide and shallow, with ornate balcony ironwork, the attic floors having slightly inward-sloping walls clad in slate shingles. We had a room on the top, in the rear of the building, small, but not cramped -- and with air conditioning! The building was probably 250 to 300 years old, but inside was completely modern and absolutely immaculate -- as I descended the stairs one morning I found a maid washing the bannister, something that hasn’t been done at the San Jose Doubletree Inn since the management bought the place. There was an en suite toilet and shower, and all for $70 a night! The management was wonderful, very helpful and friendly. We ate petit dejeuner (small breakfast) with the other guests each morning in a small dining room in the lobby, and had a good time hobnobbing with a family from Berkeley. Two nights of our stay we went grocery shopping and picnicked there in the dining room, with plates and cutlery graciously supplied by the hotel. The rear of the building overlooks a small, semi-circular amphitheater where people played raquetball and boules and practiced recorder and tai chi.
After showering, we went right out into the evening to see Paris. We were a ten-minute walk from Notre Dame and the Seine, so we headed that direction. We found a restaurant on the Ile St. Louis that some friends had recommended, but deemed it to be too expensive and went next door instead. After requesting a change of seats away from a couple who were exuberantly smoking with the most sensual gusto I've ever seen in connection with that activity, we ordered from the price fixe menu -- a fixed price of 23 euros for a choice of starter, entree, and dessert. For my starter, I got a green salad with sauteed "fowl liver", and have to say that, by itself it was probably the best meal I've ever eaten. Everything about it, from the greens to the dressing to the liver, was incredibly delicious – I was cross-eyed with ecstacy. Deirdre had basically the same thing, only larger, for her entree, and I just have one question of God: why can we not live on duck liver alone? Dessert was crepes suzette for me, chocolate mousse for her.
After dinner we walked a few yards to the Pont St. Louis, where a classical quartet was playing in the middle of the bridge, which was closed to motor traffic. The were excellent -- they played all the hits, from Moonlight Sonata to Sabre Dance to that flamenco guitar piece everyone knows (Malaguena)...The sun set, with a crescent moon and Notre Dame and the Seine as a backdrop and a balmy breeze blowing. It just doesn't get any better than that!
After listening to them for about 45 minutes, we continued strolling along the Seine, inspecting the many boat restaurants, the lovely bridges, and the statues that are absolutely everywhere. Paris has done a major cleaning job on most of their landmarks, so most of the stonework is a gleaming, creamy white. There were several amazingly good portrait artists by the Seine riverwalk plying their craft, managing to make every customer look like a movie star. An electric trio across the river had a crowd of about 300 on the stairs and bridge mesmerized, singing along to American rock and roll classics. A group of Korean students were giggling their heads off and singing along with an acoustic guitar. A woman leaned on a bridge railing, making a pastel sketch of Notre Dame.
We continued walking, south from the river. The weather was gorgeous – soft, breezy and warm, with people walking everywhere. We wandered into an area of narrow alleyways, filled with Greek restaurants, each with its guitar/bouzouki duo playing inside and mouthwatering display of raw seafood in the front window. “Come on in!” a smartly dressed Greek man in each doorway would say with a friendly wave. In between the restaurants were souvenir shops, with postcards, caps and t-shirts, jewelry, watches, scarves and knick-knacks. On Deirdre’s urging, we consulted the map and found St. Julian’s of the Poor, a 500 year old Orthodox church nearby, making a note to visit it when it was open. Finally we limped home and had a beautiful sleep, fanned by Paris breezes, awakening at dawn to the sun rising over the rooftops.
The next morning was hot, and by the time we made it down to Notre Dame it was swarming with hordes of tourists, lined up and waiting to get in. We stopped for awhile on a bench in the plaza to listen to a girl play the bandoura, a zither-like instrument from the Ukraine, with 13 bass strings and a main harp-like section of perhaps 30 strings. She was really good, playing haunting, melancholy Renaissance or early music selections. A pair of Gypsy women in their mid-30s sent their six-year-old, masticating a breadroll, around to beg for money from the audience, already using that same husky, Gypsy tone of voice. Another Gypsy woman sat on the pavement at the entrance to the cathedral, pleading for money with practiced pathos. After agreeing that we would come back and see the cathedral early the next day, we set off walking along the Seine towards the Louvre.
Whereas on the maps we had of Bristol, distances were less than they appeared, here in Paris they were greater. We walked perhaps a mile down the Seine, perusing the book and picture sellers that have their booths along the streets bordering the river. We eventually reached the rear end of the complex of buildings that make up the Louvre. As we continued walking, we gazed down the building and saw that it extended into infinity, and realized we would have to have fortification if we were to continue. Retreating to the first corner brasserie, we sat outside and ordered a coffee and a tea. These, brought by a surly waiter (in Paris!? When has that ever happened before!?) cost 9 euros plus a mandatory tip!
Feeling a bit better, we wandered on, into a rear entrance of the Louvre complex, then down the quarter-mile long plaza to the glass pyramid that is the entrance to the museum. The Louvre is Paris at its most aggressively grandiose. It’s tall – once again, 8 stories. It’s long – looked to me like a third of a mile, at least. It has more statuary on it than there are stars in the urban sky. And on Tuesday, it’s closed! Which is what day it was, so we didn’t get to go inside. But by that point we were overwhelmed enough just seeing the outside. That Napoleon, I tell you…he thought highly of himself, and wanted you to do the same.
We shuffled back home, stopping at a bar for a not-half-bad Margarita on the way. This particular bar had my first example of the hole-in-the-floor-with-2-footprints-style toilet, to which I said, no thanks, I don’t have to go that bad. On the way home, we stopped at a market that looked about the size of a 7-11 on the outside, but kept going on the inside until I thought we were going to emerge in Switzerland. We probably shopped too long because it was so nice and cold inside. Then we took a sophisticated, Continental-style nap.
When dusk fell, we took our groceries down to the lobby/dining area of the hotel, where the owner kindly set up place settings for us. We ate our bread, cheese, wine and pate, and shared the room with a family from exotic, um let’s see…Berkeley! We exchanged cards and babbled in Californian. Then we took my mandola and strolled out again, down to the Seine, where we found a bench on the quay facing Notre Dame. I put out the case and we played a few tunes, with Deirdre on bones and spoons. It was a great pitch – we immediately made 3 Euros! But it was still too hot to be working, so we stopped after about ½ an hour and walked back home.
Wishing to avoid the rush, we rose early, once more catching the Parisien sunrise over the Parisien rooftops, from our beautiful little Parisien bathroom. After our petit dejeuner, which included a pitcher of wonderful coffee, we tripped down to Notre Dame and were among the first handful of people through the doors as it opened.
Inside, it was cool, dark and shadowy.
[1] Assuming there is one now. This is also something I enjoy about Crockett, and San Francisco.
[2] “La Croix, Saffy dahling, La Croix, La Croix, La Croix sweety-dahling…” Edina, Absolutely Fabulous
[3] This is a
holdover from Bristol’s former location in Somerset County – not that it’s
moved, but they made Bristol its own county recently. Somerset (pronounced
“Zomerzet” by real natives) is known for its rural folk, who have typically
indulged in various bucolic pursuits such as farming, cider-making, and raising
sheep and cows. As we were driving to Glastonbury a couple of days later
listening to the radio, we heard Drink Up Thy Zider, a live recording by
a group of Zomerzet hillbillies called The Wurzels
, which reached #45 on the charts in 1967. This provided more than ordinary
amusement, due to its being a part of my band Smokey Knott & the Boll
Weevils repertoire, although known more prosaically as Drink Up the Cider.
Their site provides a “dictionary
of West Country words and phrases used by Adge Cutler and the
Wurzels in their songs, patter, etc., translated into (more or less)
English” , including “Ooh Ar”.
[4] John Cabot set sail from Bristol in his ship The Matthew in May of the year 1497, sailing for 35 days and arriving in Newfoundland in June, thus “discovering” America ahead of Columbus, who at that point had only “discovered” the West Indies! Not only that, America was named for his paymaster, Richard Ameryk, not map-maker Amerigo Vespucci. …or, so they say in Bristol. This entirely begs the question that both Cabot and Columbus missed that huge continent in between, the one where we Americans live now.
[5] A cute English colloquialism: ascribing the volumetric measure “bags” to things which are never found in bags. Like the café in Bath with a tiny front, with a sign that says “Come on in! We’ve got bags of room inside!”
[6] For a fascinating discussion of the origin of gargoyles and other Gothic decoration, go to http://www.ulrikehoinkis.de/gargoyles/intro.html
[7] For a virtual tour, visit St Mary’s homepage.
[8] From Doubting Thomas: “Of interest here were something called misericords. No, really. Misericords, we learned, are a bit like gargoyles, only they're on the under-sides of the seats in the choir stalls. The chorister could be going for that high C, blissfully unaware that there was a grinning monkey's face underneath their clenched buttocks.” What they really are is a portion of the chorister’s seat that flips up, so they can lean back on it and give their legs a break during those long services. Anyway, the point is that there’s some incredible examples of decorative wood carving on these.
[9] One of the only disappointing aspects of our trip was that the high temperatures and humidity that prevailed for the first 3 weeks, coupled with the high hardness factor of the pavements, presented a physical challenge that sometimes left us unable to appreciate the unending wonders of our surroundings in an enthusiastic way. And one cannot see everything.
