Sunday, February 15, 2009
Canterbury

Following in the footsteps of Geoffrey’s Chaucer’s medieval pilgrims, Stephanie and I decided to “wenden on a pilgrimage/ to Caunterbury with ful devout corage”. I arrived at her place at Wimbledon at 9 am and using the GPS, we found a rather circuitous route into Kent. It was with some frustration that Stephanie asked me, “What’s with this country that it is ALWAYS cloudy on a Sunday?” I had no explanation but I couldn’t help sharing her longing for a day trip that the two of us will actually do in bright cheerful sunshine. Still, if we have to wait for such a day to come along in England, we might well be waiting forever. I am convinced that the English are so relieved when they find a dry day that they have stopped caring about clouds!

The miles flew by as we caught up on our week. Stephanie already feels like an old friend and when we get together, we gab non-stop. I had carried a pile of travel books with me and en route to our destination, I read aloud chunks of relevant information to fill us in on the history of the venue.

I had visited Canterbury 22 years ago when the lines of Chaucer’s Prologue to the Canterbury Tales were still fresh enough in my mind that I could actually recite the opening lines by heart. I remember how thrilled I was to be following on the route taken at least a thousand years ago by pilgrims from the Dark Ages and how enthralled I was to be visiting the sacred site on which Thomas a Beckett was murdered. If Chaucer’s Tales were on my mind then, so was T.S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral as was David Lean’s unforgettable film Beckett starring Richard Burton in the title role with Peter O’Toole playing Henry II. Who can ever think of Beckett and Canterbury without calling to mind that chilling line uttered by a resentful monarch, “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?”–a line that led to one of the most brutal murders in medieval history.

Arriving at Canterbury, Stephanie and I found parking in a public car park not too far from the famous Cathedral. The city’s Roman walls were visible long before we parked our car–walls that were begun by the Romans and fortified in the Middle Ages by such illustrious kings as Ethelbert who welcomed St. Augustine who arrived in England in 597 A.D. in accordance with the wishes of Pope Gregory III to convert the Anglo-Saxons to the Christian faith.It was Ethelbert’s wife, the Frankish Queen Bertha, who took the teachings of Augustine to her heart, provided him with a hospitable environment in which to preach and influenced her husband to convert as well. A pair of sculptures that recalls the contribution of this royal couple to the religious history of the city is seen on Lady Wooton’s Green where they appear resplendent in their courtly robes.

It was St. Augustine’s zeal that led to the creation of the first Christian house of worship in Canterbury, a space that evolved under the orders of Bishop Lanfranc into the majestic cathedral that stands today. The ingenuity of medieval stone masons, carvers and craftsmen is plainly evident on the exterior and interior of this monumental building where intricate lace-like work decorates every surface. Twin spires rise up tall, accompanied by Bell Harry Tower, a square tower whose interior is covered with the most magnificent fan vaulting at a height of 128 feet. The nave of the church is the longest in England and the choir stalls are superb examples of medieval wood carving.

None of this architectural splendour would have catapulted this cathedral to fame were it not for the notorious murder of then Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Beckett in 1170. On that fateful day, four knights broke into the cathedral and murdered the prelate in cold blood. Henry II, himself devastated by the death of his one-time close friend, ended up doing penance for what he considered to be his part in the murder. He walked barefooted around the streets of Canterbury while being flogged by monks carrying branches of trees. These gestures only served to increase reverence for the good priest and devotion to him grew steadily until news of a number of miracles began to surface. Within three years, Beckett was canonized a saint by the Catholic church and the pilgrimages of which Chaucer wrote less than a hundred years later began. Soon, Canterbury was the most popular place of pilgrimage in Europe and pilgrims came by the thousand from far and wide to seek healing.

The devotion to St. Thomas continued until 1538 when Henry VIII ordered the Dissolution of the Monasteries. St. Augustine’s Abbey, which is located just a few meters away from the cathedral, was saved for a few years, but, finally, it too fell to the merciless designs of Cardinal Wolsey who ordered the physical destruction of the monastery buildings themselves and the confiscation of all church property which came under the possession of the Crown. The Shrine of St. Thomas which had been built in 1220 was destroyed by order of Henry VIII who wished to erase his memory from English religious history–perhaps the story of Beckett’s defiance of the orders of his king (Henry II) was too close to comfort for Henry VIII who needed the loyalty of his prelates to be able to carry out his own vision of Protestant Reformation in England. At any rate, with Beckett’s shrine destroyed, all vestiges of the saint’s existence were wiped out for a long while. In due course, this devotion was revived and today there is a perpetual candle that burns on the spot in Trinity Chapel where the shrine of St. Thomas once stood.

We entered the Cathedral the way generations of pilgrims before us had done–through the marvelous West Gate that is covered with detailed sculpture. It was here that I had a minor set back–dropping my camera on the cobbled stone street. To my huge dismay, the camera suffered some damage and I was no longer able to use it. Resolving not to let this damage my spirits, I put it out of my mind and with Stephanie promising to send me the pictures she took, I decided to find out tomorrow from a camera repair store if it can be fixed or must simply be written off. At the entrance, we discovered that the church was closed until 12. 30 and we figured we might as well get ourselves a spot of lunch. At a small tea room, I opted for a cream tea (scones with clotted cream and strawberry jan and a pot of peppermint tea which really hit the spot as it was chilly outside and we both felt grateful to be able to warm up indoors).

Once we paid our 7 pounds apiece and entered the Cathedral, we found that the inside contains minutely designed stained glass windows that tell the stories of the miracles attributed to St. Thomas while the spot at which Thomas fell is marked with a plaque bearing his name and a very evocative sculpture on the wall that contains three drawn swords–The Altar of the Swords–signifying those carried by his three murderers (Thomas had struck one down in self defence when they attacked him). This part of the cathedral is near the crypt, itself an enormously interesting part of the structure and not just for the details of medieval architecture that one can study within. Treasures of the crypt in the form of silver and gold altar pieces are also on display here. It is also in the crypt that the original 12th century frescoes can be found–albeit in rather poor state.

It was while walking around the exterior of the cathedral, however, that Stephanie and I were bowled over. The accompanying stone buildings that flank the Cathedral itself are so well-preserved and so evocative of England that we were enchanted and took many pictures. The stroll took us into the serene cloisters that overlook an emerald green courtyard that lay within the shadow of Bell Harry Tower. The cloister ceilings are covered with the heraldic shields of the many knights who were once deeply devoted to their religious calling. Stephanie and I were completely enchanted by this space and wished we could have lingered there forever.

But it was cold and we needed to move on and our next port of call was the War Memorial Gardens. At this point, since we were both tired, we returned to the Cathedral to rest our feet and a little later set out on our next expedition–the discovery of St. Augustine’s Abbey. We followed directions, crossing the War Memorial Gardens and the city walls and arriving at the King’s School and then the ruins of the abbey that was founded by St. Augustine himself. I was really tired by this point and while Stephanie used her English Heritage membership to tour the grounds, I viewed the excellent exhibition that retold the history of the abbey from medieval to modern times as well as showed a vast number of archeological remnants of its past vigorous life.
Canterbury was marvelous and Stephanie and I, latter-day pilgrims, found ourselves very edified by our visit. Though we did not stay for Evensong which was scheduled to begin at 3.15 pm, we did receive a fine sense of the ambiance of the service from the rehearsals that were on while we were visiting. I was pleased to have found a priest who paused to point out some of the most interesting bits and pieces of the Cathedral’s history and architecture to me such as the red marble flooring near the altar that was worn into a hollow from the number of pilgrim knees that had crawled to the altar in their thousands during the heyday of Beckett devotion. Had he not drawn my attention to this deeply moving feature, I would have missed it altogether.

Then, it was time for us to return to our car before our parking permit expired and to start the drive back home. We were caught it awful traffic on the South Circular Road which still has me believing that there was a better way to get to Canterbury and back from Wimbledon. But then we came upon an Underground station that turned out to be Tooting Bec and within a half hour, I was home (as opposed to the one hour it would have taken me to get home from Wimbledon).

Back home, I consulted my neighbor Tim on the best place to get my camera looked at. He suggested Jessops on New Oxford Street and I shall try to get there after teaching my classes tomorrow. I then downloaded the pictures on my camera so as not to lose them, edited and captioned and backed them up on CDs and decided to stop to have some dinner and one of my Alternate Baths. While I was in the middle of my dinner, Llew called me for a half hour chat. We caught up and by 10 pm, I decided to get ready for bed and spend a while blogging in bed.

Sunday, February 8, 2009
London

7. 15 ! I actually had to stare at my watch for a whole half minute because I simply couldn’t believe that I woke up at 7. 15! I was thrilled! It has been a long long time since I have awoken before 6 am. and the fact that I slept for a whole night was a matter of great joy to me. I went online immediately to try and find out the timings of the masses at the Brompton Oratory where I thought Stephanie would enjoy a visit. It turned out that there was a Latin mass at 9 am and when Stephanie awoke (after what she said was a very good night’s sleep), we decided to shower, eat breakfast really quickly and head out for the 9 am Mass.

And that was exactly what we did. We did reach the church a little after Mass had begun (but we did have to change 2 buses). The streets were deserted when we got to the church. The exterior is an 18th century edifice in the finest Neo-Classical tradition complete with an imposing columned entrance, a magnificent dome and a great many decorative touches. These were intensified in the interior which is a smaller version of St. Paul’s Cathedral–only this one is a Catholic Church. It is a superb example of the Baroque style with layer upon layer of decoration–Corinthian columns, gilded molding, paintings, lavish sculpture, old wooden carvings, marble pillars, a grand cupola–you name it, the church contains it. It was difficult to focus on the Mass as my eye was drawn to a new detail everywhere I looked.

Besides, the Mass was in Latin–so unless you listened very carefully it was hard to tell exactly where we were in the service. It was a good time for quiet prayer and intense contemplation. Both Stephanie and I went to Communion and after Mass, spent a little while admiring the grandeur of the church. It was close to 10 am, when we left the church to walk next door into the Victoria and Albert Museum where we decided to spend the morning.

Interestingly, today, Stephanie was the first person inside the museum! After we had deposited our coats, we split up. Stephanie decided to take an Introductory Tour (though it wasn’t for another half hour which gave me a chance to show her a couple of the Museum’s Highlights) while I went off to the gallery that contains the studies in oil by John Constable that were bequeathed to the museum by his daughter Isabel. This was a wonderful opportunity for me to get to know a little bit more about Suffolk and the landscape that Constable adored and attempted to transfer to canvas repeatedly. His base in the town of Dedham where has father owned a mill called Flatford on the banks of the River Stour, provided him with endless rural vistas to paint in various lights and at different times of the day. I will be taking my students on a field trip to Suffolk into Constable Country so that they can see for themselves the natural environment that gave rise to some of the most beloved English paintings of the 19th century. Then, I shall be bringing them to these galleries so that they can see for themselves how Constable’s works evolved from pencil sketches that he put into a pocket notebook (there is charming a reproduction of one in the gallery) to small ‘studies’ to larger rough first attempts to the final work in the finished state. I was held spell bound.

In the next couple of galleries, I saw other works by Constable’s contemporaries as well as works by the Pre-Raphaelites. Then it was time to go downstairs to meet Stephanie who said that she enjoyed her Highlights Tour even though it lasted only 45 minutes. Since it was time to rest my feet, we headed to the Cafe and over a pot of English Breakfast Tea and a fruit scone that we shared, we talked about what we had just seen. Then, Stephanie and I looked at the Plaster Cast Court and a few other items that I did not want her to miss.

At 12. 30 pm, she left to keep her brunch appointment with a friend while I stayed on at the Museum and decided to see the Morris, Gamble and Poynter Rooms which are also some of the Museum’s Highlights. I was surprised to discover that the ornate dining room in which we had sipped our tea was the Gamble Room–a magnificent confection of ceramic artistry on walls, grand pillars, a superb marble mantle and huge lighted orbs that formed modern chandeliers.

Just adjoining these two rooms are the Morris Room (named, of course, after William Morris, of the English Arts and Crafts Movement) and the Poynter Room. The former was decorated with the motifs for which the Movement became well known–a fine tracery of fems, leaves and small fruit on the walls in plaster, stained glass windows designed by Edward Burne-Jones (a close friend of Morris and his classmate at Oxford’s Exeter College), a very stylized gilded ceiling and chandeliers of distinct design. The latter room was made up essentially of ceramic tiles that formed vignettes on the wall. It was just splendid and I do wish that Stephanie had seen them too. In fact, these rooms were so unique, that I returned to the Cloak Room to retrieve my camera from my bag and took some pictures of these interiors.

It was a beautiful day–very cold but dry and wonderfully sunny. Golden light filled the quadrangle of the museum and I was able to get some good pictures. After resting for a bit, I started my discovery of the Sculpture Gallery that houses works from the Middle Ages to Contemporary times. I saw funerary works, busts for grand estates, garden statuary (mostly English but with some Italian works by Canova, Bernini and Giambologna thrown in, for good measure) and came, ultimately, to the Contemporary section where a vast number of works by Auguste Rodin were the main attraction.

By this point, however, my legs were very fatigued and I wanted to study the Rodins very carefully. So I decided to leave the museum and return on another day. I took the bus to Harrod’s and spent some time at the Jo Malone counter sampling some of their skin care products. Back on the bus, I stopped briefly at Sainsburys for some groceries, then got back home and spent a while reading up on Contrast Bathing on the internet in order to find out how to do it properly. I did receive a great deal of information and then it was time for me sit down and get some dinner.

I looked forward to settling down in front of the telly to watch the BAFTA 2009 Awards on BBC 1–the British Academy Film and Television Awards which are the equivalent of the American Oscars. Though I have not seen any of the movies except Slum Dog Millionaire (which I did not like very much but which is expected to garner a whole slew of prizes), I am looking forward to the evening very much.

Saturday, January 17, 2oo9
London

I am still having difficulty sleeping through the night. Today, I awoke at 4 am and spent an hour or so cleaning up my Inbox. As soon as my Inbox messages exceed 1000, I get rid of them by the hundreds. I also began reading Kamala Markandaya’s posthumous novel Bombay Tiger, published only in India and gifted to me by my friend Firdaus Gandavia in Bombay last week. It is a heavy tome comprising hundreds of pages, so will take me until the end of the month to complete, no doubt. The interesting introduction by Charles Larson, a personal friend of the author for over thirty years, has brought to light many little-known facts about this very reclusive author and though I was one of those rare scholars who had the privilege to meet her 22 years ago in London and was given the opportunity to work with her while doing doctoral research at Oxford, there are so many facts about her life that remained unknown even to me.

Over a carb-heavy breakfast (I am afraid I simply cannot resist the croissants and pains au chocolat that call my name so insistently from the bakery aisle), I watched the Alibi channel that features only murder mysteries and detective stories. I have become familiar through it with the Hamish Macbeth series starring Robert Carlyle (of The Full Monty fame) that is set in picturesque Scotland and with the Father Dowling Mysteries which is an American series set in Chicago! Then, I had a little nap on the couch before I forced myself to wake up, take a shower and head out for my lunch appointment with Rosa and Matt Fradley.

Only I made such a blunder. It was not today that I was supposed to meet them but next Saturday! When I arrived at our appointed spot at noon, they were nowhere to be seen. A short call on my cell phone cleared up the confusion. But no harm, no foul. I had carried my book 24 Great Walks in London with me, so I simply selected a walk in Mayfair and off I went. I will now see them next week at Shepherd’s Market, a tiny tucked-away cobbled square right behind Piccadilly which is full of old pubs and small neighborly shops.

This walk was by far the least interesting of the many self-guided walks I have taken so far–in fact, it was positively dull. The walk on New Bond Street took me past some of the fanciest designer shops and I did stray into a couple to try on merchandise that at the discounts being offered seem too good to be true–Cartier and Burberry’s, for instance. Then, I arrived at the Old Bond Street Underground Station where the walk officially began.

I passed by the house of composer Handel (now the Handel House Museum) but did not go inside. It is a rather nondescript brick building right besides the Jo Malone salon where I had my unforgettable facial the other day–and it is said to be haunted by the ghost of a perfumed woman who could be one of the two sopranos who vied for roles in Handel’s operas. Right next door, for a while lived the famous guitarist Jimi Hendrix, and he too is reported to have seen a female ghost there.

On Vere Street, I stopped to see the inside of pretty St. Peter’s Church which is rather ornate. The streets behind Oxford Street are basically residential–lined with Georgian terraced houses punctuated with the occasional mews. These lanes that once hid stables in which the horses of the owners of these fancy homes were kept have been converted rather ingeniously into expensive contemporary housing, the ground floor stables being used as garages today while the upper rooms that once housed the syces and grooms are now occupied by yuppies who enjoy the proximity to their places of work in London that such housing offers.

In one of the mews is concealed the home of a Dr. Steven Ward, an osteopath, who in the 1960s, obtained a lucrative second income by introducing influential society men to young and attractive girls. One of these was a 17-year old named Christine Keeler who moved in with Ward and was visited here by two men–a Russian diplomat named Eugene Ivanov and an Englishman named John Profumo who just happened to be the English War Minister at the time. This liaison posed a potential security threat and resulted in the infamous Profumo Scandal.

A few streets ahead, I arrived at No. 2 Wimpole Street where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle leased a consulting room in 1861 as an ophthalmologist and awaited his patients’ arrival. When none turned up, he began to spend his time writing short stories about a dapper detective named Sherlock Holmes which he sold to the local publications. These caught the public imagination and made Holmes a household name in Victorian England and Doyle one of the most successful writers of the time.

From this point, my rambles became rather pointless. I passed by a garden called the Paddington Street Gardens where I stopped to eat a sandwich lunch (I had picked up a sandwich earlier from the Waitrose on Marylebon High Street). This was once a burial ground and 80,000 people are buried under the well manicured lawns (though you would never guess this) and mature trees–now, of course, devoid of their foliage. On Manchester Street, I passed by the home of a Joanna Southcott who in 1814 fooled the world into believing that she was going to deliver the Messiah though she was 64 years old. 22 doctors pronounced her pregnant but when 9 months passed and she did not deliver her child, the medics continued their vigil by her bed side until she died three months later. The false pregnancy turned out to be internal flatulence and a glandular enlargement of her breasts! Thank God for modern-day sonograms!!!

Soon I was crossing into busy Baker Street and arriving at the home of the world’s most famous detective–Sherlock Holmes– at 221 B. This is the only location in London that actually has a blue plaque depicting the home of a fictitious character. So many readers kept arriving at 221 B Baker Street looking for the famous home, then occupied by the Abbey Bank that it was necessary to mark the location in some way. The bank even had to employ a full-time secretary to deal with the correspondence that flooded its premises from faithful fans. Today, the venue has been converted into The Sherlock Homes Museum complete with interiors and a great deal of memorabilia from the Age of Victoria. There is no charge for browsing through the very interesting souvenir shop and I did just that.

By then, my feet were almost caving in under me and I made my way to a bus stop and got back home as soon as I could so that I could rest my weary feet and indulge in a foot massage. I intended to do nothing more strenuous than watch TV for the rest of the evening as I had enough exertion for one day.

In fact, I think that I shall also take it easy tomorrow and but for lunch with my next door neighbors, Tim and Barbara, I’m glad that I have nothing lined up.