Tag: cathedral

Holiday at home

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A cup of black coffee and a Danish pastry on a table in a walled garden
Starting the week with really nice coffee

One of the most infuriating cases of semantic drift is the word staycation. It was an irritatingly twee portmanteau in the first place, but it did at least serve a useful purpose, describing that thing where you take a few days at work to stay at home and do nothing in particular, maybe take some sandwiches out to the park and read a book under a tree. I am all in favour of this. I make a point of doing it at least once a year.

But now it’s been appropriated by the travel industry to mean “a holiday in the UK”, thereby implying that a holiday that doesn’t involve a flight and a passport isn’t really a holiday, thereby attempting to make those who can’t afford or don’t want to leave the country feel bad about their circumstances or their choices.

I am not having this. If you’re leaving your house and staying somewhere else and doing something enjoyable and not working, it’s a holiday. You’re not telling me that every joyous seaside summer of my childhood was a mere staycation.

I’m not really talking about either of those things in this post, though. I’m talking about the attempt to adopt a mindset that looks something like this:

I live in a place that’s really quite beautiful and really quite interesting, the sort of place that other people visit on holiday. What can I do to appreciate this and make  it more than merely my everyday?

I mean, I got an email the other day from a steam train excursions company inviting me to go and look at “the serene beauty of Ely”, so I’m clearly onto something here. And so are they. It does have a serene beauty.

So what does it look like when I don’t, in fact, have to take a train to experience this serene beauty? Mostly, making today the day I get out for a walk/pop into that interesting-looking shop/use the coffee cup I really like/do a very bad sketch of the angel on the Old Palace. Allowing myself to take some time to be interested.

And then: How do I do this when I have a job to do and can’t just skip out to do a two-hour self-guided walk? How can I do this when funds are limited and I can’t eat at the Old Fire Engine House every week? How do I do this when non-working days are occupied with childcare? How do I do this when looking after the house is my responsibility, not that of some briefly-met and charming apartment owner or hotel proprietor? How do I do this, in short, when everything else still needs doing?

And the answer is, as it often is for me, doing what I can in the time available, and paying attention. If I would order a coffee and a pastry and sit at a table and people-watch if I were in, I don’t know, Bordeaux, I can do it in Ely. If we would go to a recommended child-friendly museum abroad – well, Ely’s museum is great, it has an exhibit where you can fill a basket with wooden vegetables, if that’s your thing, and meanwhile I learn about what keeps the landscape around me working (pumps and drainage ditches). One of these years I’m going to walk the labyrinth in Chartres cathedral, but in the meantime there’s a perfectly good one here. At home, I can take my coffee out into the garden for ten minutes, or stand at the kitchen window and watch the birds.

You might very well say that it is easy in Ely, where a wonder of the medieval world is my regular place of worship, where the tourist information centre squats in a house that belonged to a ruler of the nation, where the buildings are made of old brick that glows in autumn sunlight, where there’s a plaque commemorating James Bond’s Little Nellie on the side of the gelateria. You might very well point out that before I lived in Ely I lived in Cambridge, which must be in the top ten UK tourist cities. I’ve been in no danger of running out of things to look at.

And I would say, yes, and before Cambridge I lived in Woking (“ugh, Woking“, say colleagues), which is generally agreed to be an uninteresting commuter town in the South East – and, because I have been trying to live like this for a long time, I found interesting things there too. Woking is where the Martians land in The War of the Worlds. Once I cycled out to find the place identified in the book (it isn’t right in the centre, where the magnificent tripod sculpture stands). There’s the site of Anne Boleyn’s palace. There’s the country’s first mosque. There was an unexpected cycle race that sparked a decade-long enthusiasm for the sport. And apart from all that, I explored, I walked down streets to see what there was at the other end, I kept my eyes open. I could do that anywhere.

Julia Cameron advises taking time every week for an “artist date” – not to create art, not necessarily to experience it (though you might do), but just to fill up on colour and taste and sound and smell, to encounter something other than the inside of one’s own head, to be able to return to one’s creative work refreshed and enthused and replenished. That is part of what I’m doing here, I think.

And of course it also makes me more at home. When I follow these streets, I get to know these streets, I get to recognise my neighbours. When I know my town, I can share my town.

Do I succeed all the time? Of course not. There are plenty of days where it’s back to back meetings and lunch is a sandwich in front of the computer, and if I go into town it’s a frantic errand for a box of eggs and I don’t spare a thought for Oliver Cromwell as I dash into the Co-op opposite his house. Often the holiday at home isn’t even an aspiration, let alone a reality. But when I manage it, I enjoy it.

December Reflections 3: remembering

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A framed watercolour painting of a building on an island in a mirror, a framed prayer by Robert Louis Stevenson illustrated with a photo of an angel carved in stone, and a brass rubbing (only partly visible) hang next a door

In the introduction to my copy of Virginia Woolf’s The Years, Jeri Johnson draws attention to the way that certain pieces of furniture reappear in different settings through the book – the sort of thing it’s easy to do in film, but which requires considerable skill to pull off in a novel. I’ve been thinking of this a lot as I try to assimilate objects and artworks from my late father’s house into my own. Sometimes it’s been a bit of a challenge – twenty-first century walls are not, on the whole, tall enough to give nineteenth century portraits the breathing room they deserve – but this little prayer fits beautifully next our front door.

In Pa’s house (smaller than this one, and certainly fuller) it was clamped onto the end of a bookcase. It hung in the bathroom at the house before. And at the house before that, I’m pretty sure. I don’t know about the one before that; I was only four. Reading it over and over, it’s sunk into my head. I know it by heart, without ever having deliberately set out to learn it.

In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever read this prayer aloud. I would find it difficult to do the play the man bit seriously; when I pray it in my head, which I quite often do when I need a prayer in the morning and can’t remember how the Collect for Grace begins, I can add a mental footnote (‘you know what I mean’). I remember Pa telling me how when he was a child he thought ‘play the man’ referred to a stage role, and ‘perform them’ followed on from that. That’s got me thinking about how nobody (hardly anybody) really gets what ‘performative’ means (me included), but that’s not really the point here.

In my memory I also see it quoted in the visitors’ book – ‘… laughter and kind faces; let cheerfulness abound with industry…’ in the spiky handwriting of a dear departed friend. I don’t remember a huge amount of industry happening in my childhood home (my mother, I am sure, would beg to differ) but it most definitely had its cheerful moments, many of them associated with that very friend.

The angel – you can’t quite see in the photograph of a photograph – is from Southwell. We visited Southwell this summer, but I didn’t think to look for the angel. Nor did we look at the famous Southwell Leaves, which were in a part of the minster that looked a bit daunting to attempt with a pushchair. We did, however, find a memorial to the victims of the Katyn massacre – something we would most definitely have sought out had we known about it, as my husband’s great-grandfather was among those murdered. It brought us up short; we’d only diverted to Southwell to tick another cathedral off the list and find lunch. A surprise – a stop-and-think-for-a-moment – a remembering – keep it alive – keep them alive.

Remembering is an inexact art. Was that prayer really in the bathroom? My memory tried to put it in the bathroom at my father’s last house, too, but I know I unscrewed it from the bookcase myself. I’m getting confused with prayers for washing of hands. Already the family stories blur and swirl. My brother (happy birthday!) went to look for the house where those portraits must have hung, and now it’s a chip shop. Except that was twelve years ago, assuming he went when I assume he did. We write down what we can remember, and then wonder how long the writing survives. Digital decays fast: I shouldn’t be surprised if that framed prayer outlives this blog. As for the memory that goes with it, that’s another question. In the long view, it doesn’t really matter. If the prayer survives, it will be because somebody likes it, for the sake of its associations (my father, me, Southwell, who knows) or for its own. In the meantime, I see it as I put my shoes and coat on and prepare to leave the house:

Give us to go blithely on our business all this day, and bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonoured, and grant us in the end the gift of sleep.

Hyperlocal travel writing: Ely cathedral

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cathedral in grey-yellow stone against a blue sky

It’s the first thing you see. Coming in by road or rail it’s the biggest thing on the horizon.

They call it the Ship of the Fens. It’s a big ship, a container ship or an oil tanker, with a long, flat profile except for the bulk of the west tower and the blob of the lantern; perhaps it’s even more like a steam locomotive missing the funnel.

But that’s only one side of it, or perhaps two: south and north. Come from the west, the way I do most days, you see the lopsided, broken west front, a stark diagonal line where the north-west tower ought to be. Cross the green and you meet an incongruous-but-somehow-not Crimean war cannon.

In the town, you look up, and there’s the octagon peering over the rooftops.

Walk out to the north-west, towards Little Downham, and look back, and the cathedral is more like the submarine of the Fens, emerging from the folds of ground in a geographical peculiarity I still don’t quite understand.

If you’re down by the river on a sunny day, you can look across the meadows and the railway line to see it hovering on the higher ground in a kind of fairy-tale lightness of glittering glass and flying buttresses that leaves Neuschwanstein in the shade.

It isn’t fussy: you can see it from Sainsbury’s and Tesco’s and the station and the Fens and the top floor of Topping’s. The whole city huddles around it.

Inside, the light congregates at the crossing, flowing in from the nave and the choir and the north and south transepts, running up and down the octagon like the angels going up and down Jacob’s ladder.

I keep finding new angles to look from.

Cathedral seen across an expanse of water, with green bushes in the foreground
White van parked next a bench. The octagon of Ely cathedral is visible in the background.
A flat landscape of open fields with deep ditches. On the horizon there is a city with a prominent tower.