Originally written August 17
There is something very, very strange about not knowing where you are.
I am currently in Lancaster. This is apparently in northern England, but, allowing for the possibility of teleportation, I could just as easily be in Pennsylvania for all I know. It's cool and partly cloudy, with large patches of deliciously blue sky, and I've just had a prefectly wonderful cup of coffee at Costa to kill time waiting for the train to Penrith. As far as I can seen, there's a fairly deserted road out one exit and a couple of buildings in that ubiquitous greyish tan stone out the other--no town in sight. Although I've just been informed that the town is not five minutes' walk down the hill in the direction of the buildings. Odd.
There's a sort of deep-seated terror of being lost that rises up in strange places like this. Obviously, there are people on the platform and in the shops, and I'm sure I could start walking in almost any direction and come across someone who could help me in minutes. I'm hardly, in other words, in the middle of nowhere. And yet, there's a sort of nervous itch that pokes at my spinal cord. What if the train doesn't come and I'm stranded here? What if I get on the wrong train and end up in Nowhereton-upon-Tinkle with no way of getting back? The unfamiliarity is disconcerting. It's the small, annoying Chihuahua cousin of the wolfish terror that preys on people lost in the wilderness with dusk approaching.
It's also wonderful. Familiarity, while comforting and snuggly and good for evenings in the winter, can also be frightfully dull. The sense of being, and going, somewhere new has drawn humanity forward for millennia.
And yet, this is all rather grand when you're sitting in a train station in a quiet town in northern English, waiting for a comfortable train to whisk you off to another quiet town in northern England. Or possibly Pennsylvania.
Anyway. I've just left York, which makes it somewhat fitting that I'm passing through Lancaster as well. For those not acquainted with English history (which includes me, but here goes), the houses of York and Lancaster fought for a good long while for the rulership of England in a conflict known as the War of the Roses. Before I'd made the connection between THAT Lancaster and the small, seemingly isolated train station I was sitting in, I'd asked a very talkative lady next to me if I was still in Yorkshire. Hah. Oops.
Keep getting off track. I shall tell you about York. Calling into effect the First Day Rule, I dropped off my stuff at my new hostel (which was, unfortunately, 20 minutes' walk out of town) and went to have a little look around. The sun was shining brilliantly, it was warm and lovely, and so naturally, the only thing for it was to find cafe with tables out in the sun and have afternoon tea, which I promptly did while planning my next move. This turned out to be getting a ticket for a local performance of Henry IV, Part II--an exciting prospect, since I'd seen Part 1 in London (as you may remember) and was disappointed that I wouldn't be able to see the end. Having got my ticket for that afternoon, I set off walking on a bit of York's medieval wall, a pleasant stroll made fantastic by the views of the enormous, creamy white minster looming in a dignified, meranguey sort of way over the busy town center. I'd intended to walk the town walls all the way round, but got easily distracted by Goodramgate, a street leading into York's center positively overflowing with charity shops.
Charity shops are a wonderful idea. Apparently, charities open a shop and ask for donations, and at least part of the profits they make selling people's unwanted stuff to other people goes to fund the charity. Basically, it's like Value Village, except small, English, and for the benefit of heart patients or orphans or something. Not needing clothes, board games, furniture, dishes, or jewelry, I always make a beeline for the bookshelves, because if I'm lucky, I just might find a book I'd like to read. I've already mentioned how I bought far too many books at an Oxfam store in Liverpool, and yet I just can't seem to stay away.
The interesting thing about these places is that you only find there things that people have at one point owned, decided they don't want or need anymore, and have accordingly given away. If you're looking for particular books, like I am, that are popular at the moment, you're not likely to find them, because they're popular, and therefore people are reading and keeping them. The great thing about this is that you can kind of get a feel for unpopular books by their relative frequency between stores. Find one copy of something, and one person doesn't want it; find ten or twelve, and clearly, a lot of people don't want it. This is why I laugh to myself every time I find a brand new hardcover of one of Jeremy Clarkson's books, which happens in about half or more of the shops I've been in. The only people who are ambivalent about Clarkson, it seems, are the people who don't know about him.
Incidentally, in almost every one of these shops, there is also a copy of Jane Eyre. But I digress.
I was doing really well in the not-buying-more-books department until I came across an honest-to-goodness Oxfam bookstore and found yet another book I can't live without. Ah well.
I returned to the middle of town for evensong at the minster. I didn't have much time to look at the church and was ushered straight into the choir, where a guest choir from Arkansas sang the service quite beautifully. I only had time to peek around a few corners before I was chased out of the minster again and was left staring up at the spires rising golden above my head in the afternoon sunlight.
I carried on wandering through town and finally made my way to the church that had been converted to a theater for the play. Although I was a little too cold, the play was fairly good, if still somewhat baffling. I was reminded of when I picked up third-quarter physics to complete a GUR when I'd taken the first two quarters at a different college two years previously: I had a vague idea of what was going on, but I'd forgotten some important details (like which names belonged on which side) and, of course, all the faces were different. So, frustrating, but on the whole not bad. On a random note, during the play they mention that the King's forces are divided because he's also fighting Owen Glendower; this made me smile, because Glendower's rebellion was in North Wales, where I'd just been, and I'd been hearing about the noble Welsh rebels' fight at Conwy castle. Nothing like a little personal connection to give a story some context. I left contemplating the nature of kingship, the passage of time, and the meaning of loyalty, but was quickly brought back to earth by having to walk around a man who was standing on the pavement outside a bar with his friends, laughing as he urinated on the wall. Turns out the theatre/church is right in the middle of the bar and clubs area, so I had to wend my way past scantily dressed girls and drunk men to end up, eventually, back at my hostel.
I made it into town the next morning after a nice stroll down the river just in time for a walking tour around the city. The tour covered mostly ground I'd seen the day before, but I was introduced to some new places as well as learning more about what I'd seen before. After the tour, I got lunch at Greggs (<3!) and popped into a small church in the middle of the bustling shopping area.
This was an interesting thing. The cars were whizzing by, the people hurrying past, and yet all of them seemed to be completely oblivious to or uninterested in the fact that there was a very nice-looking church right there in the middle of it all. I wandered in to find something I always treasure: a calm, cool, peaceful, beautiful santuary. The traffic was right outside, but inside the stone walls, it was quiet and unruffled--and totally deserted. A poster on the wall told the sad story of how the church had once been grander, with much more land, but slowly, bit by bit, it had sacrificed more and more to the growing city around it. It reminded me of the giving tree in a way: dignified but a little sad.
I made my way through the center of the town, taking some pictures of the Shambles--a narrow, shop-lined street dating from way back in the day, medieval times or something. The shops on the ground floor are modern, but overhead, the old houses lean and sag into each other with a sort of sleepy forgetfulness. Eventually I made my way around town to the Castle Museum, which had exhibits on things like washing machines and wedding dresses that were mildly interesting, and a recreation of Victorian-era street, down which I walked, pretending I was Sherlock Holmes. I also wandered through the '60s (it was scary) and York's old prison. I then spent far too much time on the Internet at the local McDonald's and finally made it back to the hostel late only to find a nice young lady from Japan with whom I had a very nice conversation before finally going to bed.
The next day, then August the 16th, was cool and cloudy, and that to me means museum, so I hung out in the Yorkshire museum look at the skulls of YOrk's citizens from thousands of years ago, old jewelry and pottery and a could of animal skeletons. I then finally made my way to York's Minster and wandered about with my head thrown back and my jaw hanging. The minster is enormous, and inside it feels huge, but it's also airy and full of light. I also paid a few quid extra to climb the tower, and peered through the wire caging to keep people from throwing themselves off (apparently) until the guard made me go back down. After dinner, I spent more time in McDonald's, mostly downloading a bunch of shows from the BBC to keep me occupied in my internetlessness.
My final day in York, I spend the morning running around doing errands. I managed to mail off most of my library and donate a couple books I didn't want to keep. As I keep mentioning, I've been compulsively buying books all over the place, and this has led to a rather heavy "travel library" that I don't want to keep carting around. Instead, I mailed them to myself in Germany, so I'll have my own library already started when I get there. In the remaining time before my train departed, I returned to the minster and had a quick look around the undercroft and treasury and one last gawp at the magnificence of it all before I had to book it to the train station for a very long journey to Keswick.
At the station, I got pulled in by the irresistable gravity well of a WH Smith and bought two more books. Facepalm.
No comments:
Post a Comment