I am dead tired and have not taken many notes over the past few days. It will be interesting to see how this goes.
I remember two key impressions upon my arrival in Nottingham: it was much smaller and slower-paced than London, and it seemed to be a lively city of innovation. While it does not have a very impressive historic center, its city center is a pedestrian-only zone with such attractions as a little fairgrounds and ping pong tables for public use. I spent little time in the center of Nottingham, as I mostly just wanted to get some work done and relax, but I enjoyed visiting its castle and the oldest inn in all of England, and I went to two Asian grocery markets (i.e., East Asian), satisfying the need for Chinese food that makes me go crazy if I have to go a month or more without it.
Visiting Lincoln reminded me of the source of my reflection on people's desire for self-determination. While Lincoln had an incredible ensemble of historic buildings, including a massive cathedral, a castle, the remains of a Roman arch and well, the oldest synagogue in all of England, parts of the old city wall, and a ton of old houses, it also used to have many more Roman ruins before those were demolished in the 17th and 18th centuries to improve traffic flow and make way for newer buildings. Lincoln once had the tallest free-standing building in the world, the spire of its cathedral, which was toppled in an earthquake and only partially reconstructed; all trace of most of the buildings on its castle grounds has disappeared; and even its castle itself, like a great many castles and cathedrals in England, was remodeled over hundreds of years. I was reminded, while in Lincoln, of Joachim du Bellay's phenomenal meditation on the ruin into which Rome had fallen in the sixteenth century when compared with its former glory. Since I could not find Edmund Spencer's translation of the poem online and do not know its last two lines by heart, I will have to show off knowing them in the original French:
Ce qui est ferme est part le temps destruit,
Et ce quit fuit au temps fait resistance.
These translate literally as:
That which is solid is destroyed by time,
And that which flees resists time.
Who is to say that the government officials of Norwich who wanted to clear many of its old homes and replace them with new ones or the architects of Canterbury who elected not to reconstruct a part of the old town that was destroyed by bombs were in the wrong? Can we really pass judgement on those who decided to smash some of the old, useless Roman ruins in Lincoln in order to outfit the town to meet the demands of contemporary life? While I consider it extremely important to preserve buildings and ruins left by ancient civilizations and medieval architects, I also cannot deny that time wears everything, even the greatest of buildings, to dust and that preserving the artifacts of previous human activity is not the sole purpose of our existence. The Romans themselves built pragmatically, choosing sites of maximal strategic importance and convenience for their outposts and fashioning even their most impressive and beautiful buildings with such pragmatic aims as subjugating foreign populations, impressing foreign merchants, and affording maximal numbers of people with entertainment. The only thing to do, having accepted time's eventual victory over all human activity and the need to build forever newer buildings in order to accommodate contemporary life, is to enjoy the ancient ruins that we still have and to wait another hundred years until travel agents will be able to plug electrodes into our brains that let us relive the entire history of cities or regions of our choosing through careful reconstruction of the sensations that people in those areas would have experienced.
Shrewsbury was a very pleasant, quiet market town full of half-timbered houses, which I loved. My strongest memory of it will remain having chatted with a greengrocer, who was flattered that I had chosen to visit such a low-profile city. He, the greengrocer, told me that the city's cuisine was mostly defined by its agricultural products, from fresh dairy products to cured meats, onion and cheddar cheese bread, and various fruits and vegetables. The same greengrocer bumped into me twenty or thirty minutes after he had sold me my lunch, introduced himself, as he had not done so before, and set me on the exact route through the city that I had been hoping to take, even telling me the nicest place in the city to eat lunch. Such an encounter would, naturally, have been impossible in a larger city.
Liverpool was more interesting than I expected, but, as it is a large drinking town, I am not unhappy that I spent so little time there. It is a big university town, has a reputedly-nice harbor, which I did not see, and has a ton of brick buildings. A man whom I met on the train showed me through a bit of the city, as he was going in the direction of my hostel, and solved the mystery of Georgian houses' having multiple flues in their chimneys for me. As it turns out, wealthy families in Georgian England could afford to have fireplaces in every room, or most rooms, of their houses, and, for simplicity's sake, each house was given one chimney with flues leading to different fireplaces rather than separate chimneys for each fireplace. I do not know why these houses were often built with identical facades in very symmetrical lines, shoulder to shoulder with one another, and I did not have the acumen to ask my interlocutor as we walked; I was too excited by having learned the source of the chimneys with multiple flues.
I visited Liverpool's Chinatown on Saturday morning and found it deserted, which shocked me; while most of Liverpool's residents are probably very hung over on Saturday mornings, one would expect Chinatown to be busy nonetheless. My trip to Leeds revealed it to be a town even uglier and more industrial than Liverpool; on the way there, I met a Jehovah's Witness, which was a little frustrating. York itself was another town of phenomenal historic importance. Among its many attractions were the remains of its abbey, which Henry VIII destroyed; its massive cathedral, which costs 9 pounds to enter on the discount student rate; its winding, medieval streets and old houses; its remains of Roman baths, which I did not visit, as they were in the basement of a pub; and its castle keep. Almost every non-tourist whose path I crossed in York appeared to be drunk; a sober, or relatively sober, resident of the city told me that that was standard fare, and, when I asked a woman in the Leeds station if so many dozens of other women were wearing ridiculous six-inch high heels and expensive dresses because of a wedding or festival of some sort, she explained that they were merely dressed up for Saturday night. There had been some races in York earlier in the day, which, apparently, made the trains to and from Leeds much busier than usual and the people there drunker than usual.
Newcastle appears to me to be the cultural capital of the north of England, based on the cities that I have seen so far, though it might be far enough away from the region's manufacturing centers to be considered somewhat separate from the rest of the north -- I do not know. It has a large art gallery, a massive opera house, tons of plaques explaining its history, and many pedestrian-only streets lined with stores. Its Chinatown is unimpressive, even smaller than that of Liverpool, though it does have a very nice castle keep. Durham, for its own part, has a phenomenal cathedral, one to rival that of Canterbury, and a pretty castle. It is nestled amongst hills rich with tree cover and came to have its cathedral because someone with non-null religious influence had a vision that a saint by the same of Cuthbert, Huthbert, or something of that sort wanted his remains to be brought to Durham, where there was already a settlement of some sort (It is on a river.). I spent just over an hour there, most of it in the cathedral, which someone with more knowledge of religious architecture could have spent at least two hours. The priests (or monks?) there were very friendly, and the view from the top of its towers was good enough that I felt the cost of climbing them justified, though I plan to hold off from climbing any more cathedrals henceforth in order to save a bit of money.
My eyelids are closing of their own accord! I am going to Edinburgh tomorrow and should be able to write another email home in two days, on whatever day of the week that is (the 29th of July). It is hard to escape cliches when describing the north of England; that is, it is hard to describe it in terms not colored by one's preconceived notions of it. People living in the north are known for being gruff coal miners, and I am tempted to say that, when I stepped on the train from Birmingham, where I left my luggage on my trip to Shrewsbury, to Liverpool, people's jawlines grew sharper, they themselves more dour and taciturn, but I do not know if I would have thought that had I not arrived in the north of England with that impression of northerners. It has been explained to me that northerners are seen as uneducated brutes and southerners as pampered sissies by patriots of one region of England or the other; I have probably already explained that in India southerners are seen as backwards and superstitious, though I did not hear what southerners thought of northerners. The man who showed me a little of Liverpool described The Troubles in Northern Ireland to me, filling me in about the history leading up to them. I have generally enjoyed my interactions with people here, just as in the south.
There is a certain contrariness to the English. It is embodied by their walking on the left side of sidewalks and corridors, their charging money (more in the south than in the north) for city maps, their often charging money for entrance into cathedrals, and their having hardly any garbage cans in or around their train stations. If I had to define England as a whole, I would call it a very developed society, one of the most developed in the world, with certain incredibly-annoying quirks to which the British themselves seem entirely inured.
I forgot to mention that the man who showed me through Liverpool told me, when I explained my initial fear that I would not eat a single fresh fruit or vegetable during my whole stay in London, that Englishmen have the exact same fear when they prepare to visit the United States! The best single phrase that I can remember from this part of my trip is of a man's telling me, when I got on a train headed south and asked which carriages were second-class, "There's no first and second class to Wales." Finally, the railway officials here, especially those who check one's tickets, are very friendly, on the whole, and it would seem a pity for them to be replaced by machines. I have been unable to forget a lady's telling me, when I bought my Oyster card for the London subway, that the people working at the subway's ticket counters would be phased out within the next few years. While I recognize that automation of phone calls to Visa, one's phone company, or the airport is more efficient for dealing with high volumes of calls than having individual people answer the phones, I also strongly prefer to talk to a real person when I make such a call, just as I prefer to buy my train tickets from real people, when possible, and like to know that there is a real person sitting in a train's locomotive, even if the train's movement is automated. Machines may never be able to deal with dynamic situations, situations requiring behaviors that are not mechanized, as well as real people, and people will always need human interaction and enjoy it even when it is not directly related to the efficiency of some working process or other; having real ticket collectors, to choose a simple example, makes trips on trains more pleasant than merely having machines would do, and this pleasantness has a real value all of its own.
Whatever the case, the whole world will never be automated in full, and I need to get some sleep before leaving for Edinburgh tomorrow. It is a little surprising that his trip is already coming to its conclusion.
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| Durham is famous for this cathedral. |
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