PL48 - Old time
At Rochester cathedral
Great this week folks to spot a pal in town and head straight to the nearest fine pub. A YouTuber I loved as a teen said that moment confirms you as resident of your city. I’ve had it twice in two weeks now and must agree: it does make you feel an absolute homme environ: which is French for man about: town. Hope you’re all enjoying the sun too. I’m in Offa’s Dyke on the Welsh border.
The NS new leadership about the most inspiring team I could have asked for there is lots to write. Is it annoying to link through to those, are you all NS subscribers anyway, should I ask the business-side team for some kind of gift link? Tell me what’s best. This week, for the new episodes of Clarkson’s Farm, I wrote on the complicated sunset of Jeremy Clarkson.
Thanks for being nice about the Macfarlane profile and I was so pleased it was put on Arts & Letters, my debut there:
I also hope you’ll like my girlfriend’s essay on the American opioid crisis. A piece that leaves no virtue of journalism unexhibited -- energy, rigour, courage, style, feeling. I just wish it had spilled from the Monaghan Mont Blanc... Link.
Anyway this week I thought keep the cathedral momentum rolling, so off we go down Rochester, East Kent.
Now we are back to cathedrals, I must issue a retraction. I said St Alban’s had the longest nave. Winchester’s is longer. But I retract with great pleasure, because that correction was made by Simon Jenkins, whom I met at a book launch after quoting him in every cathedral issue!
And I must also qualify the prediction that no cathedral would be more literary than Southwark. Rochester is at least more Dickensian. He lived nearby, you see, and strolling up the high street you pass all of: Oliver’s restaurant, Little Dorrit’s Piercings Studio, Sweet Expectations sweet shop, Peggoty’s Parlour, Tiny Tim’s all day breakfast, and finally Mr Tope’s house, the last building ever mentioned in Dickens’s writing.
It is mentioned in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, his unfinished novel. A character looks into the cathedral and says “Dear me, it’s like looking down the throat of Old Time.” Later the cathedral is seen at sunset:
Old Time heaved a mouldy sigh from tomb and arch and vault; and gloomy shadows began to deepen in corners; and damp began to rise from green patches of stone; and jewels, cast upon the pavement.....from stained glass by the declining sun, began to perish…
That was likely seen through the original Romanesque Western door, the building’s most remarkable feature. You get those across Norman Europe but hardly in England. Jenkins: “It is of five receding arches with elaborate motifs. Monsters dive in and out of leaves, capitals burst into flower.”
Generally, you forgive Rochester its plainness because it’s so old. The cathedral was founded by Justus in 604 and Canterbury is the only older bishopric. Plus the view is complicated and complemented more than enough by the castle just across the street. It was through a window of that that I took the picture at the top.
Henry VIII went there incognito to see his coming bride Anne of Cleves and was ‘greatly disappointed’ by what he saw. I was there incognito too, investigating for a piece I hope to share soon, and was not disappointed.
One fellow was going about the place with a duck. He explained. Once a fox massacred his pet ducks. But he had twelve eggs in an incubator. They hatched. His face was the first thing they ever saw. Eleven wanted nothing to do with him. One did. He knew it was special within three days. It became his first therapy duck, named Dog, and was the picture on his hoodie. Since, he has trained more therapy ducks and “I just take them out, make people smile.”
Overall I think we have to call Rocehster a modest but pleasant affair, and give it 20.
