A Canterbury tale

Francis Bacon told the tale that “if the mountaine will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will goe to the mountaine.” I’ve been thinking of the many Muslims around the world who had saved up, some for many years, to make that once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca called the hajj. But this year, for the first time in memory, the hajj was canceled. I can hardly imagine the loss and disappointment that many of those would-be pilgrims must feel.

We are very fortunate. We have not experienced anything like this loss, let alone the illness or economic hardship that countless other people in the world have suffered as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve been blessed to travel so much in our lives already and, many times in 2020, we’ve thought how fortunate we were to be on the road in 2017-19 instead. I know of people whose travels and lives were disrupted, sometimes with great severity. And, perhaps like you, I know people whose loved ones have died of the disease.

 

So we know how fortunate we are. Here in England, we made it through several months of near-lockdown while carrying out our work (Trish never dreamed her part-time grocery store job would make her so “essential”). Though still far from the old normal, things are starting to open up now, and—here, at least—we’re cautiously optimistic that the curve remains flattened and the first wave under control.

 

Despite all this, I’m feeling deprived in the second half of 2020 in a way I didn’t during the spring. That’s because, apart from some activities and meeting with friends that everyone had to stop doing for a time, we really didn’t have plans disrupted during lockdown. We’d had a long-overdue catch-up with friends in Devon in February, and then in March everything kicked off. But we had no travel plans that month that we had to defer or cancel. Nor for April, May, June, or July. I don’t remember the last time we spent this long continuously in a single country, England or otherwise.

 

Our second half of the year, though, was not meant to be spent here. We were booked to spend a significant chunk of it in Toronto, which we so enjoyed in 2018-19. And of course, from there we were meant to visit family and friends in the U.S. We would also by now have expected to host my mom and dad on a visit from America, and, in an ordinary year, no doubt others as well.

 

But no one’s year is ordinary. None of those trips are happening, and for good reason. One of my aunt’s friends pointed out, wisely, that a pandemic on this scale is a once-in-a-century event and we should all just take a year off. Not, of course, that we can all afford to stop working or learning or taking care of our families, but we can’t expect anything to go back to normal this year, and we should probably stop trying. I suspect minimizing the disease and rushing to reopen things too soon have made things worse in some places than they had to be, but that’s not the subject of this post.

 

In the spirit of those Muslim pilgrims, I thought I’d make a pilgrimage of my own. Specifically, now that travel restrictions within the U.K. itself have been lifted, where have I never been in this country? Which is how Trish and I made our way to Canterbury, a site of pilgrimage at least since medieval times, as described in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

 

For most of two years, we traveled around the world with only a 40L backpack and a day pack each. As we learned, the amount of stuff you need to carry for two years isn’t much more than what you need for a week. The funny thing now is, I pack the same bag for any length of trip. So now, packing for a two-day getaway, Trish said it looked like I was taking this enormous bag of stuff!

 

I was excited, though. We were going somewhere, doing something new, and that is not to be taken for granted in 2020. Although Canterbury is little over an hour’s drive from London, neither of us had ever been there, making it the first new place we’d been since Ecuador.

 

We weren’t going to be able to forget it was the plague year, though. A few days before, we’d run around our house in Twickenham shutting windows, because a tremendous hailstorm was throwing down; it made the national news. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to see frogs or locusts next, but what in fact happened was that, as we drove closer to Canterbury, blinding sheets of rain would suddenly lash down and threaten to flood the road, only to stop as suddenly. The rain washed out our plans to take the riverside walk from our bed and breakfast—but at least we could stay in one. The staff had made many alterations to comply with government guidance on safety, and were obviously happy to have customers back. They asked if we were nervous about our first trip post-lockdown. We said we were not.

 

Breakfast room. From one particular seat, you can see the cathedral.

We’d assumed we would have to book meals out, like our visit to Canterbury Cathedral, in advance. Everyone has to be conscious of how many people are inside at one time, to maintain social distancing, as well as contact details in case of track and trace. So imagine our surprise when, venturing into town that evening, we discovered a street food fair was going on.

 

We love these things. It reminded us of many places we’ve eaten all over the world, though with obvious changes: entrance and exit, one-way signs, hand sanitizer everywhere, masks on the staff. If we’d known, we wouldn’t have bothered booking a restaurant.

 

The next day, the weather was forecast to hold until afternoon, so off we went on a 3 ½ mile hike I’d looked up in a big book of British walks. It was the first time we’d walked anywhere other than from our front door since March and, apart from a bit of a walk with our friends in Devon before lockdown, Trish’s and my first hike together since the Galápagos Islands. As she wrote many times in her own blog, Trish “isn’t a hiker,” but fortunately there wasn’t much climbing and it wasn’t too warm. Given the humidity, in fact, it was just as well the clouds persisted throughout the day.

 

There were blackberries to pick and eat along the way, as we walked past the castle and up along part of the North Downs Way.

 

I thought we’d have more of a view from Golden Hill, whence pilgrims once caught their first glimpse of Canterbury, but we just came down the London Road and through Westgate—the same way we’d come in the car.

 

Trish arrives at Westgate

Proud of ourselves, we’d managed to miss the rain. We continued round to Northgate and outside the city walls before making our pre-booked time at the cathedral.

 

City walls

Canterbury Cathedral is the cathedral of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the leader of the Church of England, and thus the mother church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. Its origins, though, go many centuries back before there was any such thing, to A.D. 597. The cathedral we see now is 11^th-century, with the east end in a 12^th-century Gothic style to house the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury. It was this shrine that drew Chaucer’s and many other pilgrims. 

 

The interior, almost all to myself. Brilliant

Thomas à Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, had clashed with Henry II, to whom is attributed the exasperated saying, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Eager followers of the king promptly murdered Thomas in the cathedral. To this day, Henry’s saying is a classic example of “Your wish is my command.” The ruler didn’t have to command his subordinates to rid him of the priest; they heard what they heard. This is why it's so dangerous for a powerful leader just to throw around irresponsible remarks.

 

The Pilgrims' Steps that led to the original shrine

Thomas à Becket has the distinction of being venerated as a saint in both the Catholic and Anglican traditions. Yet even in death, his conflict with the secular power continued; Henry VIII summoned him, without success, to face charges of treason in 1538, and when Thomas failed to appear, that was the end of the shrine. Today a candle burns on the original site.

 

There's also a shrine to saints and martyrs of our own time.

While I wandered around the crypt, Trish noted the scaffolding on the outside of the cathedral, where they’re noticeably cleaning it.

 

The gift shop sells teddy bears and rubber ducks dressed as archbishops. I don’t know if that’s weirder, or the fact this one was wearing a mask. 

 

It was also weird to have to wear a face covering in a house of worship, as has been required in England since they reopened for public services. I, myself, hadn’t been physically inside a church on a Sunday since March.

 

Afterwards, we were happy to see the street food fair was still going. We got some lunch, just before it started to rain again.

 

Social distancing, paper straws

Holed up in Canterbury, I reread some of Chaucer’s Tales and thought about what a privilege it is to travel, to go places and see other people. I hope I’ve never taken it for granted, but surely none of us will, after this year is over. Even before the pandemic, Trish and I remarked many times how glad we were to have done all that traveling before her health problems, before circumstances changed and some things became no longer possible. 

 

Some of the more colorful bohemian characters, real and imagined, have lives filled with love affairs, each in turn portrayed as the love of their life. I am that way about places. I remember the lift in my heart when the skyline of Chicago would come into view, knowing that I was going to live there. The love I felt in the botanical gardens at Oxford, my first foreign city in my first foreign country. Toronto is my adopted city; I always feel at home there. These are all places I found when I was young.

 

Some people say that middle-aged feelings are deeper and richer than young feelings. Either that’s not true, or I’m younger than it says on the paper. Middle-aged feelings are certainly different—the outlines less clear, the edges less sharp—but I don’t feel more deeply. Canterbury, the young man at the tea shop told us, wasn’t known as a student town when he was growing up there, but it is now. Perhaps for this reason, for me, it evokes Oxbridge. The punts on the River Stour.

 

Maybe on a better day

I’ve written before that my regrets are things I didn’t do (and one of those was not buying 9 doughnuts for a pound). If you get an opportunity and you want to do something, take it. Never defer an opportunity thinking you will do it another time. You may not.

 

When we came back to the parking lot, there was a couple struggling to make sense of the payment machine. Trish offered to help and we could see, from their language selection on the screen, that they were German speakers. After some struggling back to English we realized that they were trying to pay just after having arrived, whereas this was one of those automatic machines that reads your license plate and charges you when you leave. When I explained they seemed embarrassed about it, but it’s not obvious; I’d only dealt with this type of machine in one other place.

 

After the German-speaking couple left for their rainy afternoon in Canterbury, I realized what had just happened. Some visitors from another country—although for all I know, they live in Britain—had needed help in an unfamiliar city, and we’d helped them. The same thing that happened to us hundreds of times in the two years before COVID-19, across more than two dozen countries. I had missed that experience, being on either side of it. I hope to have it again.

 

  “This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo,
                 And we been pilgrymes, passynge to and fro.”