Settling in England

April 30 - First week in England.

My flight from Turkey was uneventful; both Heathrow and the freeway to Milton-Keynes were uncrowded and stress-free. I was also treated to three days of beautiful sunny weather before more typical April weather set in on Thursday. I spent Monday and Tuesday in Milton-Keynes getting settled in the room I am renting from Joy, learning my way around M-K, and meeting with Lynne about the project (it will be another adventure in itself, as we work to connect our similar-yet-different approaches to metaphors and stories). Joy's house is quite nice, with a lovely back yard that includes a glassed-in sun porch overlooking a large koi pond (but alas, no place to set up a BBQ or eat a meal during nice weather. As the weather turns summery I will miss our wonderful patio in Portland more and more.)

Milton-Keynes is an odd town, a New Jersey style "New Town" built around several centuries-old villages, in a way that the existing villages are incorporated into the fabric of the town - yet the city center is itself a huge covered shopping mall. There is a network of bicycle, horse, and pedestrian paths that in principle provides a way to get anywhere in the city with very little interaction with automobiles. My first two forays were frustrating - the paths wind around in a way that is hard to follow, and the signs are often unhelpful - for example, when the path crosses a named surface street they don't tell you the name of the street, and the signs often point toward a location that is meaningful only if you know the city well (and is either not shown on the map or difficult to find). On each of my first three exploratory trips, one on foot, the other two on a bicycle Joy is providing for me, I ended up going at least half again the actual distance because of detours and double-backs. The fourth trip, walking to the train station for the trip to Stratford-upon-Avon, was more successful, since I finally realized that navigation is by village names, and a sign informs you each time you cross into a new village. The villages are roughly square, about 1 km to the side, separated by arterials that run more or less straight, from northwest to southeast ("verticals") and southwest to northeast (horizontals). Once I figured this out, I realized I need to write down, not a sequence of street names, but rather a sequence of neighborhood names to guide me on my trips. So the walk to the train station went smoothly and took a bit under an hour. Three or more trips around town and I will probably get it figured out.

I also realized that lacking a map of England (we have one that LaJean was supposed to bring, and I haven't found a bookstore yet from which I can buy one) cost me some money on my trip to Stratford. The train I took passes through Coventry to Birmingham, where I changed to a milk train back to Stratford. I did not realize how close Stratford is to Coventry. Since I want to visit Kenilworth Castle on the way back, and it is between Stratford and Coventry, I will take a bus to Kenilworth, park my luggage in the castle's cloak room (I hope they have one!) then take another bus on to Coventry, thus writing off the first leg of my return ticket.

The first couple of days in Stratford have been very interesting. I am staying in a very comfortable, although smallish, room in the Penryn House B&B, close to a mile walk from the center of town. Again because they don't bother putting signs on the main streets, getting to the B&B required a combination of guesswork, hope, and a bit of doubling back. The landlady compensated by providing me tea and some very nice cakes when I checked in. After checking in I toured Anne Hathaway's Cottage, then walked back into town and toured a couple of other houses associated with Shakespeare, including the house where he was born. Unfortunately they do not allow photographs inside, although they don't put up many signs about it and I did take one before a guard told me not to take any more. They also do not provide any really good photos of the interiors that you can buy - or I would have bought some. All of the houses are interesting - dark wood, and constant reminders of how much shorter people were in those days. I enjoyed all of them. I also enjoyed, yesterday and today, stopping in at a couple of 400 year old pubs - the Windmill, licensed in 1600, is the oldest in Stratford that has been in continuous operation. I do have a picture of its interior, and a picture of me in another pub, in an even older building.

On Wednesday night I saw a superb performance of King Lear. The actor who played Lear was spell-binding. Regan and Goneril were also very well-done; both came across with exactly the right sort of oily seductiveness. The performance got a warm but not enthusiastic ovation, but in Portland it would have earned a standing ovation. Different standards of comparison. I was less than enthusiastic about the staging - more of the time-shifting, with most (but not all) the costumes World War I vintage, and the backdrop based on a run-down factory or metal shop, with a bank of broken windows in the background, steel girders, and industrial-grade florescent lights. I hope that fad runs its course and they get back to staging Shakespeare in the eras in which the action supposedly happens. Although it wasn't as distracting as some I've seen recently, like one we saw in Ashland a couple of years ago, where the "Duke this" and "King" and other royalty titles, and the threats of execution, positively jarred with the 1920s jazz era setting.

Today I toured Warwick Castle. It was fun, but a bit much - they have converted it into a theme park, with costumed actors everywhere, and multi-media presentations. The cost of admission reflected that - ordinarily 19 pounds, 13 for me with a senior discount, plus 8 more for the dungeon. Sort of a continual Renaissance Faire. I most enjoyed the unconstrained, unguided, and mostly actor free tour of the family quarters and ceremonial halls. One actor, in the ceremonial hall, I did enjoy chatting with; he said he was one of the descendants of the family. A 1920s "weekend party" setup was kind of fun. (Complete with some dummies in period dress and some live actors playing people who might have been invited to a weekend party in the 1920s.) The castle was actually the family home until the 1970s when it was sold, probably because it was getting far too expensive to keep up. They did allow pictures here - the fellow I talked with in the ceremonial hall said they had put coatings on everything to protect them from light and flashbulbs. But the dungeon tour, which cost me an extra 8 pounds, was just a gussied-up Halloween "house of horrors" show, with a Black Plague room, a torture room, a court room, and an execution chamber. I think it might have been fun but they crammed 20 of us into one tour, so unless you were standing in front you couldn't see or experience much. I considered it mostly a waste of $12 and 40 minutes of my time. I really prefer seeing these places at my own pace, guided by my own imagination. It was no surprise when I later learned that the castle is operated by a commercial entertainment company - it _is_ a theme park.
It started raining about the time I finished the tour - fortunately I came equipped with my portable umbrella. It was too late to visit Kenilworth, so I decided to head back to Stratford. In the town square was a cart selling curry - they were out of rice so gave me curried chicken on a baked potato, something I'd never heard of before. It was quite good, more like a slightly curry flavored chicken stew than anything, but warming in the drizzle.
Eric Jensen came to meet me for dinner and the first 2/3 of Romeo and Juliet, before he left to catch a series of trains back home. We enjoyed a nice visit; he and his partner Sam will meet me in London on Sunday. He was in the vicinity to interview for a job in Sociology at U. of Warwick, apparently UK's 2nd ranked Sociology dept. - he later told me he got the job, which is no surprise. He is doing extremely well.
I was not as impressed by Romeo and Juliet as I was by Lear - none of the actors seemed as dynamic, or as convincing; the two dukes seemed almost stiff. The nurse, played by an African-Brit with creole mannerisms, was great, and Mercutio (Romeo's friend who gets stabbed by Juliet's cousin Tybalt in a rather unsportsmanlike and opportunistic way) was great. Otherwise, many of the actors seemed to be just reading their lines, except for Romeo, who over-acted. The director put most of the cast in period costume, but had Romeo and Juliet in modern casual dress and the Capulets in black leather with high-tech switchblades like the heavies in a modern fantasy-punk movie. That was a jarring note: Tybalt came across as a treacherous, villainous bully, a person Juliet would not likely have loved enough to be emotionally torn by his death, and the feud seemed more like "victims vs. oppressors" than the more morally equal balance that, in my view, is necessary for the play to work. The director also used bursts of fire, to symbolize passion I suppose, but that also gave it rather too much of a flavor of cheap hollywood special effects, and actually distracted from the passion the language and the acting is supposed to project - perhaps that is part of the reason that the portrayals of both Romeo and Juliet seemed at once overdone and strangely tepid to me. Having Romeo wheel around stage on a modern bicycle was, really, a bit much. I enjoyed the evening but I have seen many versions of the play that seemed more convincing. In sum, King Lear was one of the best versions I've seen, but Romeo and Juliet was mediocre. They bused in a ton of high school students to see Romeo and Juliet, though, so it got a much more enthusiastic response than Lear got the night before.

April 30

Today I pulled my stuff together and took a bus to Kenilworth - taking my time, since I had been told by many people that there isn't much there; a judgment that turned out to be quite erroneous - I spent about 2.5 hours there and could happily have spent 4. Even in the town itself people seemed quite lukewarm toward the castle - and on one of the few occasions in my experience, I got very poor help from a librarian (the library doubles as tourist information center), who told me rather vaguely to just follow the road around, leaving out the crucial detail of taking a right turn a few hundred yards down the hill. I ended up in an obvious residential area, accosted a woman delivering pamphlets, who had to think for a minute and consult her own map, doubled back, found the turn I had missed, with no "Castle Road" sign. I found the sign another hundred yards beyond the intersection, in the middle of a long block. Grump! The British are really challenged about road signs.

Once I finally reached the castle, I was immediately impressed. The castle walls are mostly gone, with just a few badly ruined stretches and the lower half of the entry towers. The stables are intact, and now house a tea shop and exhibition hall with a really good display on the history of the castle. The central hall, used until recently as a residence, is still intact, and has had exhibits of how it looked when Elizabeth I visited. The original castle is in ruins - very picturesque ruins, where I spent the greater part of an hour taking photos and understanding why Sir Walter Scott was impressed enough to write a novel about it. (Got to re-read that book!) To me, the way it was romanticized in literature adds greatly to the interest and value in visiting the place. Not long after I arrived it started the same sporadic drip that it did yesterday afternoon, although not until near the end of the visit did it rain enough to justify putting up my umbrella. The clouds actually helped evoke the historical mood of the place. It dates back to the 11th century, has figured centrally in much of English history since. It underwent two long sieges, each time yielding only after the point of near starvation had been reached; figured in the romance between Robert Dudley and Elizabeth, was finally captured, used for a while, then rendered militarily useless by Cromwell's forces. There were only a few other visitors, so it was easy to let my own imagination run. I am familiar with most of the history, but it would be fun to reread it and visit the place again.

It is interesting and a bit dismaying that so many people told me there isn't much there. If I had only one day to spend in the area, knowing what I know now, I would definitely spend it at Kenilworth rather than Warwick, Kenilworth where there is only a couple of tents to interfere with your own free imagination. I guess on the other hand if I were touring England with a couple of restive pre-teens with little knowledge of or interest in history, I might opt for the vastly more "entertaining" theme park to get them out of my hair for a day or so.

I have been ruminating since before I left Turkey about history, in the light of the various historical places I have visited. In Asia, especially Nepal and India, the history I saw has very little to do with me or my culture - only the peripheral relationship from the introduction of watered-down Buddhism and Hinduism during the last half of the last century. It was interesting but did not really speak to my own life or culture. In England, every time I have visited I have felt the history strongly as _my_ history, history that contributed to what my culture is and who I am. In Turkey it was an interesting in-between. Most of the events, including the battlefields and castles, are part of the Story of the West, dating from well before the Greeks and extending through to the eventual conquest of Byzantium by the Ottoman Empire. But the story is told from the Ottoman perspective: Battles I grew up learning as tragic defeats are perceived as glorious victories. Even the historic Christian churches, some dating to only a century or two after Christ, were converted to Mosques. It is vaguely disorienting - in a positive way. I felt my perspective repeatedly, continuously, wrenched. That also happened to a lesser extent in other Asian countries, but the Hindu and Animist cultures, in particular, are so very different, so very alien that it did not have the kind of personal immediacy it had in the Greek / Roman / Byzantine / Ottoman empire, with its final layering of (still not fully realized) secularism cultivated by Ataturk (whose image is still everywhere in Istanbul). Don't get me wrong - I am no fan of the crusaders, and consider most of the crusades as little removed from genocide and pillage. But I still think of the fall of Constantinople as a tragic ending, and it is very enlightening to spend 3 weeks visiting historical sites in a country with a shared history but radically different perspective - the victory of Islam as a glorious beginning. (And indeed, considering what Muslim scholars and mathematicians accomplished while Europeans were struggling vainly to hold on to some shadow of the knowledge of the Greeks and Romans, it _was_ a beginning of a glorious age.) It has actually contributed to greater appreciation of England with our shared history.