Salisbury

Today can be roughly divided into two categories: (1) Driving out of London; and (2) Moving on and finding a way to rebuild from the rubble of our lives.

Seriously people, it’s a traumatic event which I suspect will be matched in intensity and suffering only by driving back into London in a couple of days’ time.

Picture, if you will, navigating through the following obstacles:

  1. You belong to a culture which no longer places an emphasis on the skills associated with celestial navigation.
  2. You are temporarily inhabiting a city with whose geography you are so unfamiliar that you don’t know at any given moment whether you are driving into the centre of the city or away from it.
  3. You are likewise unfamiliar with the road rules, which include lanes that merge and divide apparently at their own whim.
  4. You (or, more accurately, your spouse) are paranoid about turning onto any road marked with the letter “C”, as this signifies the incurrence of a congestion tax.
  5. Said spouse has resisted all pleas over the last two days that a map of the city be purchased.
  6. You have made a joint decision that the hiring of a GPS system to go with your car is “not worth it” given the added expense.

Eventually, after half an hour or so, Sim figured out that he’d disabled the part of my phone that made the maps work, and we managed to ingratiate ourselves into enough lanes to not have to make too many u-turns, and found the motorway to Salisbury.

Salisbury was lovely, a little friendly town with narrow roads predating the invention of the internal combustion engine and, possibly, the domestication of the horse. St Paul’s yesterday may have been massive and architecturally impressive, but Salisbury Cathedral was a much more pleasant experience from my point of view. There were far fewer people there, there were no audio tours, there was a “suggested donation” less than half the entry fee charged for St Paul’s, and everyone was very quiet and respectful of the peaceful atmosphere. There was even an announcement on the hour that it was time for prayer, and everyone stopped for a couple of minutes while someone said prayers over the PA. Contrast that with St Paul’s, where there was a communion service at 12.30, and the parishioners were surrounded by loud groups of tourists jabbering at one another and attempting to covertly contravene the rule against photographs.

We obviously went to the chapter house and saw the Magna Carta, which was much tinier than I realised, and then wandered around the cloisters some more. It started raining as we were leaving, but we had been thinking about going to Stonehenge in the late afternoon, and I thought it would be “quintessentially English” (my words) to see it in the rain.

Do I hate myself? Why do I think it would be a great romantic idea to look at some rocks in a field in the pouring rain? In fairness, the rain eased off a bit and we were able to do our audio tour more or less without contracting pneumonia, though it started up again as soon as Sim tried to take some photos. I did really enjoy the fact that we were looking at this mysterious historical monument dating back 5,000 years, and it was bordered by a wire fence with a bunch of sheep on the other side.

Our B & B tonight is in a little town just out of Salisbury called Alderbury. We headed up to the pub for dinner; to my delight, it was called the Green Dragon (Tolkien fans will appreciate this). Of course, the Lord of the Rings dates back to (from memory, could be wrong) 1955, whereas this Green Dragon has a list on the wall of all of the landlords starting from 1620, so it wins. I was a bit worried in such a small town that the pub would be a bit insular, but it couldn’t have been friendlier. It made a contrast from Soho, but the food was perfect in a different kind of way (steak and kidney pie! Treacle sponge pudding!). Winner.

On our walk back to our accommodation we went past a monument to the local Lord who supplied plentiful water to the locals; the stone columns on it dated from the 12th century. Take that, European colonisation of Australia!

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