Skip to main content

London









It was -1 degrees when I landed, but the sky was a clear bright blue, and with just as much to fear from nutters bearing gelignite as the yanks, the Brits processed us visitors with infinitely more grace, efficiency and friendliness. I had forgotten, until I was sitting on the tube, how much I love this place. There is a feel to it which is utterly other - there is no amount of imagining that could convince me I might be somewhere in New Zealand - but at the same time it is comfortable and familiar and deeply, deeply known. The tube zims speedily through the dark tunnels and I am surrounded by that variation in humanity which makes London so unpredictable and so appealing. There is an elderly East Indian woman with bags of groceries at her feet, reading the Financial Times. A group of tiny schoolgirls in panama hats gather Madeleine style around a Miss Clavell. An achingly beautiful girl sits distractedly in a hippie costume of kaftan and brightly woven headband. Young men receive texts and talk to each other in Turkish. An old guy in a leather jacket and jeans reminisces silently about the days when he rode a Matchless wiv a bird upon 'is bike; his clothes have remained the same since 1964 though he has changed within them as has the world around him. An assured young man talks loudly to three assured young woman and a slightly more diffident older one.

There is congestion on the Circle line and some sort of repairs being made to the District line. I look at the tube map on the wall and recalculate my way to Victoria. I feel like one of the cognoscente.

I buy an English sim card and Google Map my way to the little hotel I have booked. I have a shower and find a pub for my first real beer since I was last here and have something to eat. I had intended to visit the Tate Modern, but instead am content to wander the streets. Near my hotel are streets lined with Maseratis and Porsches, but also ones containing a market, and guys with dreadlocks and Rasta caps, and there are racks of the new Boris Bikes, and theatres and cafes and famous buildings at every turn. I wear 4 layers,three of them woolen, two fairly thick but I am only just warm enough. I pop into Westminster Cathedral. It looks a bit like a railway station but feels inexpressibly holy. I am moved deeply at the sight of the fragile little body of St. John Southworth who, in 1654 suffered the inhuman fate of being hung drawn and quartered for the crime of ministering to his people as a Catholic priest. Oh my Lord. The things we have done in your name! Forgive us.

I walk out into the gathering dusk at 4:00 and back to my tiny room to sleep. I'm glad, as I walk, of the scarf and gloves but gladder still to be here.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hi, Kelvin, nice to hear you're back in Ing-er-land - we met up in Canterbury when you were on your sabbatical.
If you have time and come down this way again, you might care to see some of the fine castles of Kent, esp. Dover and Walmer. Is it St John's Durham or Nott'm you're going to?
every blessing,
Brian (ex-Dunedin)
1 February 2011 at 20:08
Kelvin Wright said…
Actually Brian it's Canterbury. I'm there for a week starting today. It would be great to catch up again
1 February 2011 at 20:38
Anonymous said…
Brilliant! Let's meet up and I can show you a few places you might not have seen last time & our church.
every blessing,
Brian
1 February 2011 at 21:16
Anonymous said…
Good to have you here Kelvin - however may I gently suggest that should you wish to attract or retain the services of any clergy from these fair shores, comments about 'first real beer since I was last here' may be a tad unwise?;)
1 February 2011 at 22:34
Lee said…
It sounds like you've hit a warm spell - a friend of mine in the UK told me recently that the beer in her granddad's shed had frozen solid, and it was 25 degrees below.

I love England, my parents are Poms and it feels very homelike to me - not least because I'm related to half the population of Surrey, three quarters of the population of Hampshire, and every citizen excluding three people who migrated from India in Buckinghamshire. But you can keep it - I prefer the warm, sunny climate of Dunedin! :-)
2 February 2011 at 21:02
Brian R said…
The ODT thinks you are in Canada
3 February 2011 at 07:26
Anonymous said…
It may not be a bad thing that the ODT thinks you are in Canada.
3 February 2011 at 09:56
Anonymous said…
Another fine pub a short walk from the Cathderal is 'The White Hart' which has a good beer garden.
'The Ancient Raj' by the Stour is good value for good curries.
Hope we can meet up soon, Kelvin. Why not come along to St Mary Bredin Church this Sunday (Old Dover Road, 10 mins from the Cathedral) - large and very lively. How long are you in 'Mater Angliae'?
Brian
3 February 2011 at 11:52
Zane Elliott said…
"I have a shower and find a pub for my first real beer since I was last here"?!
How can this be? Dunedin has two exceptional breweries - Emmersons and The Green Man - have you not discovered 'Tonic' a purveyor of fine beer from across NZ and the world? Perhaps when you return you could join me there for a brew, it is within our parish bounds, so obviously I have a duty to minister there as regularly as possible!
4 February 2011 at 08:34
Lee said…
In agreement with Zane: I think it is quite clear that it is the duty of all upstanding Dunedinites to shout the Bishop a locally-produced beer when he returns home, so that we can help change his mind ;-)

I'm an Aussie-girl-gone-Kiwi, and I have to say that Dunedin has some excellent beers - comparable to anything Australia or the UK produces.

Emerson's "Bookbinder" is a favourite of mine.
4 February 2011 at 13:15
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Living the lies

In 1969, when I was 16 I left school and got a job as a labourer. My wages weren't high but to me they were a fortune and within a few months  I bought my first car, a 1938 Morris 8 sports, this one here. It had a minuscule 4 cylinder engine and a wood framed body which meant it was slow and it flexed so much when going around corners that the doors would sometimes fly open. Nevertheless I thought it was pretty damned cool, especially with the modifications I made to the muffler for performance and advertising purposes, ie, removing it.  Back then, the most popular TV program was The Avengers, in which the suave and resourceful hero, John Steed drove a 1928 3 Litre Bentley. Which looked kinda like my car, right? Yeah, right. Anyway, John Steed usually entered his car by leaping nimbly over the door, so I emulated him whenever possible. Now all this is preamble. I want to tell you about something that happened to me one day in Papanui Road, Christchurch. My car ...
1 comment
Read more

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why I Hold the Views I Do

St. Hilda's Collegiate School, taken with my phone after a recent meeting. This picture has nothing whatsoever to do with what follows, but I like the interplay of shapes and particularly the shadow on the wall. My mother is a Methodist, liberal in her theological and social opinions. My father was a socialist, just slightly to the left, in his politics, of Karl Marx. My siblings -there are 5 of us- are all bright, eloquent and omnivorous in their consumption of books and other intellectual fodder.  One of my most cherished childhood memories is of mealtimes in our little state house. The food was ingested with copious amounts of spirited, opinionated, clever and sometimes informed debate on whatever subject happened to catch the attention of one of the family that day. Or whatever one of us thought might get a rise out of someone else. So, sex, politics and religion it was then - oh and motorbikes, economics, international relations, demographics, cricket, company ownersh...
47 comments
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...
3 comments
Read more

2 More Years

An autumn leaf, the evidence of the death whereby the grapevine lives and bears fruit There are 31,102 verses in the Bible, or at least in the Protestant version of it which the conservative section of our church recognises. Of these, there are 6 verses which explicitly condemn homosexual practice. The best scholars in the Christian world have pointed out the ambiguity of even these scraps of scripture, but this does not prevent their becoming the basis of an antipathy to contemporary same gender sexuality which I was repeatedly told, during General Synod, was "First Order". I'm not sure what "First Order" means exactly, but I was told that this is a "Salvation Matter". So, presumably, holding a proper view on homosexuality is right up there in importance with belief in the doctrines I would consider foundational for the Christian faith: namely the Holy Trinity, Incarnation and Resurrection. In any event, antipathy to homosexuality has already ...
25 comments
Read more