July 25: More Canterbury

I learned yesterday that today is the feast day of St. James, so this morning I went to a saint's day communion service.  This was in a small chapel in the "crypt" (basement) and was very simple, with no music or sermon.  It was very nice and friendly, though, with only about 20 people there.  So I've been to three different services in this cathedral: three very different kinds of services in very different spots.

Before the service I wandered around the cathedral and took pictures from new angles, including this one that shows some of the renovations/repairs that are currently in progress:

When you get up a little closer, some of the walls are decorated with sculptures, like this:

The names with many of the older ones are missing or illegible.  Here are some interesting ones with very readable names:

From left to right, those are Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Phillip and Queen Elizabeth I.


After the service I joined a guided tour of the cathedral.  I did have to pay extra for that, but it was well worth it.  We had a very knowledgeable and entertaining guide who took us all over the place for an hour and a half and showed us all sorts of things that I would have missed without his help.

One of the most famous things about the cathedral is the murder of Saint Thomas Becket, who was Archbishop of Canterbury and was killed inside the cathedral in 1170 as a result of power struggles between himself and the king.  Reports started spreading of miraculous healings for people who visited his tomb and it became a very popular pilgrimage destination, leading to the famous "Canterbury Tales" about a group of pilgrims.  During the reformation, many English cathedrals and the tombs inside them were stripped of valuable jewels and other items, but apparently Henry VIII gave special orders that Becket's tomb be completely destroyed and it was done very thoroughly.
I suppose he was too important a symbol of struggles between church and state.

But people still remember Becket when the visit the cathedral.  For centuries there was no visible sign of him in the cathedral.  Then in 1982, a reigning pope (John Paul II) visited England for the first time ever.  He met with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the two of them publicly knelt in prayer at the approximate spot of Becket's murder.  Both of them remarked that it was a shame that there was no visible recognition of this history event in the cathedral, so this marker was created:

Following that, the cathedral commissioned a sculpture for nearby:

Becket was killed by several knights with swords.  The sculpture was designed to be lit from the side, so that it creates cross-shaped shadows.

Here are more pictures from the tour.  First, the nave -- the pulpit and the ceiling followed by the best view I could manage of the whole area:

and two of the many, many beautiful stained-glass windows in the cathedral:

After the tour I grabbed some lunch and checked out of the Lodge.  As I left the cathedral grounds I snapped yet another view of this enormous, historic building:

To balance that big picture, here's a little bird from the cathedral grounds

It has been fun to see birds in Britain that look different from birds I see at home.  This one looked like a pigeon, but its coloring is very different from North American pigeons.

I headed to the train station to catch my train back to London, where I will spend the last few days of this trip.  After a day spent mostly on my feet I was looking forward to a nice quiet sit on the train.  I thought I was a real pro at British trains by this time, but this trip turned out to be a bit of an adventure!  I arrived at the train station in plenty of time and typed my confirmation code into the little machine that spits out your actual ticket.  No problem there.  Then I turned to the screen in the station to find out which platform my train would be using.  Instead of a platform number, I saw the word "cancelled".  Oh dear....  So I went to the desk and the nice man at the desk told me that my ticket would be good on a different train and told me when and where to catch it.  That sounded easy and reasonable, since I'd learned by this time that some tickets are good on more trains besides the one indicated on your ticket.

To make a long story short, after a few stops the conductor on the train I boarded told me that my ticket was NOT good on that train and I'd have to change trains.  I did that, but when the conductor on the new train came around to check tickets he told me that my ticket wasn't good there either.  He advised me to stay on the train anyway and just explain again when I got off in London.  When I got off in London I was chastised one more time for being on the wrong train, but forgiven.  I guess my "foreign" accent made them accept my very real confusion.  Since the last train I ended up on was a high-speed train and my original train was scheduled to stop at every single little town on the way, I ended up getting to London an hour earlier than planned in spite of all the confusion.  Very strange.

I did kind of enjoy my conversations with the conductors.  They were very nice to this silly foreign person who obviously wasn't born knowing how the train system worked.  One of them called me "my lovely" at the end of every sentence, which sounds very odd to a North American ear but was just friendly and reassuring in England.  The other asked me where I was from and when I said "Canada" he made a joke about it being a shame, because if I were American it would be easier for people to believe that I was confused.  I didn't tell him I was born in the U.S.!