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livI went to Winchester with jack, with the excuse of running a service and we decided to expand it into a long weekend break.
It really worked out very well, we did everything we hoped to in three days and still felt really relaxed. The only real downside was that the weather got extremely hot, not dangerously but uncomfortably, temperatures in the 30s and humid, and I guess I just have to admit that English summers are like that now.
We stayed in a funny little self-catering place, a former granny annexe attached to a ludicrously grand house, I'm not honestly sure why anyone that obviously rich is bothering to run a short stay business. But it was a bit more traditional and personal than the modern everything arranged through multiple layers of agencies model promoted by AirBnB. We drove down on Thursday, taking it fairly slowly and stopping for dinner in a pub near the M3 junction. Friday we spent the day in a country park at the edge of the Downs, lovely views including eating our picnic looking down on wheeling kites.
Saturday I led the service, hosted by the Quakers in their extremely lovely Meeting House surrounded by the most glorious garden. Had about 15 people from a range of backgrounds. We mostly overlap in the tunes we know but not for the Torah service, and the minor thing that went wrong was that nobody (very much including me) had thought to bring a chumash to read the section from the Prophets, so we ended up reading that from a mobile phone, less than ideal but it's nice to have all of scripture on the internet as a fallback. I gave a sermon about the spies' bad report of the Promised Land (yeah, we're a week ahead of the Orthodox at the moment for complicated calendrical reasons), comparing the situation to the climate emergency. Yes, the situation is bad, and we have to be honest about that, but it's wrong to give in to despair or to just sit back and assume God will sort it all out. I also talked about how Numbers 14 starts out comedic and veers into very intense stuff about repentance with some of the refrains from the High Holy Day liturgy, and explored a little bit about the role of repentance in tackling climate disaster. Not that we should sit around feeling bad about how we've messed up the environment, but that we need to change ourselves to build the sort of society who can address this (and other) big and serious problem.
We then went touristing in Winchester itself. A member of the community spearheaded the campaign to erect a statue of Jewish businesswoman Licoricia so was a deeply expert guide to all the places where there used to be Jews (but there are no traces or buildings still standing). We also saw the Mediaeval Great Hall and the Tudors' recreation of King Arthur's Round Table, and spent a good amount of time in the cathedral, which really is impressive. There was a wedding going on, a fairly sizeable wedding, but that service took place in just the choir, leaving the rest of the enormous building free for tourists to wander around, and incidentally enjoy the amazing music of a really good cathedral choir.
And Sunday we had another nice gentle journey back, stopping at an extremely random sculpture park thatjack found. If it had been indoors I would have skipped it, a lot of what they have is very obvious commercial gallery stuff, but since it was actually set in some lovely woodlands, it made a really fun trip. I found I kept being drawn to Shona-style stone pieces by Innocent Nyashenga and bronzes by Won Lee, plus I ridiculously loved this Jonah, even more so when I looked closely and realized that he has a fish in his mouth!
jack, with the excuse of running a service and we decided to expand it into a long weekend break. It really worked out very well, we did everything we hoped to in three days and still felt really relaxed. The only real downside was that the weather got extremely hot, not dangerously but uncomfortably, temperatures in the 30s and humid, and I guess I just have to admit that English summers are like that now.
We stayed in a funny little self-catering place, a former granny annexe attached to a ludicrously grand house, I'm not honestly sure why anyone that obviously rich is bothering to run a short stay business. But it was a bit more traditional and personal than the modern everything arranged through multiple layers of agencies model promoted by AirBnB. We drove down on Thursday, taking it fairly slowly and stopping for dinner in a pub near the M3 junction. Friday we spent the day in a country park at the edge of the Downs, lovely views including eating our picnic looking down on wheeling kites.
Saturday I led the service, hosted by the Quakers in their extremely lovely Meeting House surrounded by the most glorious garden. Had about 15 people from a range of backgrounds. We mostly overlap in the tunes we know but not for the Torah service, and the minor thing that went wrong was that nobody (very much including me) had thought to bring a chumash to read the section from the Prophets, so we ended up reading that from a mobile phone, less than ideal but it's nice to have all of scripture on the internet as a fallback. I gave a sermon about the spies' bad report of the Promised Land (yeah, we're a week ahead of the Orthodox at the moment for complicated calendrical reasons), comparing the situation to the climate emergency. Yes, the situation is bad, and we have to be honest about that, but it's wrong to give in to despair or to just sit back and assume God will sort it all out. I also talked about how Numbers 14 starts out comedic and veers into very intense stuff about repentance with some of the refrains from the High Holy Day liturgy, and explored a little bit about the role of repentance in tackling climate disaster. Not that we should sit around feeling bad about how we've messed up the environment, but that we need to change ourselves to build the sort of society who can address this (and other) big and serious problem.
We then went touristing in Winchester itself. A member of the community spearheaded the campaign to erect a statue of Jewish businesswoman Licoricia so was a deeply expert guide to all the places where there used to be Jews (but there are no traces or buildings still standing). We also saw the Mediaeval Great Hall and the Tudors' recreation of King Arthur's Round Table, and spent a good amount of time in the cathedral, which really is impressive. There was a wedding going on, a fairly sizeable wedding, but that service took place in just the choir, leaving the rest of the enormous building free for tourists to wander around, and incidentally enjoy the amazing music of a really good cathedral choir.
And Sunday we had another nice gentle journey back, stopping at an extremely random sculpture park that
jack found. If it had been indoors I would have skipped it, a lot of what they have is very obvious commercial gallery stuff, but since it was actually set in some lovely woodlands, it made a really fun trip. I found I kept being drawn to Shona-style stone pieces by Innocent Nyashenga and bronzes by Won Lee, plus I ridiculously loved this Jonah, even more so when I looked closely and realized that he has a fish in his mouth!
(no subject)
Date: 2023-06-14 06:14 am (UTC)Try Chichester as your next cathedral city!
I note your observation "...I guess I just have to admit that English summers are like that now" and that's the best we can hope for: I'm making a deliberate effort to acclimatise, what with working at home instead of working late in an air-conditioned bankers' lair.
The bad news is that we need to be a lot more aware of wildfire risk, the way we are about flood risk; only, indirectly too, as the smoke is likely to affect me badly when we're in the long dry season.
There are parts of Canada I won't be visiting at the wrong time of year, either, no matter how beatiful Ontario and British Columbia are in Autumn; it seems that work trips to New York are going the same way.
But... London, too? A long hot summer under a high pressure system and temperature inversion will make the air extremely unpleasant for me, and actively dangerous for people with moderate-to-severe asthma.
The good news is, I'm learning to like these 30° summer days, and get out a bit.