Cambridge 5

June 23, 2010

Early train to Bury St. Edmund’s. We had our tour with the perky Englishwoman, and I was convinced of the significance and former majesty of the place. But I was also reminded how much I hate tours, and never in my own travels take them unless I have been deceived into it. My own process would have been to take the train and wander, maybe to have stayed a night, absorbing without the Greatest Hits version provided by the very well informed and well meaning and almost infuriating tour personnel. The ruins are spectacular, though, and the place in its day must have been magnificent. When places like it were falling, it was the end of a civilization, and the one replacing it was not its equal. There are so many reasons for hating Henry VIII– and the one good thing that came out of him, the Anglican Church, may have come in its own. Our guide was perpetually being interrupted by squirrels, quarreling pigeons, children. There was much more of the town I would have liked to see, and rather less of what she showed me. The Cathedral is very beautiful, but it made me meditate on the rightness of building in a style 500 years out of date. Was the Norman really the great age of faith which one wishes constantly to be hearkening to? We toured the Greene King brewery. Part of the wisdom gained at the Natural History museum– that sometimes you don’t need to see the innards of a thing to appreciate it-- was operable here. The flat truth is that I don’t really care how beer is made, and now that I know, it’s smelly and sort of icky, with a whole lot of damp grain lolling about in nasty brown tanks. The day must be commended, though, for extreme beauty which holds now even as it inclines toward evening. The ruins of the abbey must be remembered for the largest and most beautiful roses, as outsized and voluptuous as the compound must have been itself.