Weekly Dispatch No. 17: In Which I Overcome Homesickness and a Cold; Ride an Odd Horse; Enjoy the Cathedral; Visit the Queen's Favorite Castle, and Avoid Gaol Time

Laid low by an annoying head cold and kept inside by a steady and cold British rain, I succumbed to a bit of homesickness yesterday, Sunday, a condition exacerbated—though unwittingly, of course—by news from the other side of the ocean where Beth was hosting a bike ride/dinner with visiting faculty from the Netherlands and Finland, along with photos sent by my trainer and friend, Donna Petry, of my horse, Major Dude, winning blue ribbons and a reserve championship, but not with me in the saddle.

Please understand that I neither begrudge people their joy nor do I wish I had not received the news and pictures.  But anyone who has been away for any length of time can understand, there are those moments when the unfamiliar becomes less charming than it had been, and all you want are familiar sights and sounds and tastes and smells--never under-estimate the power of the olfactory to prod your memory—of home.  I did not lie on the couch—there’s no lying on the couch, anyway; it’s too short, even for me—with my wrist to my forehead, crying, “Oh, woe…woe is me” (well, maybe, a little), but I did feel stupidly sorry that I was all alone, albeit in a beautiful place and of my own choosing. 

That said, the feeling passed, as I knew it would, and I woke up this morning with the sun shining, my cold on the wane, and full day of activity ahead, not the least of which is getting this completed and posted and adding more photos to Facebook.  Which brings me back to my horse…

One of the great pleasures of my life is horseback riding—or horse riding, as they call it here—and I am lucky to have spent quite a lot of time in a saddle the past 15 or so years.  Though I came late to riding, when I finally started it was the realization of a dream I’d had since I was old enough to ask for a horse for my birthday and then for Christmas. I continued to make the same request every year until it became apparent that my parents and Santa were in cahoots, and I’d have better luck asking for a BB gun or a puppy.  Even a monkey.  When I finally decided that the only person who would get me a horse for my birthday was me, I was 50.  After a summer of looking, I came into a barn and met Dude (I added the Major, after a Steely Dan song), and we began our partnership.  At first, we had to get to know each other and figure out how we were going to work together and then, about 7 years ago, we met Donna and started to learn dressage.  Variously called the “golf of equestrian sports,” because when a rider is completing a test, the spectators are silent, or “the equestrian equivalent of paint drying,” because it’s more interesting to the one riding than to those watching, dressage has its roots in cavalry maneuvers, and though we don’t move our horses sideways next to another rider to whack him with a sword, those of us who practice enough can, indeed, move our horses sideways.  The real good, experienced dressage riders make their horses dance.  (Check out the world championships on YouTube.)  Dude and I can’t dance, but we’ve come quite a ways, and I’m proud of us.  We’re a good team, and we have a very good trainer .

This lengthy introduction will, I hope, explain why one of the things I wanted to do when I came to England was to take weekly riding lessons.  While Dude is at home being trained by Donna and my share boarder, Nicole Quaisser, I need to try to stay in shape so that when I go home in December, I’ll start up close to where I left off.  Last time I was in Canterbury, I made contact with Andrew Payne, who owns Trenley Stables out on Stodmarsh Road. With his help, I got about a dozen of the students who were in the program then to go on a trail ride, and I later took a lesson before time started to fill in with school obligations, and it wasn’t possible to get back out again.  The week we arrived here this year, I got in touch with Andrew again and asked about lessons.  He’s a very affable guy and assured me that they would work with me and listen to what I wanted.  That sounded good, so I had Beth bring along my breeches and half chaps when she came to visit, and then I called again and set up a lesson for this past Tuesday.

Despite the treacherous nature of my walk out Stodmarsh Road the Sunday prior, I decided I’d go by foot to the stable and then, if I was tired after the lesson, would call for a taxi.  Unfortunately, when I got up Tuesday morning, a stereotypically soupy British fog had settled over the area, and, after imagining headlights coming at me through the thick mist, I made arrangements to be taken out to the stable by cab.  Once there, I met with my instructor, Paul, and my horse for the day, Cashel, a 17-year-old chestnut former eventing horse—which means he had competed in dressage, cross-country and stadium jumping—and went into the arena for a half-hour lesson.  Overall, I was happy with the lesson because Paul tried to help Cashel and me get a feel for one another before I asked him to do too much.  We spent a bulk of the time trotting and doing the kind of work that I’m used to doing in a lesson.  When I was finished and getting ready to start my walk back to town, I did a quick mental evaluation to see if this was what I’m looking for. 

Having only ridden Dude for the past 7 years, getting onto a strange horse was, indeed, strange.  I’m so used to my own horse’s size and the way he moves that I don’t even think about it anymore.  With Cashel, I was first struck by how much smaller he is than Dude.  He is by no means skinny, but my horse is a wide body, and I felt a little like I was sitting on a sawhorse.  Adding to the awkwardness was the saddle.  It was a dressage saddle, meaning a deep seat, but it was too small, and when I posted a trot, I suffered a wee bit of man pain any time I didn’t come down exactly right; as a result, I sat the trot a lot.  At 17, Cashel is starting to experience arthritis problems, something I noticed when I tried to get him to collect himself and to bend around my leg in the corners.  He was very stiff and had a tendency to tuck his butt and scoot when I asked him to move forward rather than to accelerate at a steady pace.  Still, I very much enjoyed Paul’s teaching and was still going back and forth about continuing as I headed down the lane from the stable and onto Stodmarsh Road.

It was on the walk home that I finally made my decision.  I walk a lot, so the 3 ½ mile trek back into Canterbury was no big deal, but, as I noted in the last dispatch, Stodmarsh Road is not the idyllic country lane I remembered from 2007.  Perhaps that’s not what it ever was, but the more I walked, the more I realized it was just a matter of time before someone exceeding the posted-but-not-observed speed limit of 30 mph was going to have me plastered like the proverbial bug on his/her windshield.  I was nimble enough to avoid even the speediest of motorist-murderers, but when I got to the place I now and will forever more refer to as Prayer Corner, I made up my mind definitively.  As I dodged car after car after car, leaping into hedgerows where sun-happy bees buzzed and sent pleas heavenward—“Oh My God…Oh, Sweet Jesus!”—l swore that if I could return to Canterbury with all limbs intact and no blood spilled I would never again walk along this stretch of British roadway.  I’m posting a photo on Facebook of the perhaps innocuous–looking Prayer Corner after I’d made my way around it.

Though I could continue to take a cab to and from Trenley, the cost for each day would almost double the cost of a lesson.  So, even though I like the people and the place and feel that Cashel and I would, eventually, work together well, I’m checking into a second facility near Canterbury, one I’m told is served by a bus route.  In this way, then, I will live to ride again. 

I spent most of the rest of Tuesday dealing with post-traumatic stress, but that evening, following class, my Missouri counterpart, Rich, and I went to the cathedral for the annual open house.  Either Beth and I missed this event in 2007, or it’s an addition to the calendar, but a friend who was here a couple of years ago told us about it, and I’m glad for the information.  Following the 5:30 evensong service, the cathedral is wide open, free of charge, to the public, and everyone who works for the place in any capacity has a chance to meet the public and let everyone know what they do in that amazing building.  There were, among others, archivists and clergy, artisans who apply gold leaf to the ornamentation and some who carve limestone by hand to replace chipped or broken pieces.  There were seamstresses and carpenters and one man whose job was to keep the pigeons from making too big a mess.  He was aided in the job by Junior, a Harris Hawk, who soared above the cathedral and chased away any bird attempting to foul the place.  (I forgot my camera that evening, but Rich had his, and he’s shared a couple of photos with me that I’ll post on Facebook.)

Down in the crypt, we ran into a docent I’d spoken to last week, a native of the Netherlands who spent 25 years in New York and now lives in Canterbury—“the best place in the world I’ve ever lived”—who showed us around a small chapel that had been walled off for hundreds of years because the space had to be filled with loose stone to anchor a wobbly tower.  The tower continued to wobble, so they took it down, but they didn’t open up the chapel until 1950, at which time they discovered amazing frescoes, still untouched by weather or man.  This led our docent-friend to explain that the cathedral had four enemies over time: the weather, Henry VIII, the Nazis, and, most importantly, the Puritans.  The Puritans wreaked the most havoc on the cathedral in their attempt to erase anything papist, including frescoes like the one we were admiring. 

Though we were too late for tickets, guests were taken up into the Bell Harry Tower, which rises 294 feet above the ground floor, and into the choristers’ practice room and the organ loft.  I, of course, would have had to take a pass on the tower tour, but either of the others might have proven interesting.  I noticed that of all the cathedral departments represented, the table least visited belonged to the human resources department.  In the past, when I worked for a living, I found that the HR department could be a little difficult to work with, what with all their forms and regulations and whatnot, but I felt sorry for the two women standing there, looking so forlorn.  I said to Rich, “Maybe if they had some candy to give away, people would stop.”  As it turned out, they did have candy, and we did stop.  Their gimmick was a “Guess How Many People Have Been Hired By The Cathedral This Year” contest, which isn’t really much of an attention-getter, in terms of general interest—certainly not like “Guess What Anthony Weiner’s Been Up To Lately”—but the possibility of winning a large tin of chocolate seemed to do the trick, and their tally sheet was nearly filled by the time we got there.  I guessed 114 people had been hired, but what do I know.  How many gilt-painters are there in the world, anyway?  Bitter?  Of course.  That looked like good chocolate.

Tuesday was clearly the most eventful day of the week, though Friday featured a field trip to Windsor Castle and Runnymede.  Having been to Windsor a couple of times already (sorry to seem jaded), nothing was any different from the last time (see Dispatch #8 from 2007 for a full accounting of the place), except that the Queen did not arrive during our visit but shortly after, giving me reason to wonder if our relationship is all I thought it was.  Tramp.

At any rate, Friday was rainy, rainy, rainy.  It was the kind of day that everyone expects when they come to Britain but no one really wants to experience.  Because of the dreary weather, our trip to Runnymede, site of the signing of the Magna Carta, perhaps the most important document in human history, was cut short.  We did have a quick run up the hill to the site of the JFK memorial and a sprint to the Greek-looking memorial to the Magna Carta, but we were denied the chance to visit the very spot, under an ancient yew tree, where it is speculated that kings first ceded control to the masses, paving the way for, among other things, the United States of America.  The rain was relentless, and the students were as well.  In England, the term for whining is whingeing, and I heard more than a little of that as we marched these ingrates across muddy fields so that they could appreciate something they had no intention of appreciating.  In twenty years, however, it’ll all make sense.

If you look on the Weather Channel UK, you might see, at the top of the screen, a rather vague warning: “Potential Disruption Caused by Rain.”  Take the “Potential” out of that, and you’ve got our bus ride back to Canterbury.  Rather than arriving a little early because the rain had foreshortened our field trip, the disruptive rain caused us to arrive more than two hours later than had been planned.  And, from my perspective, it was not a pleasant journey.  At first, exhausted and wet, the students slept, and I was happy.  Then they awoke, and I was not.  Between conversations that bordered on the insipid (sorry if I seem to have grown intolerant of 19-year-old insights into the world’s problems) and ear-splitting renditions of iPod songs only the singer could hear, I was certain I’d descended into a level of Hell far below any that Dante could have ever imagined.  In the light of day, at arm’s length, these are wonderful kids, the apples of their parents’ collective eye, but at 6:30 p.m., in a hot, stinky bus, with a cold smacking me in the forehead, and my shoes still damp, they became the spawn of Satan, beings whose sole purpose was to torment me, and so they did.  Had the trip lasted much longer, I might have had to face charges.

This week, I have guests from the U.S. coming for a few days.  Pam and John Moore are arriving tomorrow and should they survive my “you have to stay up until 9 p.m.” ordeal will no doubt find this to be as charming and memorable a place as I do.  I’ll report on their visit as well as preview my trip to Cornwall and other exciting events next week.

Thanks for reading. 

p.s.  Lest, Gentle Reader, you find my depiction of the students to be too callous and to ask yourself if I am a suitable shepherd for this flock, please understand that for that section I adopted a favorite persona, The Cranky Man, which allows me to wax hyperbolic and vitriolic for effect.  In truth, the reason I came back to Canterbury was the students and the chance to watch the transformation this kind of experience provides.  That, and the food.