An English Summer Solstice

Summer in London might be described as more of a mindset than a season. That’s not entirely true of course. It’s not really possible to conjure the mood of summertime when it’s cold and rainy, so the consistent presence of the sun clearly has a role. So perhaps I should say instead that like any season in England, summer arrives unpredictably and behaves erratically. You might hear the locals say something like “Last year, summer came in early May and lasted three weeks.” One thing readers in the southeastern or mid-Atlantic United States should appreciate is that you can generally rule out a consistent string of days in the 90s bracket. Generally, I said. On the whole, summer is a temperate affair here: temperature-wise, it might not seem that much different than spring, lingering pleasantly in the 60s and 70s with the occasional cold, rainy day that makes you want to light a fire or hot day that prompts you to pull out the electric fan. Apparently, the fan kept in the closet below the stairs in our building was bought at a yard sale for five quid (the orange hand-written price tag has been left on it by the purchaser, perhaps as a mark of pride). The reason for this bargain becomes clear when you set yourself in front of the fan at full speed and realize that you can’t actually feel any breeze coming off of it. You just trust that it’s circulating the air and generally cooling things down.

The days at this latitude have indeed become quite long—with sunrise at 4:30 a.m. and sunset at 9:30 p.m. However, the arrival of the summer solstice this past Saturday was admittedly anticlimactic. We spent it in Yorkshire visiting friends who live in a lovely little village of a couple hundred inhabitants called Nun Monkton. We woke on June 21st to a day of gusting winds, rain and cool temperatures. We had planned to visit the ruins of a former abbey called Jervaux and went out anyway, trudging around the beautiful ruins of the former Cistercian monastery in the rain and wet grass. The sheep in the surrounding pastures huddled beneath trees for shelter, bleating at passersby. We huddled in a café afterwards instead. When we returned home, our hosts brought us hot tea and started a coal fire, so that we could dry our cold, wet feet. We heard a number of jokes that day about the fine weather we were having for the longest day of the year. We commiserated and almost felt like locals. J even bought a traditional Herford cap in grey (if you know him, you’ll appreciate his color preference) to commemorate our day in the country and, more practically, to keep the rain off his head. It’s quite fetching.

 

That evening, I ventured out in the rain with our friend Suzanne to attend a girls-only Nun Monkton Summer Solstice Party. This party is apparently an annual event for the local women of the village, and since it is attended by many mothers, it has the benefit of allowing the women to have a night off without having to seek out a babysitter. We were to dine al fresco, presumably to enjoy a long summer’s night, so I admit that I felt hesitant to attend an outdoor party on a rainy night with gale-force winds. I had visions of women huddled under a tent together, trying to enjoy their finger foods and the local gossip without getting their heels stuck in the mud. So it came as a very pleasant surprise to find that our host, a brash but lively and welcoming woman named Ulrika, had set up a long, sturdy tent that was perfectly dry and protected from the rain and hung with pictures and lamps. The long table (set for 30 women) was set for a formal dinner and strewn with red roses.

 

As we arrived, Ulrika had us draw a number to determine our seat for the evening with the no doubt intended effect of forcing us to be brave socially. I found myself at the opposite end of the table from my friend in the good company of some local women and a German woman who had been practising medicine in Yorkshire for several years. Over the next SIX hours, we enjoyed a four-course dinner, wine, coffee, conversation and a series of humiliating pop quizzes provided by our host. In case you’re the kind of person who loves reading menus, ours included: spicy shrimp salad, goulash with sauerkraut (Ulrika was from the former East Germany), meringue with cream and strawberries drizzled with chocolate, and a plate of English cheeses.

 

This lengthy monologue was intended as a prelude to a list of our favorite summer outings in the Big Smoke, but it’s turned into some ruminations on the arrival of summer in England. So look for another post to follow soon with thoughts on the best ways to get outside when the sun is shining in London.

 

-HDE

More Moments

My apologies for the delay in posts folks. I meant to do this last weekend but then the sun was shining, and when the sun shines in England you take advantage of it, because it might not shine again for a week or two. Then I was going to do it this past weekend, and our internet was down. So I’m seizing the moment now!

I’m flattered that H thinks that her scholarly husband is somehow not as prone to nostalgia in and about this old world country that he studies for a living. I’m extremely nostalgic when it comes to the UK, although I’ve lived here long enough to no longer see it with rose-colored glasses. That said, I will spare you, dear reader, my cloying musings. Even better, I will share lots of pictures. I can’t hope to match H’s prose, but I’ll share some thoughts about my favorite images from our trip.

This is actually less of a favorite image than a favorite moment. Our first day in York we poked around the city, just taking in its many sights and lovely architecture. Then we stumbled across this, the medieval merchant adventurers guild. I doubly enjoyed it, as not only have I spent a lot of the last few months studying English merchants, but it was a beautiful 14th century building (yes, thats 100 years before Columbus stumbled across the Americas!) in a completely unexpected place.

This picture demonstrates another one of the pleasures of York – how the medieval cathedral bobs in and out of your sight as you move around the city. It absolutely dominates the skyline, but can be hidden by many of the more modern buildings. I liked this shot, as we just came around a corner and there it was, so close you could almost reach up and touch it. There was also a shop on the corner that was the York-something-or-other, but I managed to cut the “something-or-other” out of the frame, leaving a little visual clue in the corner of this picture.

I worked hard for this next shot, and it turned out well, though not quite as dramatically as I had hoped. I was hanging out the window of the North Yorkshire Moors Railway (NYMR) steam train, trying to get a picture of the engine as we went around a curve while it belched black smoke. The curve you could predict, the black smoke, not so much. I also had to be careful because (and this was the hard part) the afore-mentioned black smoke has lots of hot little cinders in it. I had a fine layer of ash on my shirt by the time I had completed this experiment.

I’m not really prone to taking cutesy animal pictures (unless they are of the noble German Shepherd), but this creature was, well, too cute. H and I took a quick hike through a ravine in the moors to see a waterfall, passing a number of pastures filled with sheep. It being spring, there were lots of lambs out and about. This particular lamb was quite near the fence and was very inquisitive. He tottered up to see what we were doing before his mother herded him away.

I was also pleased to see that dogs are considered part of the family for the NYMR. Inexpensive members at that!

The churchyard of the parish church in Burford, where we stayed in the Cotswolds, is one of the most bucolic I’ve ever seen. It was a place where the eye could soak in the beauty of God’s creation wherever it was cast. This shot is only a pale reflection of it too: the purple of the flowers, the verdant green of the plants, the pale gray of the medieval wall and the solitary ancient tombstone amidst all of it was far more striking than this picture could ever show.

I think God has a gentle sense of humor. I was struck by this grave and the little sign that said “reserved” planted in the ground next to it. Indeed. It was far more peaceful then some of the memento mori that were found within the church itself, yet it served the same purpose. I took several shots of this trying to get it without my shadow, but in the end having the shadow there underscores the humor and impact of the image that much the more.

This is a bit of a vanity shot, but bear with me here. I was dreading -dreading- driving during our vacation. Its not just the whole driving-on-the-left thing, although I was sweating that too. It’s that English roads were often laid out hundreds of years ago, for horses and carts, not cars. So careening around in the country you are often on one way streets, except that a tractor trailer may be coming in the opposite direction. Dreading, people. But you know what, I actually enjoyed it in the end. Mostly because of this car. Man, what a beauty. It was a complete surprise too. We had rented a Ford Mondeo, of all things, and they gave us the Benz instead at no extra charge. That kind woman working at the car rental place instantly turned one of the scariest parts of the trip into one of my favorites.

Those of you who have been following my “career” for a few years know that I received a masters degree in Reformation history. So I’m always fascinated by physical manifestations of the Reformation, both positively, and, as is often the case, negatively too. This was a pre-Reformation wall painting at Northleach parish church that had been whitewashed over in the 16th century and rediscovered by the Victorians. The plain cross gives the whitewashed medieval wall painting in this picture a pleasing focus in what would otherwise have been a dull picture, and an appropriate subtext too.

This was just an old BP advertising sign that caught my eye outside an automobile museum in Burton-on-the-water.

I close with a couple pictures of one of my most vivid memories, the scores of mustard fields around the Cotswolds. There were literally hundreds of them, and they never ceased to amaze me with the hundreds of acres of vibrant yellow flowers. No picture can do them justice, as sight of these broad yellow fields scattered across the green English plains is just one of those things you had to witness. Yep, no nostalgia for merry old England around here, folks.

JEE