Skip to main content

Sun Sept 14.Boughton Lees. 21.7 km.

 Yesterday’s Unite the Kingdom march in London brought together people from all over the UK for a huge (at least  150,000 people) march in support of the far-right and Tommy Robinson. Google him - pretty unsavoury.  I’m going to continue to bury my head in medieval pilgrimages.

Of course, there has been scandal a-plenty and multiple troubles throughout time.  Yesterday I passed by the site of Boxley Abbey.  Pre-Reformation an Archbishop wrote to Cardinal Wolsey saying this “is so holy a place where so many miracles might be showed”. 

A few years later, as the Abbey was being ransacked for treasure during the Reformation, it was found that a carved figure in the rood screen that had amazed pilgrims by occasionally moving was in fact a puppet. Moreover, when pilgrims had given generously to the Abbey, they had been invited to try and lift a statue of a saint that only righteous people could move.  The monks simply loosened a screw under the statue, depending on the size of the gift.  And last but not least the finger of the Apostle Andrew, inlaid with silver, was sold off cheaply when pilgrims no longer came to worship it.

While I’m on this theme, here is a monument in a fairly prominent place in Southwark Cathedral. The deceased, Dr. Lionel Lockyear, died very wealthy during the seventeenth  century. But he was a complete quack. One of his best-selling miracle pills featured “sunbeams” as an ingredient.


Alright, I will conclude on another example that times have never been very great, thanks to human nature. At the Toronto airport I itched to buy a book, and the very small selection actually included a really good translation of Marcus Aurelius, “Meditations” (trans Gregory Hays, paperback Modern Library).  If you haven’t read this, I highly recommend it.  Marcus Aurelius was a Roman Emperor (121 - 180).  He wrote these reflections just for himself, and in this translation in particular, they take the reader right in to the intimacy of a man with immense responsibilities striving to live a good life.

“”…look at the way people around you behave.  Even the best of them are hard to put up with - not to mention putting up with yourself” (Book 5, 10)

“Don’t be heard complaining about life at court. Not even to yourself.” (Book 8, 9)

“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognised that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.”  (Book 2, 1)



Comments

  1. TimKellySeptember 14, 2025 at 4:15 PM

    Nice reflections, suitable for today's news. Enjoying your posts.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

September 5

 I landed at Heathrow this morning at 6 am, a very inconvenient time to get a room and rest! But my student residence accommodation includes a common room with handy couches for a short snooze. The neighbourhood abuts on Regent’s Park, complete with gorgeous flowerbeds.   The Queen Mary’s rose garden in Regent’s Park. My neighbourhood wandering took me to the Wallace House which used to be one of the homes of the marquesses of Hertford.  The Hertfords were fabulously rich, mainly from extensive land holdings, and in the 18th and 19th centuries avid art collectors.  They obviously had Trumpian home decorating tastes. Here are two of their many clocks, all of which need frequent ‘fine tuning’, it appears. I particularly liked two 18th c British paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds in their collection: Mrs Carnac and the hauntingly strange Strawberry Girl.
4 comments
Read more

Sat Oct 4. London.

19 days walking on pilgrimage paths for a total of 395 km or 245 miles on foot (not that arduous - an average of 20.7 km per day, and lots of ‘rest days’ staying put in one place).  All of that undone in 1.5 hours on a Eurostar train.  I’m not entirely sure what conclusion I’m drawing from that comparison, but I’m back where I started, in London.   On my way to my lodgings (I’m staying in a Buddhist retreat centre) I decided to visit the first visitable place to cross my path, which turned out to be the Foundling Museum.  Horrified by the sight of infants being abandoned on 18th c London streets, a prosperous seaman, Thomas Coram, spent 17 years raising awareness and funds, as well as obtaining royal permission to build London’s first children’s charity. Opened in 1739, the Foundling Hospital continued its work until the 1950s, and actually is still active as a non-institutional resource, under a different name. Here is a photo of it in 1935. So many similarities to ...
1 comment
Read more

Saturday September 6

 I have given myself today and tomorrow in London before starting the walk. A good thing because I’m having technical difficulties getting on to the AirB&B site that I need to access for my Monday night accommodation… Today I had a lovely walk to Canary Wharf along quiet streets bordering the Thames. The tide was high and the water a bit agitated, but the sun was warm and the strollers happy.  Over 25,000 bombs fell on this area of London in WWII as the Germans fully recognised the importance of maritime trade to British resilience. Some warehouses have survived (or been rebuilt) and the extensive blocks of post-war flats are very attractive (and very very expensive.) I had a pleasant break in a sixteenth century pub, the ‘Prospect of Whitby’, where Charles Dickens would come to listen to dock folk - original flagstone floors and a pewter counter on the bar.  From the waterfront balcony patrons in earlier days could watch as pirates and smugglers were hung from a gibb...
2 comments
Read more