London, Amsterdam, and the Highlands

Here's a brief version of my spring break itinerary, written hastily in the lobby of our London hostel:

Earlier today, our group of Calvin students arrived via train in London. We'll be hear until Monday morning when Elizabeth and I have to catch the 5:59am train out of King's Cross Station to Harwich on the East coast of England. At nine, we board our ferry to the Hook of Holland where we'll catch another train to Amsterdam to meet the Dirk, a friend of my dad's from college. For the next week, we'll be staying with Dirk and his family. Potential sights to be seen: Artis Zoo, the Rijk's Museum, and the Botanical Gardens (which has a 2000 year old cactus, allegedly).

On the sixth of April, we take the ferry back to Harwich and another train to Paddington Station where we await the arrival of Elizabeth's mom and brother. On the 8th, I head back to York, stock up on provisions and rest, and then head up to Scotland. For the next week, I'll be backpacking around the Western Highlands. The first night, I'm boarding at a hostel on the coast of Loch Ossian. In the morning, I'm getting an early start on a hike westward to Kinlochleven. After three days of hiking in the Mamores and around Loch Leven, I hike along southwest along the coast of the Loch to Glencoe, the ancestral home of the MacDonald clan (yes, that MacDonald once again). There are some beautiful mountains and glens to be seen in those parts of the highlands. I've got a guidebook, a couple maps, a compass, and hopefully the love of the Lord. I return to Kinlochleven on the 15th, hike back to Loch Ossian for the night of the sixteenth, and then catch a train from Corrour Station back to York. Classes begin on the 19th, so that Sunday will be spent getting some much-needed rest.

Cheers!

Weekly Sustenance

Over the past few weekends, I've learned to appreciate the virtues of bread, cheese, and apples. Simple, cheap, delicious, and more or less healthy. Elizabeth and I usually go to Sainsbury's, the English equivalent of the Midwest's Meijer's, on Thursday afternoons and stock up on victuals for the weekend. Together we've sampled a good portion of the cheeses on display, and have discovered that England is the unsung motherland of good cheese. This weekend, I've been enjoying a brick of applewood-smoked cheese, a loaf of heavily-seeded organic bread, and Pink Lady apples.

This morning was the first time in a month that I worked up the verve to go running. I went down Gillygate to the river. It was early enough that none of the shops were open yet and there were very few people in the city center. The Ouse was full of rowers, some of whom were probably on St. John's team, and the park was teeming with walkers and their dogs. In the course of the run I realized two things: one, that I've gotten sadly out of practice since my jogging class last semester, and two, that the English, at least in North Yorkshire, don't usually greet strangers they pass. I'm a practitioner of the head nod, and even when running, I like to acknowledge my fellow runners and walkers, but here it goes mostly unreturned. This must be one manifestation of that renowned and sometimes elusive "English Reserve." Just a piece of armchair anthropology to mull over.

Also, John Morton was good enough to snap a picture of me at the Lincoln Library a few weeks ago. This is me holding up George MacDonald's letters to Tennyson like a shameless fanboy.

MacDonald and Tennyson

There's a good chance that no one but Brent will find the following post very interesting.

A few years ago, my Dad and I had coffee with a man who had met J.R.R. Tolkien. He had a signed copy of The Hobbit (in Dutch for some reason) that he brought along because he knew how enthusiastic I was about Middle Earth. I had a similar experience at the Tennyson Library in Lincoln on Saturday.

As the curator was giving us a history Alfred Lord Tennyson's life in letters, I got the idea to ask if he had ever had a correspondence with George MacDonald, the "father of modern fantasy" and one of my favorite authors and thinkers. As it turns out, MacDonald had sent four letters to Tennyson from 1865 to 1872, and I got to hold them in my hand and try to decipher the hundred and fifty year old cursive. His script was a lot bigger than the majority of old handwriting I've seen, and because of that, it was more or less legible. The letters themselves were along the lines of most of the literary fan-mail lesser writers sent to England's greatest at the time, most of them accompanying copies of MacDonald's own novels, but they still displayed his personality and humor. One of them expressed the hope that Tennyson would not find "the Scotch in [the novel] more of an obstruction than is pleasurable." Being Scottish was still considered more or less an obstacle that writers had to overcome before they could be considered great in the wider literary scene of Britain.

The curator showed us a copy of Through the Looking Glass that Lewis Carroll, a good friend of MacDonald, had sent to Tennyson with a similar letter expressing admiration and the hope that the great poet would enjoy his work, but as she then pointed out, the spine of the book showed no evidence of having been opened. Apparently it took a lot to pass Tennyson's muster as far as literary merit went.

Lincoln itself was an eccentric city. The main street of the old town would probably rate about a challenging blue in Aspen, which made it interesting to walk up and down trying to find bathrooms and ATMs and bookstores. Elizabeth and I spent some time in two wonderful used book stores, the classic kind with more books than floor space. In the first, which had shelves to the ceiling and piles of books everywhere, I unearthed a copy of The Claw of the Conciliator, the second volume in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun from the bottom of a dusty shelf beside the door bell, which rang like a fire siren every time someone opened and closed the door, which was often. In the next store, I found the first and third volumes, which made me very happy. I haven't started them yet – in the throes of writing a few midterm essays – but I've read they're some of the best in literary science fiction.

Thanks for wading through the wanton display of nerditry.

file:///Users/Andrew/Desktop/macdonald.jpg

Take care!

The Elephant Man

York St. John, in contrast with its larger and more distinguished neighbor, York University, is known as a party school. It's nominally Anglican, but that legacy is relegated to the theology department and the squat, grey, painfully modernist chapel which includes services for a variety of faiths. As far as I can tell, the classes are about as challenging as those I took in junior year of high school.

The students are friendly and loud in roughly equal proportions. The same could be said about Calvin students, but their loudness is separated from their lectures. There have been a few lectures now that I've almost walked out of because I couldn't hear every other word the tutor was saying over the lively debate about shoe shopping and weekend plans.

My Theology and Film lecture this morning was a perfect example. My tutor, a deaf man in his sixties, was talking about society's response to the disabled. This week's film was David Lynch's The Elephant Man. The students around me talked straight through a personal story about the isolating effects of his disability, which he didn't quite hear, because, obviously, he's deaf. Three weeks ago, this would have made me want to throw heavy objects around the room, but I've gotten used to these kind of (at the risk of being precious) Kafkaesque displays of ignorance.

Right or wrong, I decided not to go to the screening of The Elephant Man this afternoon. I have better things to do – like finish two novels for Monday and research and write an essay for Tuesday – than struggle to hear the dialogue over the sound of potato chips being eaten.

Along the Pennine Way

Yet another update about a weekend excursion. But does anyone really want to read, "... and then I read one hundred and ninety pages of Dickens..."?

Yesterday, we drove to Haworth, a former industrial town in which the Brontë sisters lived. After attending a service at the church where their father was minister and where most of their family is interred, we toured their house, which is now a museum. Like other author's homes/museums, there was a lot of old furniture, a few items of clothing on display, and a few samples of their manuscripts, which were by far the most interesting part of the exhibit. When we finished, I ate a sandwich on the museum veranda in the savage wind – you can guess that I wasn't thrilled about being put outside to eat my lunch.

When we got started on our hike through the moors, I managed to put away the sour grapes and enjoy the scenery. It was classic English sheep country, complete with rocky crags and heather. We hiked high into the hills, past a waterfall and walled-off pastures, up to a crumbling stone farmhouse built who-knows-when by who-knows-who. On the return hike, our group got separated. I ended up near the back of the line, with John Morton. After following the ancient signposts too literally, we ended up, with the other six who had followed us, somewhere along the backside of Mount Ararat, for all we knew. While John and the others made some phone calls, I had a very pastoral moment. I was leaning against a stone wall, staring into space when I heard some rustling behind me. I turned around and looked straight into the eyes of a pair of old cows chewing hay and staring at me through the broken window of an old farmhouse.

Eventually, we were directed toward the right path and found the bus only twenty minutes later than the rest of the group. Elizabeth was the first to see us, and started singing the theme from Chariots of Fire while we ran to meet each other.

All in all, a refreshing day.

Again, photo credit goes to William Overbeeke.