Travel Diary of the South East: Canterbury

Waking up in a Travelodge is, generally speaking, a very pleasant thing to do. Some people may blanch at the uniformity of these places—the way every room, corridor, and reception area looks virtually the same, the fact that the windows only ever open half an inch lest the room’s occupants should be gripped by an irresistible impulse to throw themselves out at any given moment—but as chains of hotels go, give me a night in a Travelodge over that one Lenny Henry likes to stay in any time. A few years ago a media story reported that an elderly couple had spent 22 years living in Travelodges in the Nottinghamshire and Lincolshire area—as they put it, the price was probably about the same as it would be if they had a mortgage on a house, but they also got maid service thrown in for that. I wouldn’t want to live in one permanently, but Travelodges certainly make for a pleasant place to rest one’s head for a few days.

I woke early, because we were going to Canterbury and couldn’t afford to hang about. That said, I’d slept more or less solidly and easily got my designated eight hours. Well, I say I slept solidly, but that’s to fail to take into account the hour or so for which I lay utterly awake, between the dead time of around four to five o’clock in the morning. I’d love to know why, as soon as you hit eighteen, you’re not allowed to sleep right through of a night any more. I can see why people say they slept like a baby when they’ve passed a particularly good night: the age of infancy is the only time we ever seem to have an unbroken night’s sleep, and that’s not even counting the puking, crying, and pissing yourself. At least I didn’t do any of those in the Travelodge. (Not this time, anyway.)

We didn’t have time for a big breakfast, what with wanting to get into Canterbury before the morning had advanced itself too much. This didn’t matter too much. In a way I’d eaten my breakfast the night before: when we’d arrived at the Travelodge the previous evening, the first thing we’d done, once we’d dumped all our bags and cases in the room, was head across the car park to the Little Chef, where I’d introduced myself to a new experience: the celebrated ‘Olympic Breakfast’ offered by that particular chain of restaurants.

Little Chef restaurants are a strange feature of the British roadside. They’ve supposedly been given a new lease of life recently by TV chef Heston Blumenthal, he of the snail porridge, but they have a long and interesting history going back to before Heston was even in short trousers, or even a glint in Blumenthal Senior’s eye, for that matter. Founded in 1958, they were modelled on the roadside diners that are such a feature of the United States, and have been owned by a number of people over the years, including the Manchester-based television company Granada. The Olympic Breakfast has supposedly been revamped by Blumenthal, but when it arrived on the table in front of me I couldn’t see any snails. Mind you, there was a rather large black mushroom slowly staining the plate underneath it, which to my mind is comparable enough. I don’t know why anyone would want to eat mushrooms. Everything about them, the texture, the look, the shape, the taste—especially the taste—goes against any sane bodily instinct to pluck one from the ground and shove it in one’s mouth, or, more daring still, stick it on one’s plate next to one’s sausages. Fungi for me are off-limits. And I bet the same people who love to chomp on mushrooms complain to the supermarket when the bread they’ve bought has a layer of mould on it. Weird.

The large mushroom aside, the breakfast was everything I could ask for: a big plump juicy sausage, several rashers of bacon, a couple of fried eggs, two fried slices, a pair of half-tomatoes (so a whole tomato sliced in two, I suppose), a pile of sautéed potatoes, and a substantial pile of baked beans, served in a little pot, supposedly to avoid the bean-juice from mingling with the other ingredients. (Why they couldn’t have taken similar precautions with the mushroom I don’t know.) Oh, and some sachets of brown sauce. (Brown sauce with a fry-up is a must for me—it’s fair to say, I’m a fussy one when it comes to breakfast.) I devoured the lot, along with some extra bacon and bits of burger, before we retired to our Travelodge room for the night.

The Canterbury Travelodge lives up to its name, being not unlike a woodland lodge surrounded by trees, making it appear as a safe haven amongst the wild forests of the Isle of Thanet. It also makes it quite invisible when you arrive. It had only been down to a small arrow pointing into the trees and my girlfriend’s eagle eye that meant we didn’t end up bedding down in a leafy glade for the night.

Anyway, the next day we headed into Canterbury quite early, so Rachel could go and use the records office in the cathedral. I set off to look round Canterbury, intending to seek out all the bookshops and charity shops the fair city had to offer. Unfortunately I spent the first forty minutes or so walking past a parade of chain stores the like of which can be seen in every single city in the country. I suppose it was good of the council to shove them all together like this, as it meant that once I’d run the gauntlet I wouldn’t have to look at another Debenhams or New Look sign for the rest of my sojourn in the city; but it was annoying at the time, when all I wanted was a Scope or an RSPCA.

Thankfully, after taking the road less travelled by and opting for a side-street, I then came across two charity shops in one. One in particular, a British Red Cross, was particularly chock-full of gems, and as soon as I win £1 million on the Premium Bonds, I’ll doubtless go back and buy up all their books, before leaving a generous donation in the teddy-bear tin on the till on my way out. As it was, I spent £1.95 on Richard Fortey’s brilliantly titled Life: An Unauthorised Biography, and left. Still, I’d got my first souvenir of the holiday. (I collect books, rather than sticks of rock. You can’t eat them—well, you could, but it probably wouldn’t do your bowels much good—but books come in a wider variety of shapes, smells, colours, and subjects, and as far as I’m concerned, you can never have enough of the things.)

I didn’t buy any more books in Canterbury, but then it’s hardly surprising. Later on we found a charity shop which proudly proclaimed that it housed ‘the cheapest books in Canterbury’, priced at 95p. Where the hell are the bargain bins with 10p books on offer? I’d had a similar experience in Worcester: it seems that once you get to a certain point down south, all the charity shops up their prices tenfold.

But we had other, more Canterbury-themed things to do. So we went for lunch in a particularly pleasant Burger King (with very adequate toilets) before walking to St Augustine’s Abbey, which is a bit off the beaten track, but worth finding. The audio guides, which come free after you’ve paid the admission fee, were too quiet once you step outside to look round the remains of the abbey. So we discarded them and just wandered round, looking at the different parts of the abbey, which are well signposted.

St Augustine’s Abbey was founded at the end of the sixth century, when Augustine—not the one who hung out with Hippos and asked for chastity but not yet, but the one who came to Canterbury and converted the King of Kent to Christianity—was allowed to set up a monastery there and became the first Archbishop of Canterbury. One of the campuses of Canterbury Christ Church University is near the site of the abbey, which must surely rival Oxford and Cambridge for universities surrounded with beautiful historic scenery. The remains of the abbey exert a calming influence over you, so as you wander round you find yourself quietly and gently subdued by fourteen centuries of history. At various points are the graves of old Kings of Kent and Archbishops of Canterbury, along with other dignitaries. There’s a not bad view of the cathedral, too.

So that is where we headed next. Canterbury Cathedral is steeped in history, and is perhaps surpassed only by the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey for the number of luminaries who are somehow connected with it. The cathedral has been there in some form since the time of Augustine, but the large and imposing structure which consistently inspires the awe of visitors in the twenty-first century is Norman, mostly the work of Lanfranc, the first Norman Archbishop. St Augustine’s Abbey may house the final resting places of some of the earliest Archbishops of Canterbury, but the cathedral houses many of the medieval and post-medieval incumbents of that post.

One of the things you notice as you walk round is how many of the previous incumbents of the post of Archbishop of Canterbury are noseless. A raft of dignitaries from the Middle Ages lie buried there in effigy, and not one of them has a nose. (How do they smell? Well, quite musty actually, since you ask.) The whole thing is awesome in the most literal sense: as with York Minster, all you have to do upon entering is tilt your head back and take in—or attempt to take in—the sheer scope of the ceiling far above you, to be humbled by your own insignificance, temporal in both the spiritual and scientific sense of that word. That, of course, was the idea. Of course, anyone with a passing interest in medieval history cannot, when surveying the vast arches and the detailed stained glass, help thinking also of the crippling poverty which must have helped to build the cathedral, how many ordinary people’s lives must have been miserably impecunious just so this towering edifice could come into being.

That said, you can’t help admiring the place. And it has some wonderful tombs, too: tombs to rival those in Westminster Abbey, surely. In a glass case hanging high on a wall, there are the funeral objects of the Black Prince, he who fought the French in the Hundred Years’ War and would have been king, had he not died a year before his dad, Edward III, did. The tomb of the Prince himself is a little further down in the cathedral. He even has his chain mail and armour on. He’s a legendary figure, although the sobriquet Black Prince (rather like another fourteenth-century anachronism, Black Death) appears not to have been used until much later—the sixteenth century is when it first appears in print. Nobody knows why he became known as the Black Prince, but the name has stuck. He appears in Conan Doyle’s excellent novel The White Company and in Bernard Cornwell’s equally brilliant Grail Quest trilogy. It was good to see his tomb, as I’m a sucker for all things medieval and Edward was such an intriguing figure.

The tomb of the Black Prince lies on one side of an empty space—there’s probably some fancy technical churchy term for it, but I don’t know what it is if there is one—and the joint tomb of Henry IV and his wife, Joan of Navarre, lies the other side. In the empty space a single candle sits on the floor, unadorned and constantly burning. It marks the spot where the shrine to Thomas Becket stood from the 1200s until the 1530s when Thomas Cromwell destroyed it. It is the shrine to which Chaucer’s pilgrims are travelling in The Canterbury Tales. I don’t know what the shrine looked like—nobody does, as it appears that no one bothered to make a record of its appearance before it was destroyed—but I’m prepared to stick my neck out and claim that, as modern tributes go, the candle is pretty fitting. It is beautiful and understated, with nothing but a brief and unobtrusive sign to tell tourists what it is burning for.

The shrine—or, rather, the candle—does not mark the spot where Becket was murdered. That area is down the steps, and in the east transept of the cathedral. During the afternoon of 29 December 1170, four knights murdered Archbishop Becket at the point now known (for reasons beyond my comprehension) as ‘the Martyrdom’. Three brown metal swords which look in serious need of a bit of polish seemingly hang suspended over the point where Beckett had his brains scooped out from his skull like egg from its shell. It’s a distinctly underwhelming experience, actually, and the candle—and maybe the shrine before it—carries far more of a punch in bringing home that distant event. And there was no secret passage to the nunnery either. If there had been, Becket may have escaped his doom, much as Edmund Blackadder did.

Fittingly enough, T. S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral, about the killing of Becket, had its premiere in the cathedral in 1935.

We emerged from the cathedral, but the experience didn’t end there: when you look back and behold the place you’ve just been walking round, seeing it from the fresh perspective of out in the open air, you receive a renewed sense of just how tall, big, detailed, and bloody brilliant the place is. And it was in such a frame of mind, suitably humbled, and with aching feet, that we headed for the car to select our next destination.