Wordly Wise

There were cheery cafeterias, quaint bookstores, and tiny gift shops in those little lanes. Handycammed tourists from all over were having a great time walking through. Guides spoke loudly in a clipped southern accent, some of them dressed in cheap, loud period garments. But my heart sank just a bit at the fact that I was there, and my hair wasn8217;t standing on end.

Then I walked into Dickens8217; house. He lived there from 1837 to 1850, really not long enough for me to call it his home. But David Copperfield was the first work of Dickens I8217;d read.

He based Wickfield House on the House of Agnes Hotel, and The Sun, where Mr Micawber stayed, on The Cathedral Gate Hotel. Beds and chambers say so little about an author; when I went round the corner into the old city square and saw the hotels, my heart sank a little more. They looked like any other hotel around.

Everything was so neat and tidy that Dickens, with his grimy industrial reality, couldn8217;t possibly live here any more.

Could I find Chaucer? I gave up before I began8212;beneath the wrapping, Canterbury was a beautifully manicured piece of history, preserved the way, I am sure, a lot of people keep their Berlin Wall pieces. There was no way Canterbury as it stood could make room for the delightful laissez-faire rough-and-ready treatment by Chaucer8217;s peasants. You couldn8217;t imagine anything ribald or raucous. The Canterbury Tales were not of Old Canterbury, they were of a time when new Canterbury didn8217;t need to exist.

My companion kept exclaiming at the cuteness of the little place, and I felt increasingly uncomfortable with my hair8217;s refusal to react appropriately to the Marlowe exhibits at the museum. It is strange how artefacts used by an author will, for example, totally demystify him. You are left wondering where all the mystery came from.

Lunch followed8212;appetising but silent, as I ruminated on images that had stayed on from the works of my literary heroes. Now there remained only the Cathedral itself.

This was different. The silence deepened as I walked on to the lawn, and standing before me, without any distracting hardsell, was the Cathedral in all its ancient dignity. As I walked through the wooden doors, the darkness cooled my senses. There I was finally where I wanted to be8212;in dim light, in dark corridors, on stone floors, in aisles that held exquisite pieces of ecclesiastical art. Frocked in black, priests clattered their way through the corridors, whispering silently.

Suddenly it wasn8217;t the words I read that mattered. Things that went way deeper started to bother me: The chaos that I live in, the complete absence of purpose in waking up, and all the rush. I was deep in my reverie, and my companion asked me what was wrong. I had to tell her I was finally awed.

We were supposed to return to London, but at deep peace with myself, I spent the rest of the afternoon at the Cathedral, just happy to be, and we stayed the night in the city.

The next morning8212;when we did all the things that the handycammed do: Dover Castle a rough-hewn fort, Augustine Abbey a small 1,500-year-old liturgical monument and a re-visit to the museum8212;I actually loved it, and took all the photographs in the right poses.