Many small happenings

[shewhomust]

On Saturday we took a load of waste to the tip: nothing spectacular - the most exciting was some unfinished tins of paint - just cardboard and wine bottles and rags, but it felt like a real achievement.

It being April 5th, which was my father's birthday, we paid our annual visit to Finchale, a place he had known as a child. The fear of falling masonry (which we encountered at so many of Scotland's historic buildings) seems to be spreading south, and large parts of the Priory were fenced off. But we wandered about the ruins anyway, and then we crossed the footbridge and walked along the riverside path. I took the pictures I take every year: ruined tracery, eroded stonework, drifts of wood anemones. But here's something new:

Durham has embraced the idea of pilgrimage as a tourist attraction, and I'm usually pretty irritated by it. But I suppose any point can be the starting point of a pilgrimage, and Finchale to Compostela is no sillier than any other. I wished I could have talked to Tom about it...

Next we visited the Quizmaster, to drop off the election leaflets he had offered to deliver, and stopped for a cup of tea and a chat. I felt we had earned both.

Sunday morning was the Farmers' Market: I may have bought too much, but I'm not sorry. And today the painter came for the last time; and there's one window that doesn't open quite as it should, and will have to be fixed - but the end is in sight.

Comments

[anef]

Pilgrimage was an early form of tourism, though, so you could say it is just carrying on as it began.

[shewhomust]

There's a lot of overlap, certainly, but they are not equivalents (are they?).

[anef]

I think a medievalist (not sure which one) told me this and it stuck with me. In evidence I adduce the following:

https://freerangehistory.substack.com/p/what-happens-on-medieval-pilgrimage

[shewhomust]

Interesting article - thanks for the link! And it chimes with something I suspected when writing my own thesis - that religion is so deeply present and so ubiquitous that things we would find incompatible don't seem to bother anyone.