York and Durham

I’ve had an exciting couple of days. First, we went to York for a weekend to see The Globe’s production of all three parts of Henry VI. We saw the first part on the Friday evening and the following two on the late afternoon and evening of the Saturday.

The Globe was keen to point out that the three parts are not written as a series, and the “first” part was written last, in my opinion was the weakest, and probably by Shakespeare alone, whereas he probably collaborated on the other two. But I do think we gained from watching all three in short succession – there was a tremendous momentum - the bloodshed gathering pace, so that forgiveness became harder and harder, and the hate became unstoppable. Henry is presented as a holy fool, but it is the country’s tragedy to have such a head.

The cast was admirable – they all took several parts except for Henry himself, and the amount of learning, and the work, of staging all three plays in a day was seriously daunting.  I thought the scene of Talbot and his son was too shouty for pathos, but that’s really my only gripe.

So then we went to Durham. Friends had booked us into see the Lindisfarne Gospels, which are on loan from the British Library temporarily. But, by mistake, they had booked for the day of the Miners’ Gala. Well, I’ve never been before. You just didn’t.  You stayed well away from Durham. The shops were boarded up; people weren’t used to being able to drink all day, so the atmosphere was pretty fraught.

Well now, it’s a pale shadow of its former self. There are no deep pits in Durham, only a little bit of open cast. The county looks so much better. Some of the pit villages are still pretty grim, but at least they don’t have spoil heaps lowering over them any more. So the Gala (in our day it was always “gayla”, but now it seems to be “gahla”, perhaps with foreign holidays) is a sort of big folk festival. 

Bands waiting to parade into the cathedral to have their banners blessed.

There are loads of brass bands parading with the banners, and rapper sword dancers, and a huge fairground, and there were still speakers haranguing the crowds, who were mostly not taking any notice of it at all. No important politicians as far as I could tell. The banners seemed to be carried by the womenfolk and hangers on of the bands. The young men were nearly all outside the pubs drinking and getting seriously sunburnt, but not nasty in any way – well, not by the time we left. One very good thing was that there were lots of young people of both sexes playing in the bands.

The exhibition around the gospels was very informative, with lots of other gospels and other manuscripts – I particularly fell for a small illuminated Life of St Cuthbert.  (I wish he was still England’s patron saint – a better and much less martial example than George, and he actually existed.)

So although the miners' gala (or Big Meeting Day) was not on the carpe diem list, perhaps it should have been, and I can't tell you how pleased I am to have gone. 

Both York and Durham look great, have great catering, and Durham has the best cathedral in England, almost in Europe. It was sunny, and everywhere looks better in sunlight, but these are world class tourism sites, and we tend to be blasé about our own stuff and overpraise the more exotic. If you've never been (lots of people have missed Durham) I urge you to go at once.