Green on holiday?

I’ve had four lovely days in Chester, staying with a Quaker friend and going to three concerts in the Chester Music Festival. Highly recommended: the young piano trio who played the Beethoven ‘Archduke’ trio were superb, giving new insights into a work I know well. Gothic Voices, famous for ‘Feather on the Breath of God’, the music of Hildegarde of Bingen, gave a fascinating and informative concert, marred only by their having to compete with the local fire brigade who for some inexplicable reason were doing an exercise putting a man on the cathedral roof – a failure of communication, they should have been told to come back and do it next week when the festival was over! And finally the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic performing Mahler’s great Resurrection Symphony, a huge work of hope and optimism in the end after a terrifying opening of funeral rites: so well done we stood and cheered at the end.

I’d gone by car. The UK is simply not designed for side to side rail travel! And actually I’d changed plans at the last minute – twice – because a friend was planning to visit right at the start of the week and then moved it to the following week: so it would have been prohibitively expensive. I can’t afford spontaneity! It does seem a bit anti-green of the railway companies to penalise the late booker so much: why can’t they do a standby system like the airlines used to, whereby those who use up the unsold seats get them at reduced prices, not increased ones.

But the house where I was staying was about half a mile from the city walls, so I walked in and back each day, good for my exercise regime. It’s an amazing city, Chester: there are mediaeval shops there, double-storied, unlike anywhere else in the UK. These are really ancient monuments but they are used for ordinary things like the sofa shop which has an interior almost unchanged in four or five centuries. It’s living history. I’d gone because someone had told me how good the Roman bits were – and foolishly I never checked it out first in my English Heritage book: but in fact that was one of the two disappointments, there is a dig of an amphitheatre and that’s about it for Roman. (The other disappointment was the river cruise, which was up the Dee, pretty and tree-lined but with no really distinguishing features, on a boat where I had to queue for 20 minutes to get a drink!)

A pleasant holiday, nevertheless. I was staying with a friend who lives a very simple life – no television, little alcohol, veggie eating: if we all lived like that, somehow the nation would be better, more peaceful, more at one with itself. My friend has been peacemaking in Israel, putting herself in danger to try to bring understanding, but with tonight’s news of Israel bombing a UN post this seems unlikely. But one must try, and she did; I’ve every admiration for that.

Back home, then, for a busy weekend: a friend to stay on Friday with whom I did a workshop on erosion of Civil Liberties (read Henry Porter in ‘The Observer’, or see their website, to see more; it’s horrific what’s going on), a couple for dinner, then another friend to stay for three very happy days. And only today have I had time to recover, wash, shop and begin on all the domestics I’d been putting off. My friend texted me to say ‘back to reality’ – but I replied that her visit was the reality, the nitty-gritty real world was the illusion! I shall visit her domain in the Spring: reality will set in again then.