(This is Douglas Adam's grave)
(I really liked this one for its penguins!)
JRR Tolkien's grave!
It was a sweet little town, definitely benefitting from Jane Austen’s presence, and we first stopped off at the house that her brother had inherited (from the Knight family, who hadn’t had an heir, so they adopted him to be their heir! A little bit like winning the lottery, that!) It had some lovely gardens and the interior was spectacular.
It’s been converted into the “Chawton Early Women Writers Library” so it has a lot of writers that I hadn’t heard of (being that, as my professor so aptly put it, “History tends to remember the men.”)
This sweet little dog was playing fetch with his owner. It was so adorable! He made me miss my dogs back home!
We toured the house and the church on the property, where Jane's mother and sister were buried...
And as we walked back into the village, I was distracted by the animals and insects...
And finally, we found Jane Austen’s house! (It wasn' t hard to find at all.)
It wasn’t as totally awesome as the Bronte house, but they did have a lock of her hair,
and a piano, which she wouldn’t have played, but is very similar to one she would have. I glanced at the music and saw that I knew it, and the museum people gave me permission to play it!
It was SO COOL. It was a beautiful, if very out of tune, instrument.
(I love that quote. :) )
In the gift shop, I bought matching mugs for my friend Ally and I – they have Colin Firth’s face on them, from when he played Mr Darcy in the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice. I couldn’t help it – they were just too ridiculously awesome to pass up. (And come on – coffee in the morning with Mr Darcy? You can’t say no.)
After that we stopped briefly (and I really mean briefly! We only had half an hour to spare!) at Winchester Cathedral to see Jane Austen's grave.
The brass plaque is hard to read even in real life! But it was an awesome thing to see.
Enough of Chawton and Winchester! Back to Oxford we go! :)
Wait a second, that’s not the title! And it sounds rather morbid… But that’s what we did! We went to a cemetery outside of London called Highgate Cemetery, where, as my professor Barrish would say, “Wasn’t where some scenes in Dracula happened, but they should have.”
London is such an old city that, what with the millions and millions of people who have lived there over thousands of years, there’s bound to be a lot of people buried under the city. London is a necropolis, a city of the dead, which is a concept I have never thought of pinning on London, being that it is so, well, alive. What with all of the decomposing bodies underneath them, people started getting ill all the time, and so in the 19th century (I think) they started to understand that they needed to move the cemeteries out of the city, and Highgate was one of the first ones. Karl Marx is buried there,
Douglas Adams, too, and wandering around the graves I found a strange sort of peace. It was a drizzly, rainy day – very Gothic of you, weather! – and it was somehow inspiring to see hundreds and thousands of markers for people who I never knew, but who were very much as loved as you or I or anyone.
We didn’t linger long in the cemetery, instead we broke off into groups and went in search of something to do in London before we went to the Globe Theater to see All’s Well that Ends Well.
My group really wanted to go to St. Paul’s Cathedral, which is a place whose outside I am familiar with, but I don’t recall ever properly going inside. Somehow I’ve managed to catch it at the wrong time, seemingly every time.
I couldn’t take photos inside, but I got some great ones of the outside.
We caught the cathedral at exactly the right time: they were just beginning the 5pm evensong service, and with the choir singing, the Cathedral absolutely came alive.
It was enchanting and breathtaking to stand in a place of worship such as that and witness people worshiping.
I would have stayed longer, but we were on a tight schedule, so we quickly ate pizza across the street from the Cathedral and then walked over the millennium bridge to the Globe!
Now, it’s been an awful tease for the last six or so years since I first saw the Globe and toured it with my brother and Dad one year when we were here for Christmas. But since it was December, we couldn’t see a show.
I was not familiar with All’s Well, but I loved every minute of it! I can understand why some call it a “problem play” of Shakespeare’s though, because especially the end was a little bit hard to follow, and it didn’t quite have the same kind of quality that some of his greater plays (Hamlet, etc.) have.
The actors were brilliant, the show entertaining (and raunchy, my goodness! Shakespeare was dirty!), and we all piled on the bus after the show clamoring for more. I can’t wait to go see another play there!
London, I'll see you later!
