How Japanese people revealed an unconsidered treasure in Canterbury.

In the years before Lockdown, we in Canterbury grew accustomed to the sight of Japanese people taking pictures of each other in front of the sites: the Cathedral, the crooked bookshop, or the Westgate Towers. With the Japanese Chaucer College closed, not to mention national borders, such activity ceased. Until today. A small group were taking turns to snap each other by an ugly public toilet within a few metres of Westgate Towers. Here they can be seen comparing their pictures, but whatever … ?

It wasn’t the toilet, of course, that had roused their interest and glee, but the nearby spreading cherry tree, covered in blossom. They were so happy to see it, brightening a dismal corner of the city, and they opened my eyes to one of our city’s treasures. A remarkable tree that deserves to be celebrated by Canterbury people as well as Japanese.

SPRING QUIET by Christina Rossetti

Mile End Cemetery

Christina Rossetti lived mostly in London, when this cemetery was still in active use; it is about 5km from the centre of town. Nowadays the thorn bushes are white, the birds sing, the sun shines shadily, and people can wander around, hearing the sea in the swaying branches. And there are tower blocks in Kentish seaside towns as well as central London suburbs!

Gone were but the Winter,
Come were but the Spring,
I would go to a covert
Where the birds sing;

 Where in the white-thorn
Singeth a thrush,
And a robin sings
In the holly-bush.

 Full of fresh scents
Are the budding boughs,
Arching high over
A cool green house:

 Full of sweet scents,
And whispering air
Which sayeth softly:
"We spread no snare;

 "Here dwell in safety,
Here dwell alone,
With a clear stream
And a mossy stone.

 "Here the sun shineth
Most shadily;
Here is heard an echo
Of the far sea,
Though far off it be."

Finding your feet

It’s a few years since Abel found his feet, but the little boy in the park this morning was just getting used to his holding him up and getting him places. He took a step forward, away from his mother who was queuing for drinks from the little kiosk cafe. He was not expecting his step to ring out, but his foot landed on the metal cover for the fountain stop tap. A step back. Another step forward. Back and forth with a look of intelligent concentration, oblivious to his mother or anybody else or anything at all, except the sounds he was making with his feet. A special moment that he will not remember, but I will.

Here comes the storm!

And come that storm did, but we reached shelter first! Hampton, Herne Bay, Kent.

Why are they called wallflowers?

At Canterbury Castle

Wallflowers happily grow on old walls, they like the lime and enough other matter gets blown into cracks to keep them growing. They are a reliable border plant, except that they are occasionally liable to diseases of the cabbage family.

Turnstones turning stones

We met this troop of turnstones on the beach recently. It was a grey and sepia day, no need to adjust the colour palette at all!

Built on a rock – and shells.

I leant my bike against a buttress of Saint Mildred’s Church while I closed the garden gate. I returned to find myself looking at this stretch of the north wall which I estimate was strengthened in the 19th Century. The course of limestone at the top of this picture is level, top and bottom, being made of identical blocks. To get the top level the bottom had to be level, of course; difficult with flints and random lumps of limestone, required some adjustment. We can see sherds of roofing tile, thin slivers of flint – and oyster shells! I have seen them used in a garden wall before, but never expected to find them holding up a church.

From a walk near Chilham

Chilham is a village near Canterbury, a good place to start a country walk as once you leave the village you are on quiet roads, then climb up a chalk track which is much less muddy than other paths. Here is a clutch of pictures from one spot near the village.

The first picture shows a brick wall and part of the railing above it. Note the date on the brick. This was put here to proclaim the remodelling of the garden by Capability Brown and Thomas Heron. I think that’s a partly eroded ‘B’ before the date. The garden belongs to the Castle, seen here from between two railings. Grey geese rather than Canada out on the water. The railings allow the owners to show off their landscape without being over-run by visitors: you could imagine a carriage being driven slowly past here and polite admiration expressed; but no-one was getting in there uninvited!

Just a couple of metres away were these magnificent hazel catkins.

It was good to see young saplings, as in the left foreground, planted to replace old trees dying off; good to see the snowdrops behind the trees and elsewhere on our walk.

A few hundred metres away part of one fallen tree had been given a new life as a hippo.

A fierce hippo as it happens. A good number of the trees in the background look as though they might have been planted after the hurricane of 1987 when many were lost across Kent. That was fierce. Our Sunday walk was peaceful apart from the noise of scrambler bikes on another track through the woods; and so home to tea by the fire.