A Tale of Two Cities

You may recall I mentioned traveling through Rochester on our way to Canterbury when our friends from Boston were visiting. At the time I saw an advertisement for a “Dickensian Christmas Fair” this past weekend and I must admit, I was intrigued. Dickens apparently spent much of his childhood in Rochester area and it is the background for some of his works, such as the Pickwick Papers and the Mystery of Edwin Drood. It also has a cathedral and the ruins of a castle, so I knew Chizz would go. As for the children, we did what any normal parents would – we forced them. So we left London for the day in Rochester.

We are getting good at going places by train, but we are learning the trains are less frequent on Sundays. Nevertheless, we arrived at Rochester and we prepared for a cute, small town festival. It was extremely quaint and although the town is small, the festival is not. It pretty much takes over the entire town. I think just about the entire town dresses up as some character from one of Dickens’ stories. We saw Scrooge, Mr. Pickwick and his gentlemen friends, Miss Havisham, the ghost of Christmas past. The main street has adorable little shops. At several points on the main street, they had “snow” machines, which blew fake snow all over the place. This festival took up the whole town. There were street performers, carnival rides, mulled wine booths, craft fairs. It was great.

All of this lost on Chizz of course. We did do a tour of the castle ruins at Rochester. They are pretty interesting. The castle was built sometime before 1086 A.D by the Normans. The castle isn’t completely ruined; it is really more of a shell. In the main part of the building, there are no floors but you can see where the floor joists were and it is not hard to imagine people living there. You can walk up the steep side staircases to certain parts of the castle that are still intact. It must have been very, very cold and dark there a majority of the time. Apparently it was here that King Henry VIII met Anne of Cleves, his 4th wife. You may recall that Anne is the wife that Henry VIII felt deceived about. Because he was very shallow, he was concerned only about her looks and sent people to spy on her prior to the marriage to make sure she was attractive. These spies were worried about how they should represent her so essentially they lied to him, telling him the 16th century equivalent of “she has a good personality”. I think this is the reason they brought her to Rochester Castle to meet him for the first time, it is so dark there after 3:30 in the afternoon, that you can’t really see very well. The darkness along with the flickering candlelight probably prevented him from getting a good look at her there. By the time the wedding wine wore off, he was stuck.

At dark, there was a parade led by an all bagpipe band. Then all the characters marched through carrying candle lanterns, and a few military bands dressed in period costumes. By the time the parade was over, the cathedral was closed. We will save that for another time.

All in all a good day. Although I have decided that I will no longer take Chizz to any event that has the words fair or festival in them, he just doesn’t enjoy them. Unless, of course, the word “beer” precedes the words fair or festival.