Castle Park Stories

The streets of Lancaster are full of stories. From the first Roman settlement, the founding of the castle in the eleventh century, the city's brief boom as a trading port to the vibrant community today, if walls could speak they'd have so much to tell.

Castle Park, the small area surrounding the castle and Priory, is one of my favourite parts of town. With its steep cobbled streets, fine houses and a quayside lined with converted warehouses, all in the shadow of the castle itself, it doesn't take a giant leap to imagine the folk living there two hundred or even five hundred years ago. So when Litfest put out a call for local residents interested in history, photography or writing to participate in a lottery funded writing project, I didn't take much persuading.

You can find out more about the project here, but essentially we have six weeks to put together an exhibition about the area.

There's so much scope in such a small area that it's hard to know where to start. Around fifty people want to be involved with interests as diverse as slavery, the Quakers, maritime and family history. Already we've heard some marvellous stories such as the banter between the prisoners held in the castle and the factory girls passing by. So the story goes, the young women would take great delight in giving the male prisoners a glimpse of the delights they were missing. Brazen hussies! We heard too of the grammar school boys who were allowed to go on the roof of the church before prayers to get a better view of the castle hangings. Let that be a lesson to you all boys!

I have my first Open University tutor to thank for the particular piece of history I'm hoping to explore. She's an expert in Lancaster's connections with the slave trade, back in Georgian times when Lancaster was one of England's major ports. She took us on a walking tour of the city and in passing pointed out a rather fine house just next to the castle. Built in 1720, it was once home to a successful merchant involved in the slave trade. He had a black female servant, brought to England from the West Indies. I've always wondered how this woman came to be in Lancaster and how it must have felt to live under grey Lancashire skies so far from home.

I've only just started my research, but already I've uncovered the most macabre tale. Truly, truth is stranger than fiction.

I wonder what other stories this fine house has to tell?

20 Castle Park, Lancaster

Coffee shop post

We are becoming creatures of habit. There was a bite in the air on our canal walk this morning but no sign of snow yet. On the hill opposite a flock of geese were resting. I wish I knew more about where they'd come from or where they're heading.

The reward was great - a window seat in our favourite cafe. It's market day so there's plenty to see and so many photo opportunities Lancaster's a relatively small place so it doesn't take long to spot people you know wandering past.

The Mathematician is rereading Camus' The Outsider for Monday's book group and I'm mulling over my many projects for this year. More on those another time.

For now I'll spend a little longer people watching.

Wise words from Rilke

Weekends are taking on a familiar pattern. They begin with a briskish walk along the canal side, through Fairfield community orchard and home again via a hot chocolate and a book in Caffe Nero.

Since Les Miserables is rather bulky to carry, I'm taking Rilke's 'Letters to a Young Poet' instead. It's a slim book with ten letters from Rilke to an aspiring young poet. The writing strikes a chord, and I expect it's a book to which I'll return many times. Rilke advises

'be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.'

Wise words, I think.

2012 in first lines

Thank you to Simon at Stuck in a Book for this idea, summing up last year in a selection of blog post first lines. So here goes...

January

"What will you do now
with the gift
of your left life?"

February

It's minus two outside and the Lakeland hills are dusted with snow.

March

Have you ever read the same book, years apart, and reacted to it in very different ways?  Are some books better read in the innocence of youth?  Do others need age and experience to be appreciated?

April

'Only six more years,' my son tells me with great authority, 'and you will be an old person.'

May

In 1953 Henry Molaison had part of his brain removed in an attempt to cure his epilepsy.  

June

With two days to go to my exam, my head is more tightly packed than a teenage girl's suitcase.

July

Should really be enjoying this...

August

After a week of prevaricating, I was starting to feel like a character in a Nick Hornby novel. So here, at last, is my list of classic books.

September

'The North is the dark place...

October

The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester. Three hundred and forty one graduands. And Brian Cox.

November

Dickens visited Lancaster in 1857 on his way back from a walking holiday in the Lake District with his friend Wilkie Collins.

December

With the reading room nearing completion, the thought of settling down with a book on a winter's evening has never been so appealing.

I've enjoyed trawling back through my posts and reminding myself of some of the highs and lows of the year. I have one more retrospective in mind and then it's time to say goodbye to 2012 for once and for all.

After all, there are many more books on the shelf...
 

Intimidating books

My plans to start the new year with a flurry of exercise and administrative efficiency have been hampered somewhat by a stinking cold. I thought I'd done well to avoid it as my family fell one by one but, just as I was congratulating myself on my immunity, I too have succumbed.

But it could be worse. I have a huge stock of reading material to keep me occupied. You might remember that I was hankering after a fine cloth bound edition of Les Miserables. Well, I was not disappointed on that or many other counts. My intention was to read it before watching the film that is to released mid January. Now I have the book in my hands I realise the flaw in my thinking. With 1232 pages of tiny print it is, quite frankly, massive.

Now I'm not easily intimidated by a book, but weighty tomes like this do fill me with a certain sense of dread. Yet with the inclement weather and another week off work, I have girded my loins and taken the plunge. And what a treat it is too! Clearly my year of studying the nineteenth century novel has paid dividends. What does it matter that it has taken the first seventy pages to establish that the Bishop of Digne is both generous and open minded? And then, just when I thought we had an inciting incident in the arrival of the ex-convict Jean Valjean, we have another diversion into his backstory and the injustices of French society. Perhaps it's just the luxury of sustained spells of reading, but I am really having a ball.

It might even be the time to tackle my other bête noire - Mary Warnock's Existentialism. I find this combination of big ideas and academic writing quite intimidating. My husband's gift of 'The Existentialist's Guide to Death, the Universe and Nothingness' might be more accessible. Certainly it started well over a hot chocolate in Caffe Nero, but then I started scratching my head over the distinction between 'being-for-itself' and 'being-of-itself'. Perhaps that's one to pursue another day.