The Blackberry Walk

A second part in a series!? How awfully peculiar. I do intend to continue the series, holding my mini-holidays ransom if I don't. For my second trip, the destination was Leicester. A larger city than Lincoln, Leicester is of a similar size to my current city of residence, Nottingham. I awoke that morning with a queasiness that lasted for much of the day; I had the worse nightmare I've had in years - even thinking about it now fills me with disgust. I read on the short train ride to Leicester, attempting to clear my mind of the awful images with which I was plagued with the night before, until I reached Leicester. Arriving in Leicester, I felt as if I'd ridden full circle back to Nottingham albeit with the buildings shuffled in my absence; the architecture, the demography, and the general feel of the city is very similar, with proud Victorian buildings forming the meat of the city-scape. Much like in Nottingham also, Leicester has a beautiful Victorian train station; the kind of train station which takes you back to the era of Victorian power and glory. I decided to go for a walk around the centre of town, looking at shops and whatnot, only to find the same old shops that one would find anywhere. The city centre felt really large, however - larger than Nottingham's. It may have been my own disorientation in a new city, or a feature of Leicester itself, but I spent quite a while attempting to find my way around the city centre. In time, I noticed the major roads of the city all lead back to a modest memorial with a small clock face in the centre of Leicester, which acted a useful anchor. I began to get hungry, and wasn't in the mood for a Greggs, so I set out to find some cheap food to eat. Cheap, cooked food, when you aren't looking for a sausage roll, is hard to come by; in the end, I settled for some fried chicken. The cheap chicken shop I wandered into sold no chips however; no, he only sold 'spicy potatoes'. The spicy potatoes sat in the warming tray next to the fried chicken, looking rather old as if they'd sat there for some time. Resignedly, I bought my chicken and spicy potatoes from the man - a very kind man, may I add - who gave me a free drink with my order, and an extra spicy potato (which he handed to me whilst I was handing over the fiver, leaving the fiver I gave to him rather greased and spiced). The spicy potatoes was surprisingly pleasant - had a good paprika flavour with a very soft texture. After lunch I wandered round the old corner of the city, waiting for my allotted time at the exhibition. The local cathedral was pretty, and is neighboured with old, narrow pedestrian roads laid when the city had no need to accommodate cars. The various cafes and shops seemed a little hipster and swanky, but the area was a quiet respite from the busy Leicester roads. 1PM arrived and I headed to the Richard III exhibition. Built upon the spot where the child-murdering former king was unceremoniously found in a parking lot, the exhibition was very much the "experience", they advertised. You walked through scarcely lit rooms playing ambient music learning from various information boards about the history of the war, the main figures, Richard's role, and the climax. I must add at this point, that I was the only visitor not wearing a face mask, and I did check before hand for any signs asking for a mask; I feel it says something interesting about who this kind of museum attracts. Anyways, after being taught about the history, we headed upstairs into a far more brightly lit room, where they teach you the historiography of Richard III, making revisionist claims that maybe Shakespeare was just a propagandist of his time etc, etc... This was what I expected, and wasn't looking forward to. Apparently, the barons had little faith in Richard because he was making pro-peasant reforms in the justice system, etc, etc... Thinking about it later, to call Shakespeare a propagandist over his position is just silly; imagine being him in his time - he wasn't being paid off by the queen's coffers to tell lies - he and all his countrymen ardently believed the history of the day. It's as if to say any pro-allies films after WW2 were just propaganda of the day, because they were anti-Nazi - it's plain stupid. After the historiography, we were led on into the brightly lit room to read about the science, the techniques used, and whatnot. This part of the museum was the most sparsely populated and quite uninteresting. I felt rather bugged at this point; bugged at the "let's all be 'objective' historians" slant, and the fact that I hadn't seen anything yet - it'd been a walking wiki page. Also, the way the two floors were set - the dark ground floor being this earthly, chaotic confusion of the pitiful medievals, and the first floor being the enlightened, heavenly, angelic 'truth' we now know - bugged me a little too; it felt rather uppity. Returning down stairs, thinking the exhibit was nearly over, I stumbled into the last stop of the route. The room was marble, with a speaker playing the Latin chants of friars. I walked in, and the floor beneath on the other side of the room was glass. Beneath lay the pit in which the king was buried. "Ah", I thought. "This is the point." The rest of the exhibit's purpose was to contextualise this moment, to give meaning to seeing the ill-carved pit where the worst king in English history lay. Projected into the pit was the outline of where the skeleton was when it was found. There's a kind of special emotion, thinking the king was once lain to rest here. The feeling of kingship is something truly deep in our psyche, which we struggle to begin to understand; looking down into the grave, there was a kind of regal aura emanating which is hard to put into words. I had a good long chat with an older lady who volunteered there. She reckons the grave wasn't dug by the friars, even though the grave was in the friary. The carving was too slap-dashed for the professional friars to have dug; she believes the grave to have been dug by the soldiers of Henry VII. Apparently, the grave didn't even have a headstone until a few years after the burial, in fear of turning the friary (and most friars, she said, were pro-Yorkist) into a Yorkist pilgrimage spot. After seeing the grave, and chatting with the volunteer there, my bitterness towards the exhibit, became a sweetness, and I was in far higher spirits (the nausea with which I began the day subsided also thankfully). After the exhibit, I walked north to explore some of the residential areas of Leicester. The area felt cleaner than Nottingham; there were less homeless than in similar areas of Nottingham also, which was pleasant. The shops amongst the terraced houses were mostly independent, each with Asian names; a large chunk of people in the area wore foreign styles of dress also - moreso than in Nottingham, despite feeling as if they have similar demographics. Since I was returning from the north of the city, I circled back round to the main park in Leicester called Abbey Park. I headed over the bridge to the ruins of the abbey which remained in the park. The sole remnants of the abbey is the stone floor plan of where the building would've stood; the sole remnants are the stones which were too much effort to quarry for other projects. Judging by the size of the floor plan, and the sketch on the notice board outside the ruins, the abbey would've been massive, a stone building on the scale of the cathedral. It's melancholic wandering torn down ruins; for Roman ruins, there's a sense of heroism - these buildings were built to last forever, but the people died out; for abbeys like this one, the building was cannibalised with the changing tide of fancy. Like a carcass the abbey was full of crows, hopping from rock to rock. Returning to the city centre, it was time to head home - but first, a pint. I struck gold; I stumbled upon a local ale house which sold real Leicestershire ales. I had a delicious dark ale called "Old Navigator", or something thereabouts. There, I sat in the pub staring wistfully into the distance, enjoying my pint (and occasionally checking my phone), like an old man in the making. Good, dark ales can leave you in a deep, mellow state, warming you up from the core feeling at once at peace and joyous; this wonderful ale hit the spot and I headed back to the train station content with life. Overall, Leicester is a good city. Very much like Nottingham, with some pros, like the quaint older district, and the nicer suburbs; but cons also, like not possessing a tram network (and not having Robin Hood). That being said, compared to Lincoln, Leicester is still a busy, crowded, noisy city, with all the hustle and bustle expected of dwelling of that magnitude; that kind of frantic business isn't the most appealing. Leicester, all in all, is a sibling of Nottingham - a very livable city, if you don't mind living in one. 6/10