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Non-Fiction
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| Imps and Pheasants Come Away | |
| By patterjack | ||||||||||||||||
| 01 February 2007 | ||||||||||||||||
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Imps and Pheasants Come Away. Our stay in Lincoln was fairly short . It is , from the little I saw of the surrounding country , rather flat , but the hotel in which we stayed had a nearby park with a gentle slope in it and during the few times when it was not snowing , and even when it was indeed snowing , there were some youngsters sledding down it . Quite a new sight for us . In fact Lincoln did provide other new experiences as to be expected on our first overseas trip , and one aspect of our stay has carried over to an incident that occurred some twenty five years later , here where I live now . But first things first . I am a Doctor Who fan , and was decidedly unhappy that I was missing Tom Baker as the Doctor . But the young son of the hotel owners was also a fan , so , though way out of sequence , I got my first sight of the primitive warrior lady companion . I also heard the seven year old continually remark Bloody 'ell ! at various incidents in the show . Lincoln also provided me with my first view of pheasants . The first sighting was a lot of them hanging in a poulterer's shop , and it brought to mind the old claim that they were best eaten just after they had matured enough for the tail feathers to fall out . I did not investigate that . The next time I saw them was from the train , running across a perfectly flat snow covered field . The picture remains stark and clear . Not for many years after , at Dondingalong , did I see another pheasant in the wild , this time a Coucal , which startled me as I worked among the lantana bushes . Twenty years later , remembering the general scenery , I think of Lincoln as being rather grim . It could be that my failing memory attributes those stark black and white flint houses to that city , when it could well have been another place altogther . However , the dark grey was emphasised against the stark white of the snow at the time . Stark , at that season , seems to be a very appropriate word. Of course , the Cathedral was a high point in our viewing . I remember it as grim and grey on the outside , and this may well have been underscored by references to mass graves from the time of the plague . But the inside of the Cathedral was a revelation and this was helped by our being approached by a lady in a grey and black habit , who I think must have been a Deaconess or an Anglican nun . She was a most solicitous lady in volunteering a guided tour of the Cathedral , for she obviously loved the building and knew it intimately . Of course she first showed us the famous Imp and old us the stories associated with it . From postcards bought later it struck me that the poor creature was suffering from talipes , so I promptly sent a copy to a dancer friend who was at that time suffering from very bad feet . He , perhaps fortunately , told me later he thought my twisted sense of humour was funny, almost peculiar . The assiduous lady then took us to see the carving she thought was the best in the cathedral , which was that of The Bear With the Sore Head and I very much agree with her estimate . Finally , after she had spent a long time with us , she sat us down and bade us look at the ceiling . Not being an architect I have no idea of what the cross pieces are called , but she confessed that she had often sat and gazed upwards , counting them over and over trying to make a regular pattern of them . In the few minutes we spent there , I confess to being baffled too . However , it was only two years ago , after we had moved to our present apartment in the middle western suburbs of Sydney , that I needed to walk up town to Concord Road to get a paper or the mail or something . It was just about then that my spinal canal stenosis had begun to get bad , and before I had bought my electric tricycle . Therefore I would walk a hundred meters or so , and find a convenient brick fence to sit on to ease the pains before continuing . As I sat on one of the fences I fell into conversation with a gentleman mowing his front lawn . He had an accent , so as I inevitably do I asked him where he was from . He told me that he was from Lincolnshire , so I nattered on with him about the city and the Cathedral . I had not long before seen an article in the paper about the rewiring of the Cathedral and he told me that he had been responsible for the wiring of the sound system there many years before. Small world , as they say , and maybe the imp had something to do with it .
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