Last Sunday I had to drive down to Canterbury for work. I don’t like and have always avoided travelling away on a Sunday evening but at times needs must. The forecast was ominous and I could see what I was driving into with a blindingly bright setting sun to my right and the Hades like blackness ahead and to my left. It hit as I crossed the Dartford bridge. Weather of biblical proportions, but this was the start of Holy Week and I was on my way to an historical pilgrimage site. What else should I have expected?
It is a while since I took a car into Canterbury, something like the mid to late 1980s at best but nothing has changed. Still the Medieval narrow lanes. I was surprised at the hooded and shadowy figures scurrying around, visible one second and gone the next as they melted into the shadows from the lit areas. How apt that hoodies were the mode that night, just as they would have been in Chaucer’s time as men and women of prayer went about their business.
Daybreak illuminated one huge difference to town centre living. No yellow lines but I have never seen so many parking wardens all PSE’d up in vests and day-glo wear slapping tickets here there and everywhere. What with tolls by stealth on the Dartford Crossing and the armies of wardens patrolling the lanes here there is little evidence of lightening up on motorists as bearers of cash for the Exchequer. I wonder how the Autoroutes would operate or Autstrada if suddenly any vehicle passing through a toll barrier had to first set up an account and pay up front or have some means of getting on-line within 24 hours to pay? The assumption that each and every motorist can access the internet whilst travelling is preposterous but in some ways so is the contradiction facing people out of work. To seek jobs through a Job Centre requires on-line access yet this is an imposition on unemployed people. Another presumption that every individual has the wherewithal to pay for a smart phone or other internet access whilst people use food banks to stretch out the meagre allowances they get.
I was not prepared for the number of grockles in Canterbury. Hoards of foreign school children thronging the narrow lanes sent me scurrying back to the hotel to take shelter. Later, I ventured out in the blustery drizzle to find a higher percentage of rowdy street drinking than I experience from living in a Suffolk town centre. These were no foreigners though. They were clearly British and I found it distasteful and a tad threatening but I suppose such rowdiness and drunkenness was a feature of Chaucer’s times also.
The following morning offered a better opportunity to record some of the sights.

The return journey was equally as biblical as the trip down and more or less a mirror drive from full sun into hades. The crossing was the easiest ever return apart from middle of the night crossings yet somehow my balance on HMG’s site of £6.66 is somewhat devilish. I can now see the horns and tail plus trident adorning the Chancellor.