People: Bored and Respectless Since Time Immemorial

I spent the best part of last week out of town. Questions put to the few residents I met about what to do in the evenings, and how they liked living there, elicited a kind of hopeless stare followed by a diplomatic but tepid reply, and I spent most of the evenings reading fanfic in my hotel room.

The hotel was a mixture of shabby and cosy and of humour intended and unintended. The owners ostentatiously aimed for a British flavour, with stuffed chairs, rickety little tables and flower-patterned crockery in the breakfast restaurant, and the napkins had "Fawlty Towers" printed on them. They also liked to use Fawlty Towers as the informal name of the hotel, and I wondered whether they had some kind of agreement with the copyright owner/s, or if John Cleese would sue them if he got wind of it.

Unfortunately, the "British" influences spilled over into a general overabundance of flowers, angels, and words of wisdom printed in frilly fonts. The tiny, rickety bedside table in my room was unusable, since the surface was taken up by a framed text on seizing the day, printed on pink paper. Fortunately, this was balanced by an ambition to preserve the original appearance of the hotel, which was built in the 1880s. The rooms had been refurbished, but in the corridors the carpets were threadbare, the stairs creaked, and the gold paint peeled.

It was actually very nice.

On my last evening I found my way to the cathedral. Old churches are always interesting; layer upon layer of architecture, local culture, art, and history. There was a little exhibition of different variations of the cross symbol, several tombstones, and a malicious-looking Green Man looking down from one of the highest vaults, but my favourite part of any church is the graffiti. There tends to be some, unless the interior has been cruelly touched up in the latest two centuries or so. 

So many people have been so bored here. People just like us, finding something to do in carving their name into the stone. Probably teenagers, not really reflecting on the fact that they were leaving a message to coming generations.

L.A.S., 1631. I imagine a boy in a lace collar and a heavy, square coat, abstractedly carving and carving, deeper and broader. He really took his time. Didn't anybody notice?

A last one that must have taken some time, dated April 1, 1645. Somehow, I always feel that exact dates give an additional feeling of reality to history, a connection to the people of the time. This person knew what day it was, and what year. Maybe he, too, kept writing the wrong year through the first weeks of each January.