Black Friday in Winchester

This is the Anglican Cathedral City of Winchester at where The Knights of the Round Table once assembled and where King Alfred The Great once reigned at now centuries ago and he then made Winchester the capital of All Albion ... So steep is its pure English history that to start to describe it would take ages to fully tell. It is so deep that the very core of our being as an English people can be traced to this extraordinary city of sheer historic beauty, ecclesiastic depth, and royal blood.

With the Mayor of Winchester and even BBC 2's Allan Titmarch present, the crowds all gathered at noon at the steps of the magnificent 11th century Cathedral at where I witnessed the degree ceremony of Winchester University graduates in their hundreds at procession after having been blessed by the clergy. Sadly, the consecrated bishop of Winchester - The Right Rev'd Michael Scott-Joynt - I did not see there among the presiding academia. No hint was given, either, of it being late autumn as the Indian summer day gave its open warmth and enveloping joy to one and all.

Oh Winchester, why did it take me so long to first visit you on this Black Friday?
Forgive me!! I simply don't know other than I was once told as a boy of sixty years ago that "ignorance is bliss." Well, let me now put away my past ingorance of Winchester and tell of my sheer bliss of having finally found you ...

It's the birthplace of English criket, I found out, and the final resting place of author Jane Austen. It is here where the one and only 12th century Winchster Bible is found and preserved for future humankind. The awesome and impressive bronze statue of Alfred himself greets you on Broadway! That's Winchester Broadway, please. No the musical Broadway of New York, obviously. Although church music and choral evening song is far older and richer to me than all of Yankee Broadway ... As for the statue I could not find out how high it was. But it's high. I'd say perhaps 50
or so feet high or foot high. Without King Alfred the Great, Winchester would be a dreary little place at best and at worst a no-nothing town. Thankz Aflie!!

Winchester is above all else a bishopic seat of major ecclesiastic importance from bishops like St. Swithun to Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626). My visit to St. Lawrence
Church was testimony to that at where Bishop Andrewes is enshrined in the ancient window of post-Medieval strained glass. Then there's Jewry Street, too, that was once Winchester's Jewish quarter. While on the other side of town, it's the complete antithesis with the Gurkha Museum at the Peninsula Barracks. If the autumn day meant
anything to me, it was here where poet John Keats composed his poetical presentation of "To Autumn" while staying in Winchester during the year of 1819. The Arthurian
Almshouse of the Hospital of St. Cross is still active and giving today to the city's homeless and needy along with it's "Wayfarer's Dole" that is still offered to today's travellers after 800 years of doing so ... Marvellous, I say!! The Black
Death" also came to Winchester during the winter of 1348-9 and savagely wiped out three quarters of the city's population. I visited the old SPCK bookshop and found
William Maxwell's 1948 book "Concerning Worship" and John Baillie's "A Diary of Private Prayer." Baillie's book had almost 20 reprints from 1936 to 1960. He was
also a Professor of Divinity at Edinburgh University. He held an S.T.D, too -
Sacrae Theologiae Doctroate.

I also checked out the local charity shops. Most had little or nothing of interest to me, except at The Cloisters charity shop that directly supports old Winchester Cathedral. I rummaged thru a few boxes of stuff and only to find to my utter surprise a handsigned and framed photograph of His Grace, the late Robert Runcie (1921-2000)as the Archbishop of Canterbury (1980-1991). The photo was a mere £1.25!!
How could an Anglican cathedral charity shop almost throw away a signed image of Robert Cantur and dumped it ignobly in a box of basic cheap bric-a-brac? It must have been meant for me and my interfaith collection of images and things ...

During his Canterbury archbishopic, Robert Runcie was noted especially for welcoming the 1982 pastoral visit of the great John Paul The Second to Britain that saw him as the first pope to our protestant shores since the 16th century Reformation and the historic schism of us from the Holy See. The kidnapping of Runcie's Special Envoy
Terry Waite in 1987 was said to have personally hurt him deeply. His Grace died at
age 78 in 2000 at St Alban's at where he is now buried.

I will now explain why today is called England's "Black Friday" and why I was in Winchester for my first look at the place ...

Due to the severe traffic congestion and the high
number of road fatalities and vehicle accidents that takes place on this Friday, which we're told makes it the most dangerous and crowded day of the year on the roads of England. It even beats summer holidays, Christams, and New Year for huge crowds and major accidents and congested motorways like M25, M3, and what have you. In other words stay off the roads altogether on Black Friday, if you can ...

And the reason I was in Winchester was simply to get a break from the maddening crowds and pepetual buzz and constant incivility and open aggression of London.
Winchester has a calm and friendliness and Englishness that London has since long lost to the new masses of multi-cultural transplants that makes one feel one is oftentimes nothing more than a bloody foreigner or another immigrant in one's own land ... The England I once knew is now lost forever. And, it will never be seen ever again. The inter-breeding and alien mix of today will ultimately destroy our past history, our language, our identity, our heritage, our institutions, and our very being as a nation. Social dislocation and urban warfare will come to Britain
and street battles between the races and religious entities will rage violently like nothing we've seen before. The pavements will be blood-soaked and masses of dead bodies will fill our cemeteries. Our neighbourhoods will be without neighbours other than filled with urban gangz and street armies. Schools will no longer exist except as open training grounds for the alienated and disaffected and violent youth. The police will be totally militarized and armed courts will be open 7/24 and huge pre-detention centres will be open at such places like Wembley Stadium and the Millinium Dome to cope with mass preventive detention arrests. London will look more like Beirut or occuppied Palestine than an English capital city. If we think the Black Plague was truly grim, just wait for the coming "Black Anus" to hit us.

I ended my visit to Winchester and I now plan to visit other parts of Britian and
the world ... Cheers for now, Monty. +Ember Day, 2oo7.