The weekend in Norwich with livredor

[lethargic_man]

(For which see also livredor's account.)

Friday

On Friday morning we went to the Castle museum. The Norman castle is built on a 21m high mount raised by the conquered Saxons, and is built out of stone imported from Caen, as there is no local stone, excepting the flints used in a lot of old buildings. It looks new in the photograph here because the exterior wall was in such bad condition by the nineteenth century it had to be entirely rebuilt.

livredor remarked to me, most of the way through, how well laid out the museum was, covering the building of the castle, and life in Saxon, Viking and Norman times. Then we went through from the main part, in the castle itself, into some other rooms, and there was stuff there from all over the place there. The first room contained both twee ceramic cats and African tribal figurines, and the second both Roman artefacts and dinosaur remains!

In the afternoon we went down to the red-light district on a boat cruise to see the Norfolk Broads. On the way there, we passed a dinky little steamboat (right). Then, on the way back, a floating ice-cream van (left).

Afterwards, we met up with livredor's friend Natasha for supper, which we had at the Waffle House, a restaurant serving all kinds of food but where everything is served on waffles. For the novelty value, I had curry on a waffle. :o)

Saturday

Norwich was a big centre of Anglo-Jewry before the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. In shul, they claimed a small number of Jews had remained in Norwich even after the expulsion, so the community there had a nine-hundred-year-old tradition. Davening there I felt a real connection to the pre-expulsion heritage of Anglo-Jewry, which was a new experience for me. I don't normally feel much of a connection between the mediaeval Jewish community in England, which dispersed who knows where, and the modern one, with its roots in Amsterdam and then later Eastern Europe.

The shul there was a new one, the old one having been bombed during the War. There were about eighteen people present, which they said was about average. Typically for a provincial community, most of them were fairly elderly, though there was one or two young families, and this coming week there is a Batmitzvah. (The following week there will be a Barmitzvah, too, of an eighty-year-old man who had never had one before.) They called me up for קריאת התורה, as I was the only Cohen, but then called me up again for הגבהה due, I suspect, to a shortage of strapping young men capable of easily lifting a Sefer Torah almost entirely on the right-hand עץ חיים.

Before קריאת התורה, they asked me if I could leyn from the Torah. I shook my head, not realising they did not have anyone capable of leyning at all. For קריאת התורה the chazan read from a chumash whilst someone followed in the Sefer Torah. This is not, I gather, halachically correct; you must hear someone reading from the Sefer Torah itself; so once I realised what was going on, I started to sight-read from the Torah in an undertone -- and discovered that for nineteen out of twenty words, I was capable of doing so without problem. Maybe the vocabulary was fairly simple for that Sedra. So I discovered a skill I hadn't known I possessed, and for ראשון and שני the reading was halachic for those within earshot of me (i.e. the people on the Bimah). (I did volunteer to take over, but when I explained I didn't know the notes, and would have to be helped with hard words and when to stop, the chazan told me they'd continue as they were.)

Between שחרית and מוסף the lay minister gave a sermon justifying medical research using embryonic stem cells on both scientific and halachic grounds, astounding me, who never expected to hear anything like that from an Orthodox pulpit. But the shul was pretty relaxed in its Orthodoxy; by lacking a rabbi altogether they had avoided the fate of many other provincial communities in getting a Lubavitch one because no one else was interested.

After shul, we met up with Natasha, doseybat and doseybat's friend fatdog for lunch (a picnic on the riverside walk), where much to my amusement, within seconds of my putting down a half-empty tin of tuna, a cat turned up and made a beeline for it.

Afterwards, the five of us wandered around the city, looking at the sights. These included the mediaeval Jewry - where the Jews lived, close by the castle and under the protection of the King - but no old buildings remained. We also had a look at the Music House (pictured), built in 1175 by the wealthy Jewish merchant Isaac Jurnet, and later inhabited by the Paston family.

We wound up at the cafe attached (literally) to the cathedral for tea, after having looked, on Natasha's recommendation, at the most perplexing carvings adorning the cloisters there (livredor: "someone toilet-papering a goat?"), where we all fell in love with the crockery: MY CUP IT RUNNETH OVER on the cups, THERE CAME FORTH SWEETNESS on the sugar jars, FLOWING WITH MILK AND HONEY on the milk jars, and COME, FOR ALL IS PREPARED on the plates. (Anyone know the provenance of this last?)

On the subject of Norwich's Christian heritage, I was surprised there was so little prominence given to the city's mediaeval mystic, Julian of Norwich. We tracked down the Shrine of St Julian, and stopped off there briefly on the way to the station on Sunday.

There was lots we didn't have time to see - an extensive section in the Castle museum on Boudicca and the Colmans Mustard Museum for a start - but we only had limited time in Norwich. It was a fun weekend, and, at the end of the day, that, I suppose, is what counts.