Tag Archives: Canterbury

Summing Up Canterbury

Posted on by Craig

I’m trying to combine a round-up of all of the other bits of Canterbury, plus some sort of round-up of how the working process went. Let’s see how this goes, shall we?

The Roman Museum
Did this on on the Sunday, partially by accident because while I’d planned to go to it, I was just out for a wander and happened to spot the sign down a sidestreet.
It is, I think, aimed at a younger audience; The audio tour certainly was.
Lots of reconstructions of ‘Roman Stuff’ with models & life-size displays, but also actual historical information & artifacts scattered in there. Mention of the existence of slaves, but not dwelling on what that actually means. It was a bit difficult to figure out what they were trying to say in some places; The layout of pictures and descriptions of Roman Canterbury through history meant that it took me a bit of cross-checking to get “the city grew, and then people just stopped being there anymore, and we don’t really know why” as the high-level summary.

That said, it was interesting and fun, and they have a thumping great section of mosaic floor preserved where they found it, which is kind of cool.

Generally Wandering Around
I did a lot of this on the first few days, partially to get a feel for the place, and partially to get out of the hotel room for a while. The side of the main street which hasn’t been developed into a giant roofless mall, still has some of the ‘narrow streets and slumping buildings’ feel of old cities; A lot of cafes & restaurants & places selling tourist stuff, and also an art gallery and a Harry Potter shop.

There’s a chunk of the main street which is being paved, or re-paved, or something, but it means that a wide pedestrian zone is reduced to two narrow walkways which get clogged with people almost immediately, and can be brought to a screeching halt by an uncooperative toddler or a few confused tourists. Was glad to have a rough idea of the twisty somewhat parallel streets when that happened.

There wan’t much to photograph which hasn’t been captured a thousand times already by better photographers than me, so I mostly went with things which amused me.

A fraction of a second later the young woman in the headscarf did a grinning double metal-horns gesture at my camera; I’m sorry I missed it.

The Westgate; Not perhaps their best attempt at naming, though it is at least in the North-West of the city.
Canterbury West railway station, on the other hand, is almost due North of Canterbury East railway station.

Also a nice park which eventually wraps around towards the other railway station, following the path of the remains of the city wall.
I did take a few walks along the wall, and up the Dane John mound, but didn’t take any photos. Nice place to walk along though.

On To The Overview
I enjoyed Canterbury.
It didn’t go perfectly, but it was fun, and I learned a few things about remote working & travel in the ‘what to do differently next time’ department.

  • Having a working location right in the heart of things isn’t all that useful if you’re working a standard job; Most tourist things are closed by the time you’re free.
  • Big Red, as a pack, is great for moving stuff around, but it doesn’t have much in the way of internal structure, which means a whole lot of unpacking every time you look for … Well, anything.
  • An improvised workspace is OK for a day or so, then it gets annoying.
  • I did not need all of those connector cables.
  • Getting sink-laundry dry is much easier in hotel rooms with air conditioning & in places with warmer weather; I can dry a shirt in a few hours by hanging it in front of the air-conditioning vent in a humid city, but that doesn’t work nearly as well with a wall-mounted electric radiator.
  • It is possible, if you time it right, to cycle through 50-100 channels of television and hit nothing but advertising.
  • Hotel breakfasts will turn on you; Do not trust them.
    This may be a smidge unkind. I had a few days of feeling unwell, which may have been the standard “you’ve relaxed, time to get sick” immune system response, but also might have been one too many poor choces from the breakfast buffet options. Or both.
    Erring on the side of caution, I made better choices & dipped into the traveling medical kit. One of them worked.
  • English hotels continue to fit bedding designed for arctic expeditions.
    In this case they also fitted a heater I could get at the controls of, and a window I could leave open, so that was easily solved.

Leaving On A Big Train
Something I’d not figured out soon enough is that hotel check-outs happen during the working day, leaving you with nowhere to work if, hypothetically, you’d decided to take the afternoon train back to Aylesbury.
I was able to do some shuffling around of hours to give myself a nice long ‘lunch’ break on the last day, so that I could pack up, check out, post a postcard at the world’s slowest post office (the machines were offline, so I joined a short queue which took forever, partially because the guy behind the counter was a very slow typist, and partially because those few people ahead of me wanted to post very complicated things – by the time I got to the head of the line the machines were open again, but also had a scrum of people around them and a lot of red lights, so I stayed in line), and wander down to the train station to get back to Aylesbury via London so that I could work the afternoon from the office.
Even got my old desk back.

A Few Days Of Work

Posted on by Craig

The hopefully none of you who’ve been paying attention to the dates of these posts may have noticed that I’ve worked from Canterbury for five days & haven’t said a damn thing about how it went. This is for deep & compelling reasons; I wasn’t sure how to make it interesting.

Having given up on interesting, I’m instead going to go with potentially informative, and give a bit of a rundown of what worked and what didn’t.

The room was huge, and had a single trundle bed in it as well as the actual bed, so I had something to sit Big Red on. What it didn’t have was a desk, or more than one chair; That last one’s a shame because there was plenty of room.

There was a sort of workspace, where the kettle lived & 2 of the 3 power outlets were, and it was deep enough to make a pretty good impromptu desk. On the downside, it faced away from the windows. ( I’d had plans to try one of the local co-working spaces, but then things went hilariously wrong on a project in a way that made me suspect I’d be making a lot of calls, which seems kind of obnoxious for a shared space )

( dramatic action shot of workspace )

It was a functional workspace, if not scenic, and the hotel WiFi was fine; Took a while to connect, and it did crap out for a bit on the second day, but that can happen anywhere. No issues with remote machines, and the giant download I had to do would have taken a while in any circumstances.

Didn’t pass the Enjoyment test though. In theory, staying in town means that the tourist/sightseeing stuff is right there. In practice, it’s mostly closed after working hours, and after a day of work my energy levels can be pretty low, so there’s not a whole lot of advantage to being in the midst of it all unless the accommodation itself is in some way worth it.

And with all due respect to the Travelodge Canterbury Chaucer Central, … , It’s just not. There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s a good hotel option, but nobody is going to recommend it as the focus of a holiday.

On to the tech stuff. I tried to keep track of how much of what I brought I actually used, and it’s a pretty short list; Going to have to go back through that bag of connectors & ‘might need it’ items to see what on earth is in there.

( the ‘how do I fit all of that crap back in there’ shot )

Overall, working from the hotel was a success, in that I got work done, but I’m not thinking it’s the way forward for me. That’s fine, that was part of the point of this trip.

A Canterbury Tale?

Posted on by Craig

OK, that was weak, even by my standards.

I am, of course, talking about Canterbury Cathedral, which turns out to be tricky to photograph, at least with a smartphone.

I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I’d been told the entry price ( still not sure I understand how that works for a functioning cathedral ) was quite high, but I paid it anyway on the basis of “May as well, it’s a famous building I’ve actually heard of”, figuring that I’d spend a bit of time there.

this one does have a “Cathedral rolling in heavy storm” kind of vibe

I ended up getting three hours of entertainment out of it, because there’s so much to the place. There’s an enormous amount of history, and reconstructions, and repurposing. I’d assumed that the cathedral was basically one big churching space, but kept finding little sub-chapel areas as I wandered around, both in the upstairs bit & in the vaults below.

There was even one of those grassy area surrounded by vaulted walkway things which I’ve seen in movies & TV, so that was fun to wander around in.

There were some folks doing guided tours, but I wasn’t sure whether they were a join in & tag along or a paying patrons only sort of thing, so I tried to stay out of their way. And after a while, used earphones and a rain noise app to muffle the narration, when it got a smidge distracting.

One interesting overhead bit, if I understood it correctly, is that Thomas Beckett was murdered there, and eventually a shrine was built which was later destroyed by orders of the king, and there’s mention of the shrine, but aside from one part of a stained glass window, nobody ever described what the shrine looked like.

Time and money well spent, I think.

and I got a scone

The Traveler’s Tale

Posted on by Craig

I’m expecting to go through a few iterations of the packing scheme before I get it right. Today’s version had the everyday clothing in the low compartment, the stuff I thought I’d need as soon into a hotel room in the very top compartment, and everything else in the middle, as a sort of protection layer around the laptops.

waiting on a train at Aylesbury

It sort of worked. I’d thought the top compartment was too full, but it seems like the issue is that there wasn’t enough in the middle one to support it, so it droops over the rest of the pack. So some fine tuning to be done there.

Work happened. I checked out of the hotel & dragged the bag in, and had a mostly standard working day. There was a team lunch, a farewell for someone who’s moving to a new job in another company, and that was fun. ( Also kinda fancy – It was a very nice restaurant )

There were after-work drinks for the person who’s leaving, and I did go for one, while trying not to make her leaving do all about me & the Big Red Backpack.

waiting on a train at St. Pancras

The trip to Canterbury was pretty uneventful. Train to London Marylebone, tube to St. Pancras, train to Canterbury, and I got to the hotel at around 23:00.