The Verger

It's raining, so time to go out and visit the birthplace and the burial place of the Bard. It is quite a while since we went to Stratford on Avon and there had been some changes. The first thing that we noticed was the number of tourists - thousands more than we remembered last time. This was probably because it's the final bank holiday weekend, and the last hurrah for many shorts -infested knobbly knee'd pale British holiday-at-homers who have had to accept two weeks of grey drizzle as an alternative to a holiday in foreighn climes. With school and work beckoning, this was the last opportunity to pack in the final bit of greyness before the blackness descends. Blackpool on Avon has done it's best to cater for the throngs, making sure that nobody suffers from a culture overload by providing all the necessary burgers, ice-creams, candy floss and stalls full of artizan jewellery, soaps, candles, glass nail-files and waterlcolours all situated by the river under the gaze of Shakespear's statue and a bunch of over-fed swans. The whole place seemed under re-construction. I've never seen so much scaffolding in a single place in my life - literally everything was being repaired or improved. The tourists of the future may benefit mightily from this modernised town but I think they've missed a few old buildings here and there - there's a couple of wattle and daub shacks that could do with flattening to make way for a multi storey car park so that more tourists can come there to buy burgers.
At the Holy Trinity church (where he's buried) we overheard a guide proudly telling a tour-group that in the 1920's this was the first church in the country to charge an entrance fee. So it was in the 20's that the world started to deteriorate into rabid commercialism. And it started here..
The verger charged a "donation" of £1.50 for adults and 50p for students to go and take a dekko at Shakespear's final resting place. I think the scaffolding has something to do with building a burger stand.