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Date Posted: August 22, 12:51:pm GMT-5
Author: Wrecks Harrison
Subject:

England Experience by Clare Coulter?

England Experience
performed by Clare Coulter

(I have no other info about this page.if its miss cackle coulter i dont know.this is all there was..it was on a site for [ 'St.Clement's Girls School' ] Toronto,Canada...
and came up in a 'clare coulter' search at 'canada.com'....what a feeling of deja vu at this schools site...in year 2001 the girls here have to wear a uniform thats almost identical to cackles 1960's kit!
see for yourself..

..........................................................
this could be just a student called 'Clare Coulter'
I dunno...seems funny the title would say'Performed by tho'

A Wednesday. The first day of the best month of my life. I was off to study OAC History in England with a group of Canadian students. Complete strangers unnerve me at the best of times, but this group of young people, just as nervous inside as I, I'm sure, looked so excited in their anticipation of the "Experience England" course that the immediate homesickness I had felt quickly dwindled away. I didn't even really know what I was getting into, but the buzzing of friendly enthusiasm made me feel at ease.

Experience England is a summer course in which a hundred or so Ontario students travel to the south of England for their studies. Classes are held in the mornings, and afternoons are for free time, and, in my and most other cases, for exploring the places in which we were staying as well as the surrounding counties.

Our large group arrived, bewildered, at Heathrow early on July 2. We piled ourselves and our luggage into coaches that took us to our first "home," where we would lay our heads for the first few days. Herstmonceux Castle in East Sussex is owned by Queen's University, and it's an International Study Centre for Canadian students. It is a real castle: turrets, dungeons, moats, ghosts and gardens. We saw it all (except for the ghosts), and marvelled at the enormous red brick castle built during the reign of Henry IV. We were awestruck by the beautiful Elizabethan gardens: lavender reaching on and on forever, wild roses climbing old walls, delphiniums of ethereal blue. Spending our first few days in England in an historic castle really threw us into the past, and prepared us for the coming weeks of intense learning.

Apart from being the place where we began our studies, Herstmonceux served as a base for us to explore the south coast of England. One afternoon we left the castle grounds and headed off to Beachy Head, a desolate, grassy headland overlooking the English Channel. Below us, the white cliffs of England glowed in the fog, and I felt drawn back into the past by such ancient, natural beauty, famous for so many historical and literary events. I saw William the Conqueror landing with the Normans and preparing for the battle in Hastings in 1066; I saw John and Elzevir from Moonfleet creeping slowly up the Zigzag in the chalk cliffs; I saw Matthew Arnold deploring the loss of faith among us as he gazed out to sea; and then, most recently, the Allied soldiers watching the white cliffs disappear as they made their way across the Channel to the beaches of Normandy. The trip to nature's great masterpiece was our first excursion with the summer school, and it was the perfect introduction to our month in England. For me, at least, the chalk cliffs represent all that is England: beauty, history and majesty.

After three days at the castle, my group took a coach to St. Edward's, a private school just outside the famed university town of Oxford. We were given walking tours of the old town centre, where we passed the Sheldonian Theatre, with its busts of intelligent men (or gods) glaring down from the high, wrought iron fence that surrounds the golden sandstone building at us camera-bearing tourists. We peeked into the private and empty quadrangles of colleges like Corpus Christi and New College. We passed the Radcliffe Camera with its domed roof, and we went down a cobbled alley that led to the Bodleian Library, where we were impressed by the serenity of the place. There, in the quietness of the courtyard outside the library, I gazed at old, worn steps, and wondered how many learned individuals had placed their feet there over the centuries. One evening my friends and I went to Evensong at Christchurch, where we were blown away by the angelic voices that soared up and beyond the belfries. I felt both my mind and spirit rejoicing in Oxford's atmosphere. On our last day, as we drew away from St Edward's, I turned around for one last look at Oxford's famed "dreaming spires." Then I turned back in my seat, and looked ahead towards the great city of London.

London is a city of vibrant culture, and from Imperial College in classy South Kensington where we stayed, every kind of culture was easily reachable either by foot or by the Tube. Taking the London Underground is an adventure in itself, and when I first descended two levels of almost-vertical escalators, I honestly thought I was going down into the pits of hell. But, actually, the Tube is great fun, and it's clean and quick. In London, my culture counter shot to the heavens. We visited everything humanly possible in 12 days. We examined paintings in the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery, we visited the enormous British Museum, where I was fascinated by the old war masks and other artifacts from Sutton Hoo, the famous Saxon site. We went to the Imperial War Museum and experienced a reenactment of the London Blitz, complete with the wailing air-raid sirens. My class went twice to the V and A (Victoria and Albert Museum) to see the "Power of the Poster" exhibit, which had old posters advertising movies like "Gone with the Wind," but also those with Churchill asking the British to do their bit. There were also posters addressing more recent concerns and events, such as the apartheid in South Africa, the slaughters in Rwanda, and AIDS. As well as museum- and art gallery-hopping, we went to a concert at St Martin-in-the-Fields, the lovely church on Trafalgar Square with fantastic acoustics. I went to an organ recital at Westminster Abbey, where the powerful reverberations shook me to my soul. A group of friends and I also went to see the original Broadway cast of Rent in London's West End. We lined up for 5 hours, and were rewarded with front-row-centre seats. One of the highlights of the trip was going to see As You Like It at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, which has recently been redone as an exact replica. The bolts are wooden, and the whitewash paint is made of goathair and chalk, in order for the theatre in which tourists now stand to resemble in every way that in which Shakespeare once acted. We Canadian students stood in the standing-room only area, where our feet tingled with fatigue, yet there was more of a sense of interaction with the actors than there would have been had we been seated. It was exciting when the actors would push their way through the crowds, and it was fun to see things thrown in the air. Almost like being back in time with the Bard. We took a tour down the Thames, passing old and new sights on our way to Greenwich and The Line. We saw St Paul's, Tower Bridge, London Bridge, the Tower of London and its Traitors� Gate (London's first one-way street). We saw Canary Wharf, Francis Drake's Golden Hind, and of course, the Palace of Westminster (the Parliament buildings) and Big Ben. At Greenwich, we saw the Cutty Sark, and climbed to the top of the hill, where we could look over all of London. We came to the Greenwich Meridian, which divides the world into east and west. It's certainly a funny feeling, standing on the two halves of the world at the same moment.

Two halves of the world in London, two aspects of the world throughout the trip: past and present. From day trips to Stonehenge, Bath, Windsor Castle, Canterbury and Blenheim Palace, to tours of modern London and visits to galleries to see works by Dali and Warhol, "Experience England" covered the centuries. It was an experience that left me with friendships that will last a lifetime, and memories that will stay with me forever.

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Used and new Uniform sale and the Xmas Panto in the great hall =) -- Arvid Snake-Dweller, August 22, 01:41:pm GMT-5