The Venerable Bede and his Big Book

The Venerable Bede sat at a corner table in Mag's Cafe just off Highbury Corner in north London; not his usual stamping ground at all. Dressed as he was in a long black cassock with matching skull-cap he tended to stick out from the other diners who wore mainly work-clothes on this bright Tuesday morning in June 2016. He appeared to be reading a rather large and cumbersome scrolled manuscript written in some sort of pre-Gothic script. He smelled very old indeed.

The young Turkish couple who ran the café were more than a little perturbed. (Mag’s was long gone but the café was sort of an established landmark in the area and they hadn’t bothered to change the name). They feared that he was perhaps some sort of serious religious figure like an imam or a high priest. Interestingly, they weren’t pretty far wrong in this assumption. When he’d asked for the ‘builder’s breakfast’, he spoke as if from not only an ancient land but also from an ancient time. He also didn’t take sugar in his tea.

Saint Bede the Venerable himself was more than a little surprised to be tucking into bacon, eggs and all the trimmings. The author of The Ecclesiastical History of the English People knew it was indeed the earth that he appeared to have returned to as he remembered the feeling of breathing the air, and he quickly realised that these other beings around him though far more numerous and often differently coloured than he’d previously experienced were the same shape and approximation as humans as he had known them. He could even discern that most of them seemed to be speaking in an estimation or version of the language of his times, though far more fluently and quickly than anything he’d heard in his own time.

He could also tell with some tremendous certainty that this was not his own time. Or, indeed, his own place.

In all honesty; he had no idea why he was here at all.

He went around asking folk directions to The Kingdom of Northumbria but they nearly always blanked him or asked where his ‘carer’ was. To comfort himself he visited the place of books on the Holloway Road and asked for the works of Eusebius and Orosius and was directed to the sport section.

He almost caused a riot on entering the holy building with the dome and proclaiming the authority of the word of Christ and Pope Leo XIII.

What Beda Venerabilis didn’t know was this phenomenon of long dead and in some ways influential people coming back to life in not quite the same place as they left it was a worldwide phenomenon.

Captain Beefheart at the very same moment seemed to be employed as a lowly deck-hand on a commercial fishing vessel harboured at Port of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. His colleagues pelted him with fish-bait every time he played his harmonica.