Ironically (always a good word to begin with) the hysterical excesses of Super Duper Tuesday coincided with Shrove Tuesday - which, by my calculations, makes today Ash Wednesday. In the course of my flaneurish wanderings yesterday, I found myself visiting this extraordinary church - one of the very few in London with anything of the truly medieval about it. Dark, heavily Norman and intensely atmospheric, it's a breathtaking space to enter - and it is but the stump (chancel, lady chapel and truncated transepts) of the original priory church. There is even - in London! - a recovered stretch of medieval cloister. No wonder they charge £4 admission - finding something like this in London is beyond price (in France, of course, it would be commonplace).
Anyway, it seems St Bart's has a good line in sermons. See the Ash Wednesday sermon on the website - that is quality stuff indeed, by current Anglican standards. And meanwhile...
Teach us to care and not to care.
Teach us to sit still.
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Not 'numinous' then? Sorry,just joking. I was thinking I last went in that church in about 1986. Its been in a bunch of movies hasn't it.
ReplyDeleteCertainly has Mutley - I was probably lucky there were no film crews. It was pretty numinous too, in a Norman kind of way...
ReplyDeleteIt is indeed a wondrous church, Nige. I love that part of London because at first it seems so unpromising, as you emerge from Barbican tube and are faced with concrete and tunnels. But then you find St Bartholomew's, Smithfield and, perhaps most importantly given my carnivorous tendencies, some great places to eat. Not that I would visit them during Lent, of course...
ReplyDeleteI would say it is probably a flaneur's paradise. Incidentally, is being a flaneur the same thing as being a boulevardier?
Much the same, I reckon, Sophie - though a flaneur can roam beyond the boulevards (of which there are sadly few in London). I imagine a boulevardier rather better dressed too, with the white silk scarf, swinging cane and top hat tilted back. Not an easy look in London these days...
ReplyDeleteCan we have it back now, seeing as how they seem to want to charge you to get in?
ReplyDeleteNige, I must stop reading these travel posts of yours. My dance card for June is already full and you keep coming up with these irresistable places. SOmething has to give.
ReplyDeleteIt is amazing, Nige, that what you now enter is the Chancel of the Norman building.
ReplyDeleteWe've got dozens of churches as old and older up here in Northumberland, but what we lack is priests as intelligent educated and devout as the one who wrote the letter about Lent on the website.
ReplyDeleteSeeing as this post only generated a quarter of the replies to the let's insult the yanks post can we have another crack at them please?