UK Trip 2005

At one end of the crypt is the OBE Chapel. In there, I suddenly found myself standing at the midpoint between William Blake's stone memorial panel set into the wall, and Hubert Parry's mosaic memorial tablet set into the chapel floor not twenty yards away. The two men responsible, independently, for the words and music to the classic setting of "Jerusalem", eternal neighbours, representatively if not literally, in the same aisle of the OBE chapel of St Paul's. The Gallipoli 1915 memorial wall had fresh wreaths of poppies laid under it from Monday's ceremonies, representing the Turkish embassy in London as well as the Australian, New Zealand and English representative wreaths. Directly opposite the Gallipoli memorial these days is a memorial wall to the soldiers who were killed in the "First" Gulf War in 1991, which is an interesting pairing. In the crypt alone there were too many displays and memorials to take in fully, and by the time I ascended into the Cathedral itself for the first time (with a sharp intake of breath!) and realised I was truly doing the whole thing backwards, missing out on the guided tour and new audio tour options because I didn't come in the front door, the galleries had already closed. However, at least one gallery is closed longterm as a five-year cleaning and restoration plan for the Cathedral interior continues. Certainly the interior of the Cathedral is much brighter, the stone walls and pillars much cleaner, and with a better sense of light than I had gleaned from television broadcasts and photographs of the past. This restoration is supposed to make good the apparent failed restoration attempts of 1935/36 and the 1800s, and so far it seems to be going very well indeed! Good grief, the colours, the carving, the Dome! The only thing not so great was...the noise. The endless rapid chattering. The relentless forbidden flashbulbs while other people were at their meditations. God's way of saying that I should have been at Evensong. There can't have been many French teenagers in Paris today; they all seemed to be in London! Everywhere, in droves. And most of them seemed concentrated in St Paul's for the afternoon, where for a mob who looked so damn bored with where their teachers had taken them, they expended a lot of energy running, yelling, LEAPING around the place. Not sure where they thought they were, but it certainly started to pall after a while. Perhaps they behave completely differently at home. I expect so. Unless the French government has deported them because they don't. Next Previous

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Andrew L

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ukmay05@yahoo.co.uk