PL36 - Cathedrophilia

We're on a mission now

I must make a terrible confession. I have kept a truth about me from you for thirty-five issues and thirty-three thousand words. I cannot conceal it any longer, I am a… I am a…

I am a cathedrophile!

I love England’s cathedrals. One book I’ve bought calls them “the most spectacular and lasting accomplishment of the English people”, and I agree. I could not have set my first novel anywhere but the loving gaze of beautiful Durham Cathedral, where I passed my happy undergraduate years. Inscribed on a bridge (with a view of the cathedral) that I crossed every day were five lines from Walter Scott’s 1817 poem Harold The Dauntless. The lines below are my own selection:

Gray towers of Durham! there was once a time
I view’d your battlements with such vague hope,
As brightens life in its first dawning prime;
Not that e’en then came within fancy’s scope

…

Well yet I love thy mix’d and massive piles,
Half church of God, half castle ’gainst the Scot,
And long to roam these venerable aisles,
With records stored of deeds long since forgot,

…

Vain is the wish—since other cares demand
Each vacant hour, and in another clime;
But still that northern harp invites my hand,
Which tells the wonder of thine earlier time;
And fain its numbers would I now command
To paint the beauties of that dawning fair.

That northern harp invited my hand too. Hopefully to another “spectacular and lasting accomplishment”. But, though nearing, publication is still some way off. In the meantime I thought I’d endeavour to visit and rank every cathedral in England. My research stacks seem to agree on a canon of forty-two constructions. I doubt any will surpass Durham – per cathedral encyclopedia Simon Jenkins the “most superbly sited” of all cathedrals in the world – or disappoint disgraceful St Paul’s, but those might happen, and in any case the project will be a great and rewarding adventure. I have made a graphic that I hope will attract viral fame. Please share, please supply feedback:

We will fill it in as we go. I placed Sheffield already. The trip there is one of my favourite issues, but I saw the cathedral while there and it was not that good. It stands beside to the founding spot of the first ever professional football club but is not remarkable otherwise. Batsford and Fry’s authoritative The Cathedrals of England groups it not in the twenty-six ‘major cathedrals’, or the hat-trick of ‘modern cathedrals’, but one of the ominously thirteen ominously uncharismatic ‘parish-church cathedrals’. I did have fun there, though, so I didn’t put it all the way down.

Here are the rest to be placed – weigh in and start defaming rivals to champion your fav:

Birmingham, Blackburn, Bradford, Bristol, Canterbury, Carlisle, Chelmsford, Chester, Chichester, Coventry, Derby, Ely, Exeter, Gloucester, Guildford, Hereford, Leicester, Lichfield, Lincoln, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Norwich, Oxford, Peterborough, Portsmouth, Ripon, Rochester, St. Albans, St. Edmundsbury, Salisbury, Southwark, Southwell, Truro, Wakefield, Wells, Winchester, Worcester, York.

All very fun so thanks folks, have a great weekend, excitably yours,

GM

Afterbirth

The ‘oui à tout’ mantra delivered a busy Thursday night. Two free tickets popped up; I surged first to a splendidly opulent fundraiser in Fitzrovia, crammed six or seven glasses of champagne and six or seven hundred canapes into my brief spell there, then flew off to the O2 for the concert of a singer called Gracie Abrams. The fundraiser was mentioned in this weekend’s Saturday Read:

And the concert review can be found through this link through this link. I asked one fan to describe Abrams’ sonic quality. She replied “Not that good. But sometimes teen girlies just need someone to scream and cry with.”

Lastly, if of interest, this week was one of the starriest Best of the Rests I’ve yet compiled. If you fancy more reading you might like any of the below. Sally Rooney on Ronnie O’Sullivan?! Sally Rooney?! Ronnie O’Sullivan?!