I can see that there is a problem. The Church of England is sitting on a lot of expensive, heritage buildings which are not much used. They are not really paying their way. So I can see that the finance director (an approximation of the role of the dean), might want to pull in anything that he can. Concerts good, especially if classical. Christmas shows better, even if they come in the form of a medley rather than a proper service or even a nine lessons and carols. So on the day we visited, it was a medley day, I think a mixture of talk and song from the stage, a mixture delivered by various celebrities big and small. What looked like a fairly fancy sound system was being put in and I did not get the impression that the audience would be expected to do much. All this took up most of the nave.
Then in a transept, instead of being able to get a good look at the ancient clock on the floor there, we had a fair chunk of space given over to a Lego model in progress of the cathedral. I expect there was some charitable angle, but I think the modelers were Lego nuts rather than church nuts.
As a heritage loving atheist, I like my churches to involve sacred music, organs and evensong. And no tambourines or powerpoints - and certainly none of that happy-clappy stuff. Not sure about hell-fire preachers. Do they count as heritage? As it happens, the most hell-fire preacher that I can remember was the chaplain at HMS Dolphin at Portsmouth, back in the early sixties, when there were submarines there - who preached a stirring sermon based on some bit of Isaiah (I think) involving rivers of burning oil and, no doubt, cauldrons of same. Described by the chaplain as an early take on the horrors of a nuclear war.
But I was interested to find the footnote (illustrated above) to the Simcoe memorial (the grave proper being noticed at reference 1) about a young officer who fell in the breach at Badojoz. Striking, because we have been varying the diet of Agatha in favour of Sharpe, and I recall one episode where a very young officer - say fifteen or so - wants to be given command of the forlorn hope for the first crack at such a breach, perhaps this very one. I think the deal was that you had four chances in five of getting yourself killed against one chance of instant majority (which I think is army jargon for being made a major. An important step for a young officer, even one with family or money at his back), From where I associated to Wellington complaining about some of the truly terrible general officers he got lumbered with during the Peninsular War by the War Office - on the strength of their family or money. At least things have moved on a bit and the War Office now gets itself into pickles in more complicated ways.
Despite the fair, the cathedral was more impressive from the outside than from the inside. I was reminded of a recently read theory about things which are scale free - with my version being that buildings built on scale free lines have a lot more scope to be impressive than those - such as most modern buildings - which have a more limited range of scale when it comes to either structure or decoration. I suspect that, without all that much effort, barely enough for an MPhil, the same theory could be applied to paintings - with a lot of modern paintings scoring as low as a lot of modern buildings. Perhaps something to play with if I ever manage to get cracking with my not much used copy of Matlab, the workhorse of scientists all over the world. Maybe even China.
Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=simcoe.
Reference 2: https://uk.mathworks.com/.
Group search key: exa.
No comments:
Post a Comment