It’s amazing what you can see when you bother to look up, as I did last week in Norwich. We’d gone to see old friends who had kindly provided us with a mini-heritage tour walk as we made our way back to the railway station. On the way there, apparently, we had walked through the Norwich red-light district though, worryingly, we didn’t even notice.
We found ourselves dipping into quaint alleyways, down cobbled walkways, by ancient houses, priories and churches. We almost didn’t go into the cathedral as I thought there would be an entrance fee and we didn’t have the time. Inside, though, there was no fee, only an enthusiastic greeting from Colin, a volunteer.
As we chatted, I looked up. The vaulted ceiling arched above, impossibly high, stunningly beautiful, looking like angels’ wings made of stone. It took my breath away. What, I wondered, were those wooden clasps that seemed to be holding the whole thing together. “Bosses!” announced Colin who launched into a fascinating description of wooden decorations intricately carved in the 1300s with Bible scenes that included a pharaoh’s chariot that, he said, looked suspiciously like a Norfolk haycart. Of course, these days no one would bother to carve something that is too high to see. Our loss, really.
A place of refuge
As we stood, heads tipped back, admiring the angels, a voice rang out (not from above but from a loudspeaker), saying the Lord’s Prayer. I liked this reminder that this is a working church: all cathedrals should be free and open because they are not just a building, or a business (sorry, charity), but also a place of refuge.
I have always liked to sit in a church in times of trouble. I can remember when, in my early twenties, I got my first real journalism job, in Chatham. I had very little money but found digs in a two-up, two-down house in Gillingham owned by a man who I began to realise, a little bit too late, was really rather creepy.
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I was alone, far from home and feeling a bit lost. At the weekends I would occupy myself by walking round the Medway towns, often ending up at Rochester cathedral where I would sit enjoying the calm and quiet. That’s the real reason cathedrals exist, not to sell tickets.
Bird brain
There is a glorious if all too short passage in the extremely long play John, written by Annie Baker and now at the National Theatre, in which the eccentric B & B owner Mertis regales a guest with her love of collective nouns for birds. “A congress of crows, a convocation of eagles, a team of ducks, a tiding of magpies, a colony of gulls, a host of sparrows, a cast of falcons. Isn’t that nice, a cast?” Mertis continued: a siege of herons, a mustering of storks and a troubling of hummingbirds. Hmmm, I wondered, what would be the collective noun for playwrights? A Shakespeare?
Perfectly plump
At the weekend I found myself in DFS, as you do, examining the merits of a sofa. Our engaging young saleswoman, Alisha, was full of info on how to keep the cushions looking good. She grabbed a pillow and explained that you must always “plump” from the outside in, to let the air in. Never from the inside out. As she plumped away, I realised that I always just hit a pillow right in the centre. I have been plumping incorrectly for decades. Still, now I know, thanks to Alisha.
Chuck-out time
My word of the week is “tchotchke”, pronounced chuchkey (at least by me) which is a mouthful that means, essentially, trinkets that clutter up your shelves, mantelpiece and life. I am at present trying to rid myself of them and have decided that the collective noun is “an oppression” of tchotchkes.