Norwich Roof Boss #21

Four goblin faces with their tongues touching- creating a vortex of malevolence. I don't suppose it means anything. I think it's just the mason having fun.

Norwich cathedral is rich in medieval survivals. It probably helped that Norfolk is so far away from everywhere else. Like Lancashire and Sussex- two other out of the way counties- it retained its catholic sympathies (they're still strong today) and the iconoclasts (with their Bibles in their boots) were unwelcome and worked without encouragement and were therefore less thorough. We were in Peterborough Cathedral on Monday- a similar building of a similar vintage- but in the East Midlands- which were the Puritan heartlands- and it got much more radically smashed up. For starters the cloisters have gone- and their bosses with them. Actually, it's a wonder it survived at all- because it was an abbey church- and could have gone the way of most of the others- only its abbot was a canny man who managed to get on the right side of Henry VIII. Seeing that dissolution was inevitable, he lobbied for his church to become a cathedral- and Henry said "What a good idea- and why don't you be its first bishop?" Lucky man; many of his peers wound up on the scaffold. Perhaps he was not merely canny, but charming.

Seasonal Adjustment

One of Ailz's teddy bears has been wearing my smoking caps this summer- one piled on top of another- but this morning I helped myself to one because there's a real nip in the air. The weather these past few days has been foul in parts of the UK but rarely in the places we happened to be. On Monday, for instance, it rained in West Kent but we were away from home, in the East Midlands where it didn't. Our monitors currently say its 17 degrees in the sun and 10 in the shade.

It occurs to me I should be doing some gardening. Well, perhaps I will, but I need to put a coat on first.