It's All In The Details... Titian at the National Gallery (in a mask)

I was standing there gazing at 'Diana and Actaeon' in the Titian exhibition at the National Gallery and started drinking in the details. I'm quite familiar with the painting but it's always nice to really look at a painting. I liked how Diana's little lap dog is already in full protective mode, baring her teeth at the enemy, young Actaeon and his hunting dog. The nymphs are all shocked and scared but the little dog is ready for anything. Actaeon is a mortal and Diana is a goddess so is pretty safe really, but that's not the point.

Actaeon is all muscle and sinew, not an ounce of spare flesh on that body, just look at the legs and that shoulder and arm. Diana and her handmaidens are all soft and fleshy, voluptuous and inviting, just the odd piece of drapery covering them. They're at their bath after all. They've been surprised and are attempting to cover their nakedness, all that flesh on display. Why they would choose to bathe in a ruined house in the middle of the woods is anybody's guess.

Then I noticed, between two nymphs on the ornate ledge above the pool, a small jar probably filled with rare, essential oils for Diana to bathe with. There's a small mirror beside it reflecting the jar. On closer inspection there's a reflection of the jar in the pool and, looking closer still, you can see a few dabs of white paint that give the jar it's sheen.  

Sometimes it's the details that bring a painting to life. Look at the detail on that ruined shelf, the frieze around the old fountain or whatever it is, partially worn away over the years and then that small jar. All the marks of a master. But it's the storytelling that draws us into a painting like this, the inventiveness of the composition. The current Titian exhibition is well worth seeing.

Favourite Paintings: 'Two Satyrs' by Rubens

'Two Satyrs' by Peter Paul Rubens is in the Alte Pinakotek in Munich and I saw it when I visited the gallery to see the wonderful 'Florence' exhibition in January 2019. After seeing the exhibition I went for a cuppa and a cake in the cafe and thought I may as well see the gallery's collection. I expected it to be like any provincial museum anywhere but I was quickly disabused of that misconception. It has an astonishing collection with loads of great paintings including 'Two Satyrs' by Rubens.

The painting may be called 'Two Satyrs' but there's really only one satyr here and he's the one looking right at you. There's something about that look that says he's already had his fun and now he wants a glass of wine, but then he sees you and you're the focus of his attention. And you know what? He'll have his way with you. He will. That's what satyrs do.

I have no idea why Rubens did this painting, why it was commissioned, how he found the model, what it's meant to represent, and I don't care. It's about nature and about sex, about passion and lust, about giving in to those primitive urges that make us who we are, about stripping back the trappings of civilisation and presenting the primitive us. It's you and me.

Westminster Abbey in a Mask

After visiting St Paul's Cathedral a few weeks ago I decided that I'd also visit Westminster Abbey when it re-opened for visitors and I went to the old place yesterday. It's probably three decades or more since I was last inside the Abbey although I have occasionally visited the Cloister when you could access it from Dean's Yard. I worked within a couple of minutes walk of the Abbey for 26 years so I'm very familiar with the old pile from the outside, but not the inside. The Abbey is a working church but it's also a reliquary of the history of this little island.

It was originally built in 1065 on the site of an earlier Benedictine church by order of King Edward, later Saint Edward the Confessor, who is still buried there. He died in 1066 and later that year, William of Normandy (the Conqueror) was crowned king of England, starting the long tradition of all coronations taking place in the Abbey. The place has been added to, extended and re-modelled over the centuries. It's strange to walk around the tombs of these almost mythical old kings and queens, earls and dukes, the plaques and flagstones engraved with names from over the centuries, the names of poets and writers, scientists and politicians. It was a big surprise to see the names of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan on flagstones. Younger readers might not even know who they were but I remember them.

The visitor entrance is still the North Door and you need to be masked and observe social distancing when you can. Tickets need to be bought online in advance. There's a one-way route marked with pink signs that takes you to some of the more famous and interesting things to see in the old church. The walls are covered with plaques and monuments to dead people and you walk on graves with the flagstones you walk on commemorating the great and the good as well as people you've never heard of. I walked over Sir Isaac Newton without noticing since I was too busy looking at the grave of Charles Darwin and wondering where Stephen Dawkins was buried.

The route takes you to the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior surrounded by red poppies. It was quite moving to read the long inscription ending with, 'They buried him among the Kings because he had done good towards God and toward his House'. It made me wonder what will happen to the Field of Remembrance in the grounds of the Abbey this year, when the grounds are planted with crosses and symbols of the regiments and names of the dead in wars and conflicts since the First World War.

The route continues down through the nave, through the Quire and around the High Altar. This is where the early kings are buried in stone caskets under the vaulted roof of the Lady Chapel, along with later kings and their families. Light floods the chapel and the colourful banners bring the place to life. The route takes you past the tombs of Elizabeth and Mary but the rooms are closed because they're so small.

Follow the route round and you come to Poet's Corner and the tomb of Geoffrey Chaucer ('Canterbury Tales' anyone?). Apparently the tradition of burying poets and writers in that area of the Abbey begun when Edmund Spencer asked to be buried near Chaucer in 1598. Not all of the poets named in plaques and memorials are actually buried there, some are named in honour on flagstones or with plaques on the walls. You see the names of Lord Byron, George Eliot/Mary Ann Evans, Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, Jane Austin, WH Auden, CS Lewis and a host of others, some still famous names, others not so famous. There's a large statue to Shakespeare, a bust to William Blake and a monument to Handel.

The route then takes you out into the Cloister and the Chapter House. It's another very light space and is where the Benedictines used to gather back in the day and for a century or so was used for storage. A thing that fascinated me was the paintings on the walls behind the stone benches. It looked like the paint was applied directly to the stones rather than to a surface of plaster. I'll have to do some research on that since it seems like such an odd way to work.

You then head back into the Abbey proper with a big memorial flagstone to Churchill and, near the West Door and exit is the Coronation Chair in a glass room on its own. It's over 700 years old and is where the monarch is seated in front of the High Altar to receive the crown. I thought it looked a bit strange, a bit too wide for its height maybe? And then out into the open air through the West Door and you can leave or visit the shop which also operates a one-way system. Looking back over the West Door is a frieze of statues that I've never really looked at before, despite walking past that door thousands of times over the years. The statues are of Modern Martyrs, most of whom I've never heard of but included is a statue to Martin Luther King.

I'm pleased I visited the Abbey, I remembered a lot and learned a lot. It was busier than I expected but not crowded. For some odd reason you're not allowed to take photos inside the Abbey (as I found out after taking a photo just inside the entrance) so the internal photos here are taken from the web. I think I'd quite like to go back in the run-up to Christmas, when the light is weaker and the air is cold. I suspect the place feels even more atmospheric. The Abbey also usually has a large Christmas Tree outside, near the North Door. I suspect Christmas 2020 will be a strange time in this strangest of years.

The Plastic Bag is 15 Years Old

This blog is 15 years old today and is becoming quite an old gentleman in blog terms. I can't remember why I started blogging on 16 August 2005, but I did. That was before Facebook and Twitter really took off and, in many ways, replaced blogging with their approach to 'micro-blogging' and updates. A lot of blogs started closing down in the early teens but I kept mine going - no idea why, really. Fifteen years on and I'm still doing it. Not with the same frequency as in the early days but it's still happening.

The Plastic Bag is named after an X-Ray Spex song from 1978 written by the great Poly Styrene. She sang, 'My mind is like a plastic bag that corresponds to all those ads, it sucks in all the rubbish that is fed in through by ear...' and that seemed so right at the time. It still does. There's never been a theme to the blog other than it's all about me in one way or another, a right mix-up of things: thoughts on what's going on in the world, reviews of plays, comments on records, art exhibitions, holidays, posting videos of things I like, all sorts really.

Some people still look at it and read posts, not in the numbers that used to but I don't mind. Blogger tells me the USA is my main audience closely followed by UK readers and then a long way behind is Germany.

Entry	Pageviews
United States	125793
United Kingdom	109855
Germany	27271
France	18051
Russia	17738
Canada	6620
Ukraine	5740
Australia	4577
Netherlands	3525
Denmark	1893

These stats aren't really meaningful over the life of the blog since I changed the address where it's hosted a few years ago and lost that history of usage but I suspect these figures are reasonably indicative of use.

I don't have any fancy analytics on the blog so can only go by what Blogger tells me, and it tells me that these are the most read entries in the blog:

'Para-Umbilical Hernia' on 4 January 2010 with 2425 pageviews
'Matilda The Musical' on 19 January 2012 with 2168 pageviews
'Blondie at the O2' on 1 July 2010 with 2049 pageviews

Followed by blogs about seeing Kate Bush live in concert in 2014, a Poem on the Underground from 2010, a TV programme about spices by Kate Humble from 2011, and seeing both Amanda Palmer and Viv Albertine in 2013. A mix of this and that, just like a lot of things tumbling round in a plastic bag should be.

Will the Plastic Bag continue? Who knows? But 15 years isn't bad at all.

Andy Warhol at Tate Modern in a mask

The Andy Warhol exhibition at Tate Modern has been extended so I thought, 'why not?' and headed up to Tate Modern to join the queue to get in, enmasked of course. I suspect he would've loved masks for various reasons and I was a bit surprised there weren't any for sale in the exhibition shop.

I'm not the biggest Warhol fan but I set up a Warhol playlist on my iPod to get me in the mood. 'Songs for Drella' (of course), some Velvet Underground, songs about him from Bowie and others, songs about New York and about art, all sorts of stuff. The first song to pop up was John Cale's 'Trouble with Classicists' from 'Drella' that seemed like a perfect start to the journey up to Tate Modern.

I got there a bit early but masked up and joined the short queue outside for the exhibition and then the longer queue inside on the third floor to get into the exhibition itself. It was all very efficient and safe so well done to the Tate and staff for making it so easy to get in.

The first room has a series of over a dozen line drawings of androgynous young men but the second room is where the blockbusters begin, with Marilyn, Elvis, soup cans, coke bottles and Brillo pad boxes. I stood there looking at the pile of Brillo pad boxes and wondered if they were in the right order, the right shape? And then decided that it didn't really matter, I'm pretty sure that Warhol didn't bother with a diagram to show how the pile of boxes should be put together.

As you'd expect for a media cult figure in the '60s and '70s, there are lots of photographs to look at and I really liked this photo of Andy and Lou Reed in the '60s - how young Lou looks. It's good to include exhibits like this in the exhibition to show how broad Warhol's ambition was and how he tried to connect all branches of the arts by wanting his own rock band to project his films onto. Weird stuff but that was the '60s for you. And, of course, the mandatory sunglasses.

On the opposite wall is the screen print of Elizabeth Taylor hung on a silver wall.

I did like the way the Tate has played out these rooms. Liz Taylor is hung on a wall covered in silver bacofoil, nice and shiny, and then later, the Mao screenprint is hung on a wall covered in Mao heads. I did wonder for a moment whether that was meant to be art as well and then decided it didn't really matter.

Most things were on a big scale so some rooms didn't have many works in them. In the current circumstances that seems very sensible indeed.

I didn't bother waiting in a queue to see the thin corridor that covered the time when Valerie Solanas shot Andy and all the smaller exhibits, like newspaper cuttings in glass cases, but walked straight through to avoid too many people. That room could do with a rethink, I suspect.  I did quite like the room full of 'drag and trans' prints that had a sign at the door that explained that 'drag and trans' had different meanings back in the late 60s and 70s, which I thought was quite sweet. It sort of reflects the people Warhol hung out with, an inclusive scene rather than anything else. Did he mean that as a political gesture or was it just that they were good subjects, or good fun at the time? Whatever, they're good to look at and there are some interesting experiments in colour and shape in his portraits. I wonder what they thought about being his subjects? Was it an honour or a pain or did they care at all?

I really liked Warhol's portraits of Lenin, the great Russian revolutionary, a perfect subject to enrage at the time. You can't see it in my photo but theres an electric blue outline around Lenin's face in the darker print. Lenin is relatively young in the photograph he copied for these large portraits and you can well imagine him being responsible for a revolution. I wonder how many of these prints he actually produced  before deciding that he was happy with the final versions?

In this room there's also a glass case that includes three of his wigs. They looked a bit scruffy and manky to me but he was happy to wear them.

There are his celebrity portraits, of course, epitomised by two prints of Mick Jagger and two of Debbie Harry. It's probably an age thing but I was more excited to see Debbie than I was to see Mick.  They are very simple as prints but it's obvious who they are.

Jagger is from 1975 (hence the slash of make-up) and Debbie is from 1980 when she was probably the most famous woman in the world, full-on pout and direct gaze.

The final room is darkened and has one work on show across an entire wall, 'Sixty Last Suppers', based on an old photograph of Leonardo's 'Last Super' in Milan. It's in black and white and shows a degraded version of the famous painting. The signage refers to his partner dying of an AIDS-related illness around the time he produced it and it is quite sombre but there's also the hope of the resurrection a few days later. I suspect part of the sombre tone comes from the subdued lighting rather than the subject matter. I admit to being one of those annoying people that gets too close to the work as I tried to identify what was different from this version to that version five prints along in the series.

I enjoyed the exhibition. I don't think I learned anything about Warhol from it but I've already booked another ticket to see it again. 

Favourite Paintings: 'Laus Veneris' by Sir Edward Burne-Jones

I first saw 'Laus Veneris' in 1976 at the Laing Gallery in Newcastle. I last saw it in 2018 at the exhibition of Burne-Jones' works at Tate Britain. It was the painting featured on the posters and on the cover of the catalogue. It's based on a poem by Swinburne in which Venus looses her love and here she sits, all languid and love-lorn, being entertained by her maids while knights ride past outside and are seen through the window. It's incredibly decorative and full of details, just look at that tapestry in the background.

Venus may be languid and a goddess but she has very poor posture and I can't help but tut. She's destined for a bad back one of these days. The next time I'm in Newcastle I'll go to the Laing and give her a talking to.

Aubrey Beardsley at Tate Britain in a mask

The Tate galleries re-opened on 27 July and there's Art to see, timed entry by ticket, masks and social distancing, guards in visors and ticket office now behind perspex screens. All as expected really. The Aubrey Beardsley exhibition has been extended due to the lockdown so I wandered over to Tate Britain last Wednesday. I don't know why but I expected a relatively small exhibition, not an exhibition that fills the normal exhibition space downstairs.

I suspect that most people who visit galleries know the name of Aubrey Beardsley and can recognise his distinctive and stylised drawings and that's as far as my knowledge of him goes. A late Victorian who moved in the same circles of Oscar Wilde and illustrated Wilde's 'Salome' as well as other works of the time. Something I didn't know is that he died at the age of 25 - he produced an awful lot of works in his short life. Or that Edward Burne-Jones (the Pre-Raphaelite painter) was his mentor for a time. There's a lot to learn in this exhibition.

We see his early works and a self-portrait from when he was 19 years old. We see some of his drawings of the Arthurian legends and 'Morte d'Arthur', all very stylised and decorative reflecting the artistic fashions of the time. Part of me wished he'd used colour rather than the black/white greyscale he used. He really seems to have liked drawing with black ink and ink washes and it makes for a very effective image. I actually have no idea if they had coloured ink back then but it's a lovely medium to use and is very flexible.

He produced some very delicate line drawings, such as his drawing of Sir Percival seeing the Holy Grail (below). I wonder how many 'mistakes' he made with his lines - or if he made any? Maybe he didn't and he was that good with his pen.

Then there are drawings of androgynous people in flowing robes, like this drawing from the 'Salome' series. This is supposed to be John and Salome confronting each other, almost in mirrored poses, Salome differentiated since her clothing is a bit more elaborately decorated. Throughout the history of painting John is usually shown wearing furs or very plain, simple clothes, but Beardsley puts him in this rather elaborate robe with a careful hair-do. That's what artists do, they create the image and that image tells a story as much as the story behind the painting or drawing. An elaborate robe fit the aesthetic of the time so that's how he's dressed.

Another thing I didn't know was that Beardsley was also a book editor as well as contributing drawings and illustrations to various books and journals. This is a cover he drew for a book he also edited, 'The Yellow Book'. The actual drawing on white paper is on the wall beside the glass case that holds this copy of 'The Yellow Book'. A masked woman and man and a tall candle. What's that all about then? I have no idea but I like it.

Coming towards the end of the exhibition and my eye was caught by this drawing for the title page of an edition of 'Volpone' by Ben Johnson (a contemporary of Shakespeare). I've only seen this play performed once, back in 1978 when the play was on the syllabus for the English Literature 'A' Level. I'd love to see it performed again. Maybe Shakespeare's Globe will put it on one day.

The penultimate room is a small, slightly darkened room with a sign at the door warning about the explicit images inside that might upset those of a delicate disposition. Naturally, I just walked in and took photos of the rudest drawings I saw, both illustrations for scenes from 'The Lysistrata', an ancient Greek play by Aristophanes. If you've read this far then I'm pretty sure you know what the play is about so let's just say the women of the city withheld their sexual favours from the men with the obvious frustrations that leads to for the men.

The final room was essentially a tributes and influences room, showing Beardsley's influences down the years in paintings, drawing, cartoons and record covers, including the Beatles' 'Revolver'. 

The safety measures worked fine, with people queuing outside the exhibition, nicely distanced, but then, as soon as people got through the door, it became a bit of a scramble, with far too many people in the first room, more distanced in the second and so on. I moved on quickly. All in all, it's a good exhibition and well worth visiting (I might visit again later in the run). It was nice to see the range of Beardsley's work over such a short life.  

Lockdown 2020 #4

The world was a different place four short months ago. Those months have been the longest ever due to 'lockdown'. I'm conscious that I'm beginning to forget what life was like at the time and want to make a few notes to help me remember.

March and April were a time of random anxieties about the future and worries about what might happen but they gradually faded as we got used to queueing outside shops to buy food and the world around us didn't crumble. Many people continued to go work and others were furloughed because they weren't needed at the time. Radio and TV shows kept things upbeat and positive (like the great 'Grayson's Art Club'), theatres were very good at offering refunds on tickets, often asking for donations to keep them going but a refund wasn't a problem, and we got used to the new language of zooming everywhere. My Zooms were for online drawing sessions. May crept into June and June into July as lockdown started to ease as the country passed the peak of cases.

I started looking back to the strange days of March and April as being not so bad, when the roads and streets were virtually empty and the world was quieter and cleaner. The government started announcing stupid rules like 'social bubbles' that were totally unenforceable and people just started ignoring them and doing as they wanted. Raves started happening on the local Commons and litter significantly increased. Things were getting back to 'normal' in a pandemic. Masks or 'face coverings' started to become a 'thing' and became mandatory on public transport. I bought colourful masks from OddBalls, the prostate cancer charity.

The National Gallery became the first gallery or museum to open on 6 July for members and 8 July for the public. A brave move that was very well done with staff and guards wearing visors and visitors asked to wear face masks and maintain distance as they looked at the works. I gave them a week to sort out any teething problems and went on 14 July to support the Gallery and see some Art. Trafalgar Square was empty but there was a big queue to get into the Gallery by timed-entry tickets. That was the first time I'd been more than a couple of miles from my front door since March.

Other things started to open like 'non-essential' shops and department stores, pubs and restaurants, workplaces that could operate safely and it became a lot easier to book food deliveries as more people started shopping for themselves. Hairdressers and barbers became a 'thing'. Was this all happening too quickly? Probably, but it was what people seemed to want.

I can get into the centre of London by overground train to avoid buses and tubes and that's what I've been doing. Visiting an art exhibition, St Paul's and Tate Britain, getting a lot of walking in as exercise to and from train stations. I wore a mask on the trains and in the places I visited and will continue to do so. London felt more alive and busier last week, not back to 'normal' by any means and the streets were still relatively quiet, but London is waking up again.

What will happen next? I don't know. Most people seem to assume there'll be another outbreak of the virus and more deaths at some point so there's still a need to be careful since the virus is still out there. We'll see...

Lockdown 2020 #3

The world was a different place five short months ago. Those months have been the longest ever due to 'lockdown'. I'm conscious that I'm beginning to forget what life was like at the time and want to make a few notes to help me remember.

Easter was late in 2020 and was in the second week of April. I discovered a new, local plant shop opened virtually on Good Friday and I ordered some plants to be delivered. I used to have loads of houseplants and missed having something to look after. They arrived the following Tuesday by bike delivery.

I started doing my cuppa-on-the-couch afternoons. During the week I'd select an art book to leaf through and look at the pictures and on Sunday it was time for a Sunday afternoon film. New traditions were born to fill the days. The weather got better and I missed flowers and started looking enviously at window boxes - I'd thought about getting them before but never got round to it and now it was an obsession. No point in having a window box, you also need a lot of soil and some plants...

So my walks started taking me past a local hardware shop and a pet shop that sold plants and soil, and one day the stars aligned and they had window boxes and soil so i leapt in and got them. And on a change to my walk I found out that Homebase was open and it was full of flowering plants so I indulged. I now had two small 'gardens' to look after on my window sills. And, one morning, I found a squirrel sitting in my window box smelling the flowers.

The government was doing daily press briefings every afternoon to tell us the number of virus cases and deaths, answer questions and spin its lies. I couldn't watch it and managed to avoid them all to save my mental health and blood pressure, just getting the highlights on the news. Then I stopped watching the news and just heard clips on the radio news about ongoing shortages with personal protective equipment in hospitals and care homes. The government kept announcing it was sorting out the problem but it went on and on.

'Stay at home and protect the NHS' was the mantra and I did. If I went out it was to pound the local streets, mainly walking in the roads since they were largely empty. I didn't go to the Common much due to the joggers and cyclists who deemed themselves immune and didn't bother distancing. And I discovered online drawing through Zoom sessions.

I've done some life drawing in recent years and it was nice to rediscover it by staying at home. A lot of sessions started up and I joined in Zoom drawing sessions with models from all over the country and the world that I wouldn't normally have access to. At first everything seemed to be very flat, drawing from a screen, but you get used to it. I've drawn models in York, London, Paris, Barcelona, Bangalore and New York. We're learning new skills and hobbies in this worldwide lockdown.

My sleep patterns changed and I was sleeping a lot less, waking up very early to see the dawn. Why couldn't I sleep? I can only put it down to the random anxiety of the virus and the uncertainty of the future. I went out less and less and had to force myself to go to for walks in the roads, seeing the same old streets and trees, peering into the same gardens to see how the plants were growing.

Then the D. Cummings thing exploded in late May with him breaking lockdown and driving up to Durham and then going on a sightseeing trip to Barnard Castle to 'test his eyesight'. There was the ludicrous moment when M. Gove said in an interview that he'd driven to 'test his eyesight' in the past. That was the end of social distancing in my area. I could see it happening from my window as people stopped social distancing as they walked in the street and stopped walking out into the road to avoid people but just walked past each other on the pavement. That stopped me going out even more, as the traffic - both pedestrian and roads - increased and distancing ended.

And summer arrived with glorious weather. For a while.

St Paul's Cathedral in a mask

It's probably over 30 years since I was last inside St Paul's Cathedral. As lockdown eases then more places are opening. I was in the area a week ago and was surprised by the empty steps up to the entrance that are normally covered in office workers and tourists taking a rest. Of course they're empty, there's so few people around. There was no queue to get in so I thought, 'why not?' and, when I got home, I booked a ticket for a couple of days later. So, at the allotted time, I put on my mask and I went in.

It's a big old barn of a place and looks very empty when you first take a look around and that's (partly) because it is so big. The statues and other memorials dotted around the walls make little impression from a distance due to the scale of the place but a lot of them are big when you get closer. Under the dome and spreading out into the nave were a lot of single chairs spaced out to ensure distancing and a one-way system was placed out for seeing the place. It wasn't really needed when I was there because I'd be surprised if there were more than a dozen or so other visitors. Lockdown and travel restrictions must be playing havoc with its income streams. 

The first 'famous' thing I came across was the painting of 'The Light of the World' by Holman-Hunt (who is buried in the Crypt downstairs. It has a big window above it that means the painting itself looks quite dark and murky and it needs better lighting. There's also a statue by Henry Moore of the 'Mother and Child'. Other than that, it's mainly statues/memorials of the type you've probably seen in lots of other places. There's an interesting effigy of John Donne, poet and former Dean of the Cathedral, near a statue of the painter Turner (who is also buried downstairs in the Crypt). Did you know that Turner was Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy for 30 years? No? Neither did the cathedral it seems. There's a big monument to Nelson celebrating his major battles and he's got a snarling lion at his feet for some reason. As I say, you've probably seen this kind of stuff before but, perhaps, not on such a big scale.

 

The important thing to remember in St Paul's is to look *up*. The ceilings may be far away but they're covered colour, bright pre-Raphaelite-esque paintings

Then you go down into the Crypt and that's where the excitement began (for me at least) when you realise the long list of famous people who are buried there under those flagstones. I apologised out loud when I trod on Turner and then on Frederick Leighton and on Arthur Sullivan. Oops, sorry guys!

There were lots of memorials to people I'd never heard of, of course, loads of random military men and others associated with the Cathedral or simply rich enough to buy a burial there. It was all very strange, in a way, to have so many memorials to military personnel, to random Major-Generals and Field Marshals that I'd never heard of and then finding the rather ugly tombs for Wellington and Nelson. I couldn't help but wonder where all the religious works were given that this cathedral bills itself as 'the nation's church' but it seemed to be more like a military museum or mausoleum, a museum of empire with little referencing it to the present. I found it all very odd.

As you leave the Crypt you can pop into the large and well-stocked shop but what it didn't have is postcards of the place. I saw postcards of the Holman-Hunt painting but that was it. Where are the cards of everything else?

The staff were all very friendly and happy to help but why were so few wearing masks? If visitors are required to wear a mask then why are staff exempt? That made no sense. But I'm pleased I went to see the place after so long and when it was so empty of the normal tourist masses and noise.