Cathedral

Our visit to Ely continued with a good visit to the cathedral. The symphony in stone still works its magic, inside and out.

Masonic Hall

But the first event of the day was the Masonic Hall, somewhere between the car park and the cathedral. One imagines that the Masons are still quite strong in a country area like this without that many other diversions.

Quince pears

The second event, a bit further along, was a clutch of what BH told me were quince pears, from the large-leaved tree above. It seems that we had been told all about them by a volunteer in the walled garden noticed at reference 1. We refrained from lifting any of them, not that I suppose anyone would have minded.

Nave

We sat for a while in the nave, mainly to admire the vaulting of the walls of nave and aisles: the relatively brand new Buckfast Abbey was not in the same league, although we liked it well enough on the day of our last visit, noticed at reference 2. The masons at Ely put those of Buckfast to shame. The ceiling painting is relatively new, 19th century, and BH did not care for the way that the figures were head towards the altar, which made them appear to those of us in the nave look upside down. While I wondered about where they took the design from.

Coke fired heater

One of the once coke fired heaters scattered about the place, this one, I think, in the north transcept. Lost among various stuff being stored there against an upcoming brass band concert.

Some sort of performance art to mark the end of the First World War going on in the crossing, with someone dropping red poppies from the lantern up above, so that they fluttered down onto the octagonal plinth and altar underneath. Complete with carefully placed and lit candles. With elaborate camera taking it all in. I was a bit disappointed that they had not rigged things up so that the next batch of poppies was dispatched by sending a code up from a mobile phone to a contraption. Instead, they just talked on said mobile phone to a person. Were they practising for the real thing, scheduled to take place during aforementioned concert?

There were also a number of clear plastic outlines of military figures attached to pews. A manifestation of the current fashion - not to say fad - for rather florid memorials, involving numbers of large and small manniquins, for the first world war. As far as I am concerned, it is time to stop. Perhaps the powers that be will find that a century is a convenient time at which to draw the line. While I associate to the recent story in the Guardian about how, for many people in central Europe, the first world war did not end until the early 1920's - so 1918 does not have the resonance for them as it might have had for us.

Green man

A detail from the florid carving of the Lady Chapel. One of the smaller of the green men scattered around the cathedral, mostly hidden in stone foliage.

Paint job

Defaced, with green man above

Oddly, whoever carefully knocked the faces off all the devotional figures did not think it necessary to knock out the green men - while one might have thought that proper Puritans would get even more excited about the latter than the former.

We wondered if there had ever been a time when the Lady Chapel was complete, with all its carvings and statues and with its full paint job. It would be an interesting project to try and create a virtual version of what it might then have looked like. Perhaps one could take a video film of the chapel and then get the computer to finish things off properly?

Echo still as good as ever, which must be interesting from a musicians point of view. Would it be a good thing or a bad thing? But all in all, given the times we live in, a slightly depressing monument to gross religious intolerance in the past, in our past.

Brass missing

Someone seems to have pinched the brass plates which once adorned these tomb stones. One supposes that metal was dear then and the market for stolen metal even stronger than it is now. It had not occurred to me before that the plates were cut into the stone, a cutting which must have been a long and tedious job: something for the apprentice, or something for Friday afternoon after the pub.

More paint

Note the traces of decorative paint work to the vaulting. And another of the once coke fired boilers right.

Quite struck on this occasion by the difference in style between the nave and the chancel, with each being very uniform in itself. One building campaign for each. Some cathedrals are much less tidy in this respect.

By which time we were getting cold so retired to the café, taking in the cathedral bookshop on the way, where I fell for the handsomely produced reference 3. Clearly at Mölnlycke, a small town near Gothenburg, they still know about book production. Unlike us who seemed to have subbed a lot of it out to China. An interesting aperçu into the northern European doings of the church around the time of the Conquest, a time when there were still pagans about. The sort of people who still knew all about the cross quarter days of reference 4.

I also fell for a cheese scone, the best scone I have ever bought from a café, despite there being a bit too much Cayenne pepper for my taste.

Next stop, Ely's fine bookshop. I found that they still had the two different editions of the letters of Van Gogh, at three or four volumes each. Not yet found a taker after getting on for three years. From which we deduce that they have a lot of money tied up in stock. So not yet in the grip of the finance wizards, the chaps who care about sales per unit volume per unit time per thousand pounds of capital deployed. See reference 5.

Our Trace

And one letter to the left of G for Van Gogh, they found room for our Trace, that monument to the gullibility of the chattering classes. See reference 6 for notice of one of her 'London River' series.

Opposite, we were pleased to see that Eli's the pork butcher was still alive, but it was rather busy so we didn't care to wait to get one of his pork pies to supplement our picnic, which we ended up taking on a bench quite near the large cannon guarding the western approach to the cathedral. A bench recently vacated by a couple of JW's (or perhaps Mormons) on Saturday duty.

Wound up the day's proceedings with a trip out to Witchford, once the principal town of what became the Isle of Ely after the cathedral was built. The church of St. Andrew was shut and we did not care to knock up one of the church wardens for the key, only I don't suppose they would have minded.

Beldam memorial

But there was this fine memorial of a leading light of the Beldam family, who died at the end of the nineteenth century. A memorial which surviving the railing stripping of two world wars. Probably the chap who for £150 bought one of the top selling horses at the Lincoln Horse Fair of 1903. Probably a relative of the chap who was prosecuted with Robert Wheaton for assaulting Sophia Wheaton, the latter probably being the daughter of the former. Some grubby muddle after the pub shut? Fine 1/-, but it does not say whether this was what they paid jointly or what they paid each.

Village store?

Perhaps the large house left ran short of money at some point and let what had been the trap shed to some Old Mother Hubbard to run one of those little village emporiums, the sort of thing that was just about alive when I was little.

Competitor to 'Quickie'

Walked back into Ely to dine at the Prezzo there. Italian style hummus, lasagne (rather a lot of white sauce) and tiramisu (mini swiss roll format). Adequate rather than good, but the service was good and the ambience was good. Much better than at the Epsom branch, where the trade is a bit young for us. We wondered whether it was a franchise, explaining the difference, but I could find nothing on the web to support that theory.

Not much wine to choose from, so we settled for this light wine from the Veneto, bottled for some people at Effingham, just a few stops on the train from us at Epsom. A label to rival that for the 'Quickie' sold by Greene King in their houses. See reference 7 for an early encounter.

Wound up with J&B (a higher grade blended whisky which I believe does well overseas). OK, except that I said no ice, they forget and fished it out before giving it too me. Which did no favours to either appearance of the glass or flavour of the whisky. But the service was very good otherwise and it seemed a bit churlish to complain.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/parke.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/buckfast.html.

Reference 3: Bishop Osmund: a missionary to Sweden in the late Viking age - Janet Fairweather - 2014.

Reference 4: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/11/endellion-at-40.html.

Reference 5: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/12/topping-books.html.

Reference 6: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=Couper+Collection.

Reference 7: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/04/gravitational-waves.html.

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