As a child, holidays meant being locked outside the house in the rain from sunrise to sunset, varied by the occasional trip to stand in the Irish rain. Occasionally we would be allowed inside, as long as the chosen building was a church. Preferably Catholic but, if not, then one built by Catholics and subsequently half-inched by theforces of evil our Protestant friends. I have vivid memories of standing on a bleak airport runway to see the Pope's plane touch down a mere mile away, while my sisters whiled away eight happy hours in full Parisian summer sun to see the Popemobile drive past. My boss similarly recalls a family holiday touring every single Catholic shrine between New York and the Canadian border (his mother also told him that she'd rather visit a ruined Catholic establishment than one in current use by the kind of people who keep their toasters in cupboards). More shrines than anyone would guess, apparently.
Driving that the apple doesn't fall from the tree, all my holidays as an independent adult are to Ireland and I still enjoy visiting cathedrals – I like the architecture and the music, though I find the imperial history very hard to take. I've read too much Betjeman and Trollope not to enjoy visiting them despite their deeply problematic cultural positions. St. Patrick's in Dublin is particularly weird: all the union jacks and memorials to men dying in the service of enslaving the globe that you'd expect in England, with no hint at all that Ireland's been (mostly) independent for a century.
Anyway, I dropped into Lichfield Cathedral one afternoon in 2011. It's an interesting town - an old cathedral built on the site of a much older ecclesiastical and national headquarters in Anglo-Saxon times, and one which was battered in the Reformation and civil war, then quietly faded from history since Johnson left. There's an excellent cheese shop, and Erasmus Darwin's house and herbal garden are rather wonderful. Since that visit I've been back a few times and through the good offices of the university's chaplain, have started thinking about ways my English department can work with the Cathedral. And not just to get my hands on its ancient library of unique manuscripts. Not at all. One of the greatest artistic experiences of my life was there: sitting at the back of the cathedral behind a screen as darkness fell, while Philip Glass himself performed at the festival - he played well beyond his allotted time, then hung around afterwards talking to anyone who stayed on.
Samuel Johnson is watching you
Erasmus Darwin
I told you I like patterns
A biblical wall-painting subsequently white-washed in the Reformation
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