Wednesday, 17 June 2020

Daily photos no. 54: the Round Table

Spring 2012 saw me toddle along to the wedding of two good friends, Adam and Katie (finally, someone to wield his other lightsabre).Obviously I'm not going to inflict pics of someone else's wedding on you (though it was glorious), but I did wander around Winchester, the furthest south I've ever been in England. Very pretty, and of course the Austen connection was an added joy. The wedding itself was in a tiny chapel up some stairs, built into the city walls and once burned down during a dispute between the ecclesiastical authorities and the locals. Some of the town felt a little too Empire English for comfort (particularly the cathedral's endless memorials to the fallen of various brutal, one-sided colonial conquests), but the strata of history and architecture were stunning. Also: go to the amazing second-hand bookshop hidden in the cathedral outhouse (when circumstances allow).


The groom (deliberately over-exposed)



I'm allergic to Cute Kiddies but come on…







I believe she also dabbled in writing of some sort

So good they named him twice






A particularly gruesome memento mori

The Round Table (well, the one constructed in c. 1275 and decorated by Henry VIII in one of the various attempts to appropriate Arthur to manufacture a heroic English icon).




3 comments:

Phil said...

You've revealed some startling details in the past (both the teaching hours you put in and your reading diary strike me as Stakhanovite), but... Winchester's the furthest south you've been in England???

Thinking back, I wouldn't count Devon or the Isle of Wight as unmissable, but Cornwall certainly is (you don't need to go where the surfers go). And I'm struggling even to imagine never having been to Brighton. Deprived, that's what it is, you're deprived. (Then again, I don't own a bike or a pair of boots that don't let in the rain (as I discovered last December), so who is truly wise eh.)

The Plashing Vole said...

I went to Brighton for an afternoon to help someone move house, and once to collect a bike, but subsequently to this, I think. I'm allergic to English toffs, hooray henries, Brexiters and golf, so that's the home counties and Cornwall out (if Cornwall counts as England). I like my coastline rocky, my weather brutal and landscape mountainous. Anyway, I've seen Brighton Rock and read Sugar Rush, so that's Brighton ticked off.

Phil said...

I like my coastline rocky, my weather brutal and landscape mountainous.

Sounds like you'd like Cornwall, tbh. (And it's barely England anyway - it's Cornwall. It's not just that the placenames are different (although they are), it's something about the scale of the place - once you're there, Plymouth to Penzance feels like Newcastle to... well, Penzance.)