And finally…

Last few shots of my weekend in Winchester (rest of the set here, or enlarge these ones by clicking on them). I promise tomorrow the thrill will have worn off and I'll be wearily blogging my outrage at the Tories/Leveson/the Tour de France once more. After I've gone to a 9 a.m. meeting, that is…

A lovely medieval statue mutilated in the Reformation's iconoclastic stage

Part of Bishop Fox's tomb in Winchester Cathedral. He's depicted as a skeletal, suffering figure in his death throes to remind us that even the rich and powerful come to the same end as the rest of us. I'm planning to send a copy to Bob Diamond. 

The 13th/14th Century Round Table of King Arthur in the Great Hall in Winchester. It was made for the engagement party of one of Edward I's daughters. The faux-Arthurian painting complete with Tudor rose was added for Henry VIII, the shameless spin-meister. 

One of the amazing things about the Cathedral is how knocked about by history it's been. Apart from the Norman chunk, it looks fairly coherent internally, but outside you can see evidence of the DIY undertaken by every generation since it was built a thousand years ago, such as this intersection of a blocked Norman door and an old roofline. It housed St. Swithin's shrine until the Reformation. As I visited on St. Swithin's day, it seemed only right to pray for rain. And so it came to pass! Old Swithin seems like a decent sort: he insisted on being buried outside the Cathedral with all the commoners - when they moved him inside, 40 days of rain followed as a mark of Heavenly Disapproval. 

Part of the Cathedral Close

The Jane Austen Death House. She lived there for six weeks and then died. 'Either that wallpaper goes, or I do'. Those were her last words. True fact. 

Some kind of flower

An industrious wagtail in the middle of the river

To bee or not to bee…

The Winchester Double-Action Wedding

Some more shots from the wedding and tourism I did in Winchester at the weekend. More here. Click on these to enlarge.

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One of the Adams. From Sunderland and similarly nonplussed by Southern ways. Between us, we drank their entire stock of bitter. By 8 o'clock. Then we had to slum it with champagne.

Adam, Amit and Ken. One's a hedge fund trader. One lives in Swiss tax exile. Not Adam though. 

Adam's brother Josh. A decent fencer. And human being. 

'There were three people in this marriage… one of them a little drunk'. 

Bee off with you!

Curle's Walk, under the buttresses of Winchester Cathedral

The Cathedral Nave

Jane Austen's gravestone. It says that she had a fine mind, but doesn't actually mention she was an author at all!

Not only does this chap have magnificent whiskers, his name was Francis Francis. 

The Nave again

Winchester… so much to answer for

… as Morrissey didn't sing. If you've never been to Winchester, as I hadn't until this weekend, just imagine an England theme park. It's stunningly beautiful, ridiculously historic (formed capital of Wessex and England; Cnut's bones are in a chest on a shelf in the Cathedral) very clean and of course completely white. Not to say Tory to it's marrow. Captivating for a weekend, perhaps not entirely comfortable to live in if you're not very, very rich. Architecturally it's lovely - mostly flint walls, with a vernacular tradition of putting narrow red tiled roofs along them to protect the mortar from the rain.

I was there for the wedding of my friends Adam, whom I've know from university days, and Katie. The service was in a tiny church built above a gate in the ancient city walls, and the reception was in Winchester College, the medieval and very expensive private school - Eton's more intellectual rival, and a heartland of the military and civil Establishment. Anthony Trollope went there, as did Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas (Oscar Wilde's squeeze/nemesis) and of course British Union of Fascists would-be Fuhrer, Oswald Mosley. Though so also did Jack White, heroic socialist founder of the Irish Citizen Army. I assume both of them were very keen indeed on the CCF (Combined Cadet Force). Lots of posh Labour types, including Michael Foot and Seumas Milne, the firebrand revolutionary leftist and Irish republican. Oh, and Sir Humphrey Appleby. It's that kind of place.

Anyway, time to be utterly soppy and sentimental: some photographs of the happy couple and others at the rather lovely wedding which was temporarily ruined only by Your Truly getting up and reading Donne's 'The Good Morrow' in my angry-quacking-duck voice. Every man at the wedding seemed to be either a banker, or called Adam - apart from the groom, I spoke to two other Adams (didn't know them from…), and the joys of tax evasion were explained to me in some considerable detail. If you don't want to see pictures of happy married people, try the next couple of entries which are of Winchester Cathedral and environs.

The rest of the shots are here: click on these ones to enlarge.

Lovebirds. Aahhhh

Statue at Winchester College

Could you get any cuter than a little bridesmaid with her arm in a sling? Perhaps a puppy with a bandaged paw. 

'Push pineapple shake the tree'

The first dance was Ella Fitzgerald. Their 'special song' is Lana Del Rey's 'Video Games'. I'm well aware that this deserves and swift axe to the head but I let it pass as they got married that day.