Snowdrops & Allsorts

Taking full advantage of the season I couldn't resist showing these snowdrops again. I'm always reminded of them everytime I see the sides of lanes and corners of gardens liberally carpeted. The photograph was sheer serendipity. Seven years ago we went into the quietness of Horninghold church in Leicestershire on a cold windy day when the sun was very intermittent. My two boys went off to have a fight with brooms they'd found in the cleaning cupboard and I walked up to the altar just as the wind parted the clouds to allow a few seconds of sunlight. Genuine genuflection took place.

    Those who enjoy the idiosyncrasies of Unmitigated England will know of the trilogy of my handbooks that map out such things, and indeed I used this photograph in the third volume English Allsorts, in a chapter called Daffodils & Monsters that describes and pictures a very personal natural history. As incongruously as I could make it, it sits between Cakes & Ale (market towns) and Black & White (monochrome photographers). Elsewhere you will find amongst other Unmitigated subjects Hornby Trains, Brighton Rock and Jaguar XK120s. Still available in all good ironmongers and coalyards, or here. Or even, in complete over-selling, by clicking on it opposite.

Walsingham Windows

And so to Walsingham in Norfolk. All very odd, and I'm dyed-in-the-wool C of E. The oddest thing for me is that the Shrine to Our Lady of Walsingham is in fact Anglican. This is the Church of England so high it must have rocketed over the border into full-on Catholicism. The streets are permeated with the smell of incense and elderly spinsters in nun-style headscarves staring beatifically into the distance as they stand blocking up parking spaces. We were looking for shriney things, and quickly found a dusty shop window filled with plaster saints. My companion photographed one with an enormous £11.50 price tag round Joseph's neck, and we wandered into the Abbey grounds. Well, not exactly wandered, we had to negotiate a lady having trouble with the till who took eight pounds off us to look at snowdrops and a ruined arch.The actual Shrine place was more interesting, if very disturbing. A pale brick building that looks like a bus station in Romford hides a garden full of bricked and gilded stations of the cross and a perfect set of three crucifixes on a grassy knoll. It was with relief that we saw these cleansing fluids on a dusty window sill as we fled to Brancaster and two big plates of whitebait.
    

Altar Image

Yesterday was like early summer rather than a week or so into February. I took my boys out into the surrounding countryside (much mud-slinging and fighting with lengths of discarded wood) but then thought I'd quieten them down a bit with some church crawling. First stop was Horninghold, a tiny village of two streets with some of the most though-provoking houses in Leicestershire. Peeping from behind laurels and yews, it is an enclave of differing architectural styles built between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century for prosperous owners. The church of St. Peter presides over them all on a slight eminence, with an unrestored thirteenth century interior. Spotlighted by the sun on the altar table was this arrangement of snowdrops, those hopeful little flowers that were spreading amongst the headstones outside. I was about to tell the chaps to come and look at it in order to give a little gentle lecture about the perpetual progression of the seasons, when I heard excited yells from a corner vestry that was shielded from the rest of the church by two six foot high wood-panelled walls. I turned to see two brooms being waved about in the hitherto undisturbed air, locked in mortal combat. Hopefulness of a different kind, I suppose, that of knowing that whatever happens, life will never be dull.