"She and Polly went for a walk that afternoon, and after tea accompanied their parents to church. Evensong was Mary's favourite service; she sang the hymns with pleasure in her clear voice and felt better - until she turned her head cautiously to see who was singing with equal enthusiasm only in a deep, rumbling voice. Professor van Rakesma, no less, with Pleane on one side of him and Ilsa on the other."
-Marrying Mary
When Dr. van der Stevejinck and I were in London a few years ago, we spent a day walking around on our own. With tourist map in hand we enjoyed the sights. One of the sights we didn't see was Westminster Abbey. The map we had was a little vague - and it sort of had a symbol for Westminster that took up the whole area around it. Yeah. We looked at the map, it said there was a church there - we looked at the church and said to ourselves, yup, there's a church...we made the erroneous assumption that it was THE church on the map. Nope. The church we snapped a picture of is actually St. Margarets. It is Westminster adjacent. At the time, I thought to myself that it seemed smaller in person than it did on tv (but you know what they say about the camera...it adds 10 pounds).
We had that problem in Munich (though not with such a quite well-known landmark). If everywhere you turn is religious architecture of a similar age then you find yourself thinking, "Yes, but are you THE Doctor Livingstone?"
ReplyDeleteTo comfort Betty Debbie, note that when you are at the Houses of Parliament, St Margaret's Church and Westminster Abbey, you are technically outside of the "City of London" which is a bit of a surprise (only 1 square mile of London is the City of London, down near the Bank of England). The Abbey is in the City of Westminster (the local city council for that part of London is called Westminster Council) The Duke of Westminster still exists and is extremely well off because he owns rather a lot of Westminster (ie central London and the West End). St Margaret's Church is a church where many 'posh' people marry (a Betty Neels wedding would be very appropriate at St Margarets) but the church is within the fence for Westminster Abbey, which is a rather enormous building. But perhaps rather harder to distinguish from the Houses of Parliament than one might expect, especially as you were at the "back" of the churches. Hope you enjoyed London, nonetheless.
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