I danced in the morning when the world was begun.

I was up bright and early on Sunday morning, which was a wrench as I was also up bright and late on Sunday morning telling smutty stories and filling myself with booze. However, I had a reason for being up and about as such an unaccustomed hour, which was that medusa_nw had acquired tickets for the last day of the Pre-Raphelite exhibition and they were for 9am.
So it was that I leaped merrily* from my bed, dressed with the speed and grace of a ninja**, joyously greeted*** the new born day, and scampered**** downstairs and out the door. A hop, skip and a jump took me to the tube station and from there it was a short trip to Leicester Square and the national gallery, where I arrived with minutes to spare before 9am.

I've got to say London at that time on a Sunday morning is something I don't see very often and it's very attractive. The chill mist of winter hung lightly over the streets which were near-deserted. Bathed in a cold dawn light, the city had a romantic air. The few passersby seemed to be mostly Chinese tourists with the bemused air of someone wondering just what had made them think that London in January would be a pleasant place to visit. The bells of St Martins bonged out and called the flock to service, and I was so charmed by the chilly solitude of the place I could have stood and taken the scene in for ages. Which was fortunate, as that's what I ended up doing.

As I hurried up to the National Gallery, I noticed a sign on the front reading Dear David. The Pre-Raphaelite exhibition is at the TATE, not the National Gallery. You've come to the wrong place and there's no way you can get to the right place in time to use your ticket, you hopeless imbecile.
P.S, it added. You are a belmer.

At the very least, I was impressed by how much better signage and communications have become in London in the last few years.

Anyway, so it was that I found myself in central London on an early Sunday morning with little enough to do. I couldn't get to the Tate in time to use the ticket but as the sonorous jangling of church bells rang out over the empty city, an idea struck me. Why not make the most of my mistake and just go off and do something interesting regardless? So off I took myself to morning service at Westminster Abbey.
I've never been into Westminster Abbey, and I've always meant to. I've written an entire section on it in the book***** and I've been past it often enough, but I've always been too tight to fork over a wad of notes to go instead for a poke around. Yes, on the one hand I accept that it's a whopping great big lump of Medieval architecture which is both fragile and old and costs millions a year to stop it falling down, but on the other hand I'm a cheapskate and the best part of fifteen nicker seems a lot when you look at it. However, if you go to service in the Abbey so long as you're wearing the right air of thoughtful piety you just get waved through security, and so in I went.

I like cathedrals; I remember going to evensong at Winchester Cathedral years ago and getting a sense of the numinist experience that a peasant in the 14th century must have had - the choir sits behind screens and so as you walk through the building in the candlelit gloaming there is the sound of plainsong with no indication of where it's coming from. To a pilgrim from the middle ages it must have been a far more remarkable experience than to someone who lives in a society where cathedrals of one sort or another are plentiful and music coming from nowhere isn't exactly remarkable. Westminster Abbey is smaller than some, but it's been the national mausoleum for such a long time that there is barely an inch which isn't a memorial to some worthy or other - Chaucer, Darwin, Dickens, Rutherford, Disraeli, Livingstone, and a veritable kings list of England and Britain are crammed in, sometimes several deep. You can't really take it all in, and it really would take hours to get round it all, so it's a shame that when the service is concluded the Abbey staff grab you by the scruff of the neck and frogmarch you out the back way to stop you looking at the place without paying - especially considering that in a moment of generosity I was so taken with the place and put more in the collection than if I'd just paid at the door and come in with the rest of the rabble.



*staggered cursing
**flailed
***Railed against the awful, awful light of day
****Painfully stubbed my toe
*****Didn't know I'd written one of those? Ah, well, there's a lot you don't know about me. A LOT.