This week we were very busy with the final touches to the National Trust issue which I have been masterminding, but I think is a good meaty recipe for publication April 5, covering a large number of properties, with a delightful piece by Lucinda Lambton on curiosities and opinion pieces by Simon Jenkins and John Gummer. We are tremendously lucky to have the National Trust in this country, and it should be celebrated and also examined on a regular basis.
Have lunch with Roy Strong at the Garrick Club to discuss his new idea for raising the profile of remote churches that have adapted themselves to serving their communities as more than just parish churches. He is hot foot from the Abbey where they have been having the service of thanksgiving for the anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade.
On Friday I attend an evening wedding of academic friends being married in the glorious setting of King’s College Chapel. As I approached the chapel I was struck by the beauty of the space in between the chapel and the Gibbs’ building, which looks out across the Backs in the late spring sunshine, matched too by the beauty of looking down the nave and out the West Door opened at the end of the service for the couple to leave by. The couple were one half Italian, and the Dean mentioned that he couldn’t speak Italian but then read some of the service in Italian rather well, I later discovered he had trained as an opera singer.
A soloist sang from the organ gallery and the sensation was so electric in the fine vaulted interior, it felt as if we were in outer space. The reception was in some Kings’ Rooms hung with Bloomsbury group paintings, by Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry, the latter have just the sort of greens that I had noted in the hazy view over the Backs.
