This afternoon I visited someone in hospital for the first time since the pandemic started. It's relatively easy now, though inflexible: you wouldn't be able to remember another parishioner in a different ward and just pop to see them on your way out. Now every visit has to be booked in. I was seeing Dol, who was anxious to know 'all the scandal, who's misbehaving'. In fact she was so keen she asked me this repeatedly. The truth is that nobody at all connected to the church is misbehaving, and in fact barely anything is happening at all.
So I will instead put up some photos from my trip to Greenwich with Sir Binarycode and Lady Arlen on Friday, which encompassed St Alfege's Church, the Junk Shop (an aptly-named emporium offering items ranging from Windsor chairs to a traffic light), the Observatory, and the Foot Tunnel. I had never actually seen the Meridian before: it was amusing to find that while you have to pay to get into the famous Observatory courtyard across which runs the metal line from which Time is measured, there's a free bit accessible by a path around the hilltop for plebs. The Foot Tunnel has wood-panelled lifts as though to recall its Edwardian origins (not very nice wood-panelling, but still). Looking across the Thames at the Naval College and up to the hilltop you get some dim impression of what might have been had the Stuart government decided to go with Nicholas Hawksmoor's ruinously expensive plan to turn Greenwich into an English Vatican, combining royalty, science, the military and religion, including a Chapel Royal with a dome big enough to fit St Peter's Basilica's inside it. I was taken with Gothick Trinity Hospital vastly overshadowed by the old power station, and will have to investigate it one day.
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