Post Op the Second

Just now I find myself in the same position I did in March 2018 - recovering from a hernia operation. I suspected ever since I had the first repair that a second on the other side would be needed at some point but it took a while before it became apparent enough for the medical profession to agree. It's only the second day so far, and unsurprisingly I am quite sore and moving around very gingerly. 

So far, so much like last time. In fact it feels rather as though I am doing a bit better, less afflicted by painful indigestion and shiveriness than two years ago, and of course the graphic I've attached to this post is misleading because I've not been sewn up in traditional fashion but, as before, glued ('dissolvable sutures', they call them). But the differences are striking too. My nice, attentive surgeon hasn't supplied my wounds with dressings which is slightly worrying though I suppose must be right. When the nurse came to wheel me off and found that I hadn't got any surgical stockings on, he had to go and check what the drill would be, as 'some surgeons don't believe in them.' Oh. Nor have I had any laxatives issued as I was before, and have had to toddle carefully down the hill and get some (a member of the congregation accosted me and gave me a lift home, which I took as providential). 

One of my convalescence books is Alex Bremner's Ecclesiology Abroad, published in 2012 by the Victorian Society. In its pages I have discovered how the first Roman Catholic bishop of Tasmania, Robert Willson, was an ardent supporter of Pugin and, in contrast to Pugin's Catholic patrons in the home country, swallowed completely the great architect's line that the only really permissible form of liturgy was the Sarum Rite, and the only buildings that could house it were 14th-century Gothic ones; Anglican church-builders in New Zealand were more flexible. Meanwhile, the oldest Anglican diocese outside England and Wales, Nova Scotia, was the scene of conflict as Bishop no.4, Hibbert Binney, tried to bend his recalcitrant clergy in the direction of the Tractarianism he'd absorbed at Oxford, with new churches built according to proper Ecclesiological principles. 

But the greatest surprise came from South Africa where the first Bishop of Cape Colony, Robert Gray, also a sound High Churchman, brought with him his wife Sophy who became not just effectively his diocesan secretary but also architect - and how many other woman Gothic Revival architects have you heard of? She designed about fifty Anglican churches across the Cape, and even St Mark's Cathedral, George - not a big cathedral, admittedly, but a cathedral nonetheless. My time hors de combat has not been wasted, just for that!