Evensong At Binsey

My week off has coincided so far with an attack of sciatica which hopefully won't stop me doing too many of the things I've planned. Those began with a prelude on Sunday, in which I zoomed from Swanvale Halt as far as appalling traffic along the M25 would allow to Binsey on the west side of Oxford, where, MissT had alerted me, Evensong was to be celebrated on the feast day of the chapel's patron saint Margaret, and a ceremony of blessing held at her well in the churchyard. The tiny lane to Binsey also leads to The Perch, one of the area's most popular pubs among the class of people who can afford its prices, and tends to be lined with cars. I parked at some distance and despite my discomfort found myself running towards the chapel as the bell rang, only to discover I could have left the car quite close by. I arrived panting seconds before we began. There were ten of us including the Rector of Osney and two students, one of whom was studying the ecological role of churchyards and the other doing a DPhil in mining including the possibility of lithium extraction in Cornwall. Amazing the people you meet. 

The holy Office concluded (and my obligation fulfilled) we moved out into the churchyard to the well. Although it's dedicated to St Margaret, the well is supposed to have arisen at the prayers of St Frideswide, Anglo-Saxon princess and founder-abbess of Oxford Priory, now the University's patron saint. By the mid-1800s there was nothing remaining, until 1874 when the perpetual curate of Binsey, TJ Prout - a classics lecturer, university reformer, mountaineer, and, according to legend, so prone to fall asleep in meetings that his friend Lewis Carroll turned him into Alice In Wonderland's Dormouse - rebuilt the well. He may have tapped the original source of the water, but on Sunday after weeks of dry weather there was so little remaining (and you wouldn't have wanted to be aspersed with what there was) that Revd Clare brought some finest Thames Water tap fluid in for the purpose. The Baptismal blessing of water, the Collect for St Margaret, a modern poem inspired by the churchyard and a blessing concluded the ceremony. 

Unlike some holy wells, St Margaret's Well operates in a predominately Christian context, but all sorts of people visit it. On a previous inspection in November I found rosaries, saintly prayer cards, and a candle bearing the image of the Indian Roman Catholic devotion of Our Lady of Vailankanni; on Sunday there were more pagan feathers and stones, a few coins, and a little pair of china shoes from somewhere in Holland. 

V&A East Storehouse

Alerted by a friend, I found my way yesterday to the new V&A Museum Storehouse halfway between Hackney Wick and Stratford, a slightly otherworldly area of rebuilding, new estates, and gigantic square structures of which the Storehouse is one. The marketing is that this is a new, radical approach to museum display, a warehouse of open storage through which visitors can wander at will, forming their own connections and stories as they look up details of the artefacts they're interested in via QR codes. This is not quite the case. Much of the cavernous space, which really resembles a cross between a cash-and-carry store and the entrance atrium of some vast company office, is out of bounds, and I rather would have liked to inspect, for instance, the five-foot-high plastic anime pandas I could glimpse through the shelves and gantries, but couldn't. There is a rational storage scheme, but operating at the level of 'chair' or 'cabinet' it's less than helpful. 

But it's an interesting experience even if it doesn't do quite what it promises. As well as the artefacts there are some charismatic set-piece displays, such as Frank Lloyd Wright's Kaufmann Office from 1937 (an oppressively soporific space you can't imagine anyone doing a stroke of work in) and the Moorish Torrijos Ceiling, or the frontage from a Robin Hood Gardens flat demolished in the 2000s (we like a bit of Brutalism, we do). Here and there you can peer down a corridor and glimpse a conservator at work. Quite the most startling experience lies around a corner I wouldn't have found without some staff pointing visitors in its direction - a gigantic darkened space with nothing in it but a seat, and a colossal stage cloth copy of a Picasso painting. And I found alabaster panels of the Imprisonment & Martyrdom of St Catherine (very poor photo).

Entry is free, and I wanted to go before the David Bowie archive arrives in September and the whole thing becomes impossible. However, part of the cost may be recouped through the café, where I gibbed at paying £8 for a very small bun made with what looked like burned bread but which is probably artisanal. I had better stop before I start sounding like a member of Reform UK and stress that I went round the corner to a café called Badu run by a Mr Badu and staffed by a polite young woman in a hijab where I had a spicy veg pattie and side salad with a cup of tea and it was very pleasing indeed thank you very much.

For the Record, from Gozo

My friends Lady Wildwood and Captain Jackson were in Malta the other week and visited the Cathedral Museum on Gozo. As well as a mosaic skull wearing a biretta and a range of episcopal buskins in liturgical colours, in the background of one of the Lady's photos I spotted a painting of what was unmistakably St Catherine. Here it is, bent and twisted into proper perspective and sharpened up a bit. I can find out nothing about it - it's interesting that it follows the post-Reformation Iberian iconography of the saint in which wicked Emperor Maxentius appears as a disembodied head rolling at her feet, ironically as she was the who ended up with her head cut off rather than him. It has rather an odd look about it, almost as though it's a pastiche of a 17th-century image of St Catherine rather than the real thing. But it's hard to tell from an image this indistinct. Oh well, nothing for it but to go to Gozo myself : )