Time Well Spent

 Well, I am back, and it was a joy to see Gloucester cathedral again – if not the city of Gloucester, which is now, sadly, the very model of English urban degeneration, dereliction and decay. A sorry fate for a once fine town, and one that is all too common, thanks to terrible urban planning, bad architecture, drugs and 'welfare' dependency, among other things. But the cathedral – and indeed its close – that is a very different matter. Not only is it a building of quite staggering beauty – especially for those of us who love the architecture of the 14th and 15th century – it is also unusually well presented and accessible, offering the hugely rewarding experience of walking around the triforium and viewing the building from a height of something over 30ft, looking down into the nave and transepts, up at the amazing vaulting, and around at the complex structure of piers, buttresses and braces that give the building a strength belied by its airy grace. 
   The cathedral is famous for its vast and beautiful east window, known as the Crécy window, which is as large as a tennis court and was made, amazingly, at the time of the Black Death. When the second world war broke out, it was dismantled and all its thousands of pieces of glass were individually labelled and taken into safe storage in the cathedral crypt. Alas, when the war was over, it was discovered that the paper labels had come adrift from the pieces of glass, so there was no clue as to how the window was to be put together again – or rather, there was one clue: a coloured postcard of the window in all its glory. With this as their only pictorial reference, the craftsmen managed to reassemble the window exactly as it was. Two thoughts: if it had been the Germans dismantling a window such as this, every piece would have been meticulously catalogued, photographed and numbered, and there would have been no chance of anything going wrong. And, if the window had to be taken apart today, it would likely take months just to get authorisation to put up the scaffolding. Another of the ever growing number of things that we could not do today. 
   Anyway, there was also some walking, this over the border in Herefordshire, where we walked (in the morning, before the heat became intolerable) uphill from Ross-on-Wye to Brampton Abbotts – locked church, wonderful panoramic views – then down to the river and back into town, where an old friend of mine joined us for lunch at a riverside pub and a stroll around the rather delightful town. This was all time well spent – and there were butterflies galore on the morning walk: abundance of peacocks and red admirals, meadow browns and gatekeepers, with commas and painted ladies, clouds of whites, and, near the end of the morning walk, a single clouded yellow, flying busily past, as they always do – my first (on this side of the channel) in several years.