Westminster Abbey I

Done it! Broken through the barriers of time, and worry - too big, too expensive, too touristy, too exhausting. Westminster Abbey. The boys away at exexhDH's family for most of the week. Mainly I am working but I have one whole, full day off. I take money from a cash point on the way there to pay the entrance fee, but have my teeth gritted to the price. Remember I'm on what feels like a slightly out of hand spree - they are wants that have been backing up and really none of them of are outlandish but just the flood of them seems to be costly:

filing boxes x 6 (yellow)
a top for me
a belt for me
origami paper and book (for boys)
Extravagant but beautiful light up balloons for camping birthday parties ( mine and youngest son's/camping next week)
a necklace from the house of fraser sale for me (there certainly seems to be a for me theme here)
fabric paints (for boys)
lots of birthday presents for others that I have skipped or side stepped

I suspect the consumer in me would always have a list of the next purchases I would like to make which are:

new beds for the boys with storage underneath (found them on ebay for £120 a piece with mattress- can they be any good?)
lamp for sitting room
electric whisk (make those meringues and cakes easier)
haircut (yup, for me again)
underwear (ditto)


But I am holding back. Mildly panic stricken by the urge of want. By money which is meant for other things.

Anyhow. It is beautiful, hot, sunny, the same weather as when I went to St Margarets of Antioch. I have attempted to get to Westminster Abbey by 9.30 when it opens but I am probably 10 minutes late. Without the boys, time is really odd - slower and faster at the same time, precious but slack, the space of them mourned. Parliament Square is fenced off in ugly tarpaulin, the decison seems to be rather than have a peace camp, there will be nothing, though the tents cluster at the edge of the pavement and the fenced off land. Sculptures of great men like clumsy parcels with plastic wound round. Winston Churchill a big coat wrapped in a mac.

Entrance from the north transept. £15 admission price. I have it ready. But just at the last minute shuffling in, I think I will just try my Westminster res card, the one I use to get cheap swimming, the one I lend to an exD friend of exexDH to go swimming - a funny arrangement where he takes it in the week and then appears on saturdays for breakfast after AA meetings so I can take the boys to swimming lessons and we try to talk about art over the heads of my sons while I make pancakes or scrambled eggs. The eldest ( often angry ) and youngest ( who licks his arm ) and usually exexDH turns up too. I am to meet him later at the Tate. While it is probably the nearest thing I have had to a date for 11 years and it does feel slightly date-like, I don't really want a date. I don't want to feel vulnerable, I don't want to lead someone on, I don't want to be rejected. I definately don't want an exD or a D either. Plus, I have made a rule to be taken out for dinner and cherished. But I like him, he is funny and kind and oh, oh, the idea someone might laugh at a joke I make is too much of a draw. Also, I think he probably feels exactly the same. I am the ex missus of an exD. Though it makes it easy for both of us, for some things don't have to be explained, the extremes are known.

But the card works! Not 10% off, not 15%, even 20% or 50% but bang, bingo, can't believe it - I am in, I live here, haven't come off a coach, dragged a wheelie suitcase, sat in a seventies steak house or even come on the tube, just walked round the corner and it is absolutely free. I am so pleased. £15 pounds is still a worrying amount to me. The belt I shouldn't have bought but love. The amount of most of the things I have listed. In the extraordinarirly bad times, I have fed the children reasonably well for a week for not much more than double that.

Under the porch with stone saints clustered, through the door and then unexpected a great crowd of grey dead people, limbs waving around, flanked by the shuffling living with audio guides. I can't explain it, but I thought I would walk in and it would be about the building, about height and awe but it isn't it is a clutter. All I can see is statues packed in, like a store room of ambitious people. This is just a first impression I think because that entrance brings you into a waving woman on her back and some seafaring chaps. Then a vicar, a real one, with a wolf smile, glides infront of me, saying to a young pretty guide 'where did the all the people come from? Who opened the doors?' Eyebrows arched. And then I can imagine the quiet and magnificence of just being there. Not him, not her, not any of us. The hush.

I reach kings. There are seventeen monarchs buried here. Including the shrine of Edward the Confessor. How amazing. How old. He built his palace near the original monastic community (initially 12 monks on an isolated marshy area of the Thames called 'Thorney Island', King Edgar giving Dunstan, bishop of London the land in AD960) then built a new church dedicated to St Peter. Though he died a few days after it's consecration in 1065 his burial depicted in the Bayeux tapestry. Less than a year later William the Conqueror was crowned in the earliest Abbey. Later again, nearly a hundred years Edward the Confessor became a saint and his remains moved to a magnificent shrine in the presence of Henry ll and Thomas Becket. Henry III started the building of the abbey we see now, inspired by the french gothic cathedrals. All this I've learnt but I think maybe I will go back, even try an audio guide, because all I could see was a lot of railings with huge caskets hidden behind.

Everyone has the guides, like enormous, white, comedy sketch 80s phones, and the people look with their ears, a crouched shuffling view. I am overwhelmed. The greats and then the merely clever, the clerics, the administrators who secured themselves a patch by nimble deals. The layers of age, kings and kings and kings, then Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth 1, these people, their remains are really here. Chapel entrances dip into smooth bowed stone worn by feet. It is too much to describe it all - this is what I noticed - two tiny figures in a chapel, a couple, a man and a woman measuring from my elbow to my thumb, pocket sized tombs, as poignant and vulnerable as Ron Mueck's sculpture 'Dead Dad'. At the side of Mary Queen of Scotts laid quiet and marble, a bag tucked beside with a sticker that says 'Mary Queen of Scotts fire blanket.' Something warm, something protective. All history kept safe, kept continuous, the line of story, the story of state and power on and on. But also inherent threat imminent, attack anticipated.


Then the writers and poets. So many. Chaucer 'Clerk of works of the Palace of Westminster' ( I didn't know he'd lived here) 'O Rare, Ben Johnson', Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy slightly worn, TS Eliot 'The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living' the cut of the text overdone, fussy in the craft of modern stone masonry.

Turning off into the cloister is the really old bit. Against the wall, tombs with shapes that look ancient rather than christian. Presumably just ancient christian. I have a sketch of them but not sure how to describe the cartoon bone shape with crosses at either end at the ball of the bone. Alongside, along the thick, rough walls, the doorway into the Pyx Chamber. It has been there since the Norman Conquest, a room that feels underground by the thickness of the walls but isn't. Huge wooden chests, which were used for counting and valuing money . A thousand years later the room used as a safe HQ in the 2nd WW. The people from the war that I'm trying to imagine must have tried to imagine the other people, with as little success, I don't know, I find it hard not to try.

On again under a low moon sliced tunnel to a deeper recessed, I think an even older, small cloister with a fountain, finally the garden, and when I get out there I am the only one. I'm not sure the audio guide takes you there. But it is beautiful, old walls, a strange view of the rooves of the abbey then the houses of parliament. Beautiful. An old fig tree the height of an oak. Calm.

Back through. The carved stones of war heroes. Again, I can't explain it but the recent typeface of the dead is horrible, the pride of the carver rather then the truth of those that died. A name is just a spoken thing rather than a flourish. Written well it conveys the gravity of them gone.

Finally, finally into the high ceiling vaults of the church. Here is the tomb of the unknown soldier 1920 then the scientists - Newton and ( I overhear a guide ) 'We let him in.' Darwin. There is magnificence and light and beauty and I realise this is how the church should be seen, how it was intended to be viewed. Tourists are exited through the entrance if that makes sense and it is hard to understand the church without that initial view. I sit.

Later I go to the Tate to the surveillance exhibition. I like lots of it. The small, tiny details. The first paparazzi pictures. Bits and bobs. The Date or Non Date and I skirt the exhibition independently, never near, never looking together, but unexpectedly we come across each other near the end, our pace finally coinciding but I can't bear the intimacy and overtake him.

Almost the last room, Bruce Nauman 'Mapping the Studio' a film of roughly 52 minutes that I watch for roughly 4 minutes. It is the Artist's studio with a film camera running at night, I wait, watching nothing. I have always been fascinated by capturing the grainy stillness of night, the shift of light and not much. Looking and looking, like trying to find the proof of nothing without you, or an internal feeling, a trace of history, or the warmth of a ghost. I wait.

Once years and years ago I was unfaithful to a man I truly loved and I ended up in an open air swimming pool somewhere near Sheffield. Swimming, I lost track of the man I didn't care about but had lied to my work and taken the train to see. I can remember clearly looking around for someone or something to recognise but there was nothing just many heads bobbing. I was completely unattached, completely unknown, free in a rectangle of water with a swimming suit on under a big, open sky.

Watching the film, and the night of the studio unexpectedly there is a twitch of movement. Bright eyes. I guess a mouse. Things happen that you don't see, don't know, I think.

Amen