Monday, October 11, 2010
A Day in Town
The CTS was shut too is there a conspiracy going on?
A delicious lunch with a friend at what used to be the Hyde Park Hotel, why can't we have food and service like that it Brighton?
We dropped into the Oratory to see the new Newman chapel: quite pleasant, quite understated, quite English; I think the Blessed JH would approve.
Then off to the V & A to see the Raphael tapestries, I have to admit I am a philistine, I know people have raved about them but to me tapestries are a bit like wallpaper they are soft furnishings. I could appreciate the cartoons: the colours, the forms but the tapestries just looked dull, obviously they have lost their colour, the gold thread in them had lost its lustre, the vegetable dyes had lost their vigour, the whites are a dull fawn, I was quite disappointed.
I was much more excited by the Medieval Gallery but then it does seem odd to have objects of veneration; relics, crosses, statuary, vestment sterilised of their sacredness by being in a Museum, at least the V & A doesn't display ciboria or pyxes with the Blessed Sacrament spewing out of them like a communist museum of atheism but they do show relics as if the bones of the Saints of God are historical artifacts, would they do that if they were the remains of Australian Aborigines or Native Americans?
I understand they do the same Westminster Cathedral, so maybe it was providential it was closed!
Posted by Fr Ray Blake