Evensong / Marriage of Heaven & Hell

After visiting the Tate Britain (see earlier post) I caught the tube to Westminster to work on the poem I'm writing for Pete Minter for the SWF this year (which Pete has organised to appear on postcards during the festival) - and found my way to The Red Lion, a pub about two minutes walk from Downing street, a stone's throw from Big Ben.

At 5 o'clock, after two pints, I headed for the Westminster Abbey to partake in the evensong. No, I'm not suddenly bjorn again, but neither do I really want to admit that I went just to get free entry to see the place, particularly the famous Poets' Corner.

I walked in late (ie. after the Lord's Prayer) and took a seat on the right, in the very back row. Recalling my Catholic boarding school education - though the abbey is Anglican - I pulled out my pious face and sang along to the hymns. If the truth be known, it is a very moving experience, listening to the wonderful choir singing along to Bach arrangements, enough almost to convert a fairly godless soul such as myself.

It turned out that I'd stumbled on a particularly special event - the consummation of a 25 year-long dialogue between the Greek Orthodox Church and the Anglican... with the Archbishop of Constantinople and the Archbishop of Canterbury addressing the congregation in their appeal for harmony (which seemed fairly heavily politicised).

Now the funny thing is, when mum decided it was finally time to splash some water on my head at the age of about twelve, it happens that it was in the name of the Orthodox church, so I found some personal significance in the event.

Anyway, throughout the whole thing, a bust of William Blake happened to be staring me down at about five paces (certainly ironically). It wasn't until the end of the service that I got up, took two steps to my right, and realised I'd been virtually sitting on Shakespeare's bones. I was the closest person in the entire place to Poets' Corner.

I scribbled down a list of all the writers apparently buried there, but it turns out some of the memorials were simply that, memorials, and not the peeps' final resting place - though some of the following are, apparently, actually buried there:

Jimmy Dryden, Dylan Thommo, Wazza Auden, Al Tennyson, Davo Lawrence, Tommo S Eliot, Will Owen, Bill Wordsworth, Chuck Dickens, Sammy Johnson, Matty Arnold, Geoff Chaucer, Bobbie Browning, Jim Keats, the Bronte babes, and Peebs Shelley. And of course, Bill Shakers.