Let's chchug* again

*Church charity mug. Which means saying farewell to this


and hello to the flinty likes of this.


Once again we’re coming up to the second Saturday in September, which means Last Night of the Proms for some, but as far as I'm concerned the annual walk for the Norfolk Churches Trust. Been a bit of a disappointing season, anyway, from the Proms I’ve caught this year, and my last (a rather charming Bridge symphonic poem, well-performed but expressively rather blank Birtwistle Violin Concerto, undercharacterised Planets) was a typical curate’s egg; read about it over on The Arts Desk.

So Rule, Britannia goes out the window in honour of Lord Nelson, whose church our dear late Mary Dunkerton of Burnham Thorpe wardened so lovingly. These walks are partly in her memory but very much for our own pleasure, too, as we tick off a growing fraction of the 800 plus Norfolk churches by hiking the green lanes, the saltmarshes, the country estates and (once) the fens for the worthy cause of church conservation.

OK (and I don’t know why I have to keep apologising), it’s not Somalia. But these are the little things that fall through the cracks, and once a fine old building is gone, it’s gone forever. Before I blog the day, I have one Norfolk church to write about seen between the annual walks I haven’t covered here and pictured above: Holy Trinity in the village of Loddon where our lovely friends Katherine Howard and Andy Walter and their brood live. When we first attended a concert in their converted mill a couple of Novembers back, the key to the church was nowhere to be obtained. But on a fleeting visit from Norwich early this summer, I did manage to get in. Holy Trininty is a tad borderline in tlc, exactly the sort of case we’re collecting for, but has so much worth restoring: the porch with its upper storey


and rather fine carvings including a roundel featuring the letters of the name ‘Hobart’ – namely Sir James, who had the present church built between 1492 and 1499. Over the entrance is a neat little holy trinity


and just inside a twice-defaced font contemporary with the church’s founding.


The major Hobart memorial is to Sir James, great-grandson of the founder, and his wife Frances



and the most singular tomb is that surmounted by the splendidly-named Lady Dionysis Williamson, d.1684, who gave huge sums to the rebuilding of St Paul’s Cathedral and other churches by Wren after the Great Fire of London. She can well reflect peacefully upon her good works.


The painted rood screen is very fine as a whole


but, alas, has attracted attention of an unwonted sort with its depiction of the crucifixion of ‘St William’ by a party of Jews on Mousehold Heath, taken as gospel by a band of anti-semites in America who will draw your attention to this piece of ‘history’.


One singular touch in the lush churchyard is the notice between these two statues, probably too small for you to read in this photograph.


It pleads thus:

PLEASE LEAVE US ALONE
We were lovingly made of marble in memory of two tiny children, one of whom died of whooping cough and the other of meningitis, some seventy years ago. We have two brothers now living in North Walsham. Our heads have been knocked off about eight times in the last twelve years.
PLEASE LEAVE US ALONE

After which one must shuffle off with a superfluous sense of guilt to ruminate on worldly folly down near the river.


Anyway, donations (ideally cheques made payable to ‘Norfolk Churches Trust’) very welcome. I’ve yet to find the plea here achieving any results, but you can always contact me via the Arts Desk email. Besides, our person-to-person donors like to read all about it, so I’ve promised the annual report some time next week.

London: pictures in place

Cities are waking up to how you can change the look of a favourite location by installing temporary artworks to grace, contradict or change it. In November Durham will come alive with a festival of light that includes a stunning projection of Lindisfarne Gospel images on to the cathedral, which they did a couple of years ago, and which will be repeated along with much that's new. I hope London will do the same at that darkest time of year: remember the sunflowers projected on to the big arch in the middle of Hyde Park Corner?

In the meantime, one of the happiest serendipities was to stumble across Swedish photographer Anders Ryman's UNESCO-backed Rites of Life exhibition on the embankment just outside City Hall.


Quite apart from the fact that these images of people of all ages ceremonially marked out for a big change are stunning, they make a startling foreground to monuments we know all too well - not least the Tower vs the young man and Ethopian rituals as pictured above and this young woman (a Berber ceremony, I think, but I need to go back and take a closer, less hurried look, and maybe buy the book).


Then there's the baby further softening the curve of Boris's City Hall.


No time, alas, to linger: I was on the way to meet the Suthren-Lanes to experience in a very different fashion from its first night Laurent Pelly's mostly wonderful Royal Opera production of Massenet's Cendrillon. I knew from the 2009 screening of Rossini's Barber of Seville that the image and the sound of the big screen experience, in Trafalgar Square at any rate, is first class, and, ma foi, how the craze for this sort of thing has grown.


I couldn't quite get over the predominance of the young, in all shapes and sizes, happy to sit through an entire opera, maybe to picnic and chatter a bit, but as I wrote in the Arts Desk Buzz piece, everyone around me was quickly hooked by the look of the thing, and the sound of it, too, not least in the shape of our fabulous Ewa Podles with chest notes to die for as the affected stepmother.


A sly shot of diverse neighbours near the fountain:


and a more professional panorama by Rob Moore of the crowd at the previous Butterfly screening, kindly supplied by the Royal Opera.


Well, there's opera for the people indeed - though at the slightly questionable price of BP's conscience-salving excursion into the arts (all this was cleverly and not aggressively raised by the White Swan campaign I quoted in the piece; shame I missed the 'guerrilla ballet' performance). And when it comes to concerts for the people, the fiver that will buy you the only place to be in the Albert Hall, albeit standing, has to be the best bargain in the world. I warmed by degrees, as I think did the performers, to the First Night of the Proms, as you can read in my Arts Desk review. But here's a shot of the first approach, 7.15 yesterday evening, with the building part-wrapped in what looks like a Christo art work and the strange man who wanders about with a book of photos sitting hopefully, or maybe resignedly, at the top of the steps.