Legends from our own lunchtimes

Friday, September 09, 2011

A lot of glass
Metz

I was going to describe in some detail how we hauled the plywood out from under the mattress and across to the picnic shelter at the rowing club, where we fiddled for a couple of hours dismantling our table and making an exact mock up of how we thought a new small table might be, and then decided we would be much happier not changing the original setup anyway, but there really isn't anything too interesting in any of that.

I wasn't going to mention that after lunch we finally succumbed to the lure of the illuminated monster that quietly guards our harbour.

Curiosity finally got the better of us so we popped inside the cathedral for a squzz. We don't normally do cathedrals unless there's something particularly significant about the architecture or the goings on inside, or we feel vaguely curious. We just don't have any desire to "tick the box" marked "cathedral" in every city we visit.

Through happenstance we often find something quite surprising or even satisfying when we do, and so it was today, having studiously avoided reading anything of the history of the building, and for that matter having studiously avoided the entrance even, when we finally succumbed we were surprised, to say the least.

When one finds oneself somewhat unexpectedly in a forty five metre high room (I'm sure it's not that tall outside) lined with six and a half thousand square metres of stained glass, one finds it difficult to maintain one's composure, let alone to keep up one's terribly blasé demeanour about such things. Yes, yes the Chagall windows are a wonder, as are the others produced by various artists over a five hundred year period, but heck this thing is more than a thousand years old. A thousand!

It almost makes me wish I'd listened during those history of Architecture lectures.


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