For this week's bout of Government-mandated exercise, @sadieholland67 & I are going to visit all the churches mentioned in the nursery rhyme #OrangesAndLemons*
* The idea for this came from someone who messaged me about doing the same here on Twitter. Whoever you were, thank u!
#OrangesAndLemons is an ancient tune: people were dancing to it in the 1660s, & so its lyrics may bear the stamp of that fateful decade. But probably not - the earliest version yet found in print dates to 1744 (Tom Thumb's Pretty Song Book).
There are many versions of the lyrics. The earliest begins:
'2 sticks & an apple, Ring ye bells at Whitechapel,
Old father bald pate, Ring ye bells Aldgate,
Maids in white aprons, Ring ye bells at St Catherines,
Oranges & lemons, Ring ye bells at St Clements.'
To the Victoria Embankment, there to take our Government-mandated exercise by following the lines of two waterways, the Bloomsbury Ditch & the #CockAndPye Ditch. These were channels which drained the marshland that surrounded the village of St Giles - current-day Covent Garden.
The walk is one devised by @teabolton in the second volume of his guide to London’s lost rivers, & follows the line of the 2 linked ditches from the Thames at Victoria Embankment Gardens & then back to Cleopatra’s Needle. #CockAndPye
"With no known natural watercourses between the Fleet, to the east, and the Tyburn, to the west, Covent Garden and Soho are gaps in the London river map. It is, however, quite possible that the ditches rechannelled small streams that existed before the earliest maps" - @teabolton
Lichfield as well. The cathedral is dedicated to St Chad, who died in a time of plague (“a mortality,” as Bede puts it, “sent from heaven”), & at whose tomb many miracles of healing were performed.
I don't know why, but my enjoyment of it was off the scale. I found myself incredibly moved this time round by the melodrama & the more sentimental passages in a way I've never been before. Maybe the effect of the darkness of the times? I don't know...
Or maybe Dickens is just one of those pleasures in life which just keeps getting better and better the older you get...
Now wondering whether to carry on, & read Little Dorrit. Worried that a novel in which the whole of England is portrayed as one giant prison may be a bit much right now.