Then seeing the stained glass at Sandwich stirred the memory and I remembered about his church at Ramsgate, which turned out to be more of a village with a church, a shrine (to St.Augustine), an abbey, a retreat and his house, some of it now looked after by the Landmark Trust (see reference 2), seemingly a competitor, at least in a small way, to the National Trust. This remembering propelling us to Ramsgate on the day following.
St. Augustine's Church was a strange place, with some very fine stained glass (particularly the east window) and some fine furnishings, including, for example, the elaborate font illustrated. But despite all this, to me there was a slightly cold feel about the place, a feel not helped by reading that the font had been exhibited at the Great Exhibition or by the odd noises coming from the radiators. The spire of the font reached up into the sky but was not attached by a rope from the ceiling to lift the lid, as it were, when one wanted to actually use the thing. Inspection suggests that the inner pillar is the part which goes up, with the restraints sliding up the outer pillars. Perhaps there is some complicated contrivance of gears inside which crank the thing up. Victorians used to like that sort of thing.
Another interesting feature was the lady chapel, inside which one could see the repository for the host, a small golden casket placed on the altar, through a sequence of half open double doors. See through into the holy of holies. A clever evocation of the holy spirit.
I associate now to Holy Trinity at Sloane Square (see reference 3).
From St. Augustine's headed north into town proper, to fine large red brick facings & arcadings to the cliff, rather in the way of Brighton. Down to the sailors' church mentioned at Ramsgate 3, up to the Pizza Express occupying the nicely repurposed bank building. More or less empty, but a decent lunch nonetheless. Up the High Street to see the church mentioned at Ramsgate 2 and then north along the esplanade at the bottom of the cliffs, but failing to make it to the splendidly named Dumpton, clambering instead up a path fashioned out of the fake red rock facing to the crumbling chalk cliff, the fake rock being very like that to be found at Battersea Park and nicely tricked out with niches for plants. And so home.
The pawn shop on the High Street deserves a mention, with a good line in 50p DVDs for us and a good line in knives for a young and weedy youth in the shop at the same time as us. The young lady assistant was very enthusiastic, particularly about our staying in a cottage called Raspberry Ripple, so enthusiastic that we wondered whether the enthusiasm was not substance enhanced - if not induced. For our part, the DVD was so good that we actually found out how to work the DVD player in the cottage in the absence of batteries for the remote, using three small buttons on the top of the thing.
The handsome library also deserves a mention, a library which allowed aliens such as ourselves to use their computers, subject to rather more adminstration than is usual. The software on the computers turned out to be ancient, so ancient that google mail had to revert to some ancient format, its current format being unsupported. Perhaps Kent Library Services are a bit short of money for that sort of thing. Perhaps the easy Blair money provided the facility in the first place, while the hard Cameron money for its maintenance was missing.
Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=letters+of+condolence.
Reference 2: http://www.landmarktrust.org.uk/.
Reference 3: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=trinity+sloane.
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