Veronese

Sunday 6 Apr

Spent the morning in my room catching up with stuff and doing the blog. In the afternoon I tried to get to the Bond St station to take some pictures of ancestral houses, but part of the line was closed. As it would have involved a substantial detour, I changed tack and went to the National Gallery instead. 

It is a damp & drizzly day, but I didn’t actually get rained on. There are lots of street entertainers in Trafalgar Square, several of whom seem to have mastered the art of levitation. They were standing or sitting on thin air, and were all attracting a lot of attention. Had an early tea at the Gallery cafe, then went over to the Sainsbury wing to book for their current Veronese exhibition. As they were taking immediate entry, I carried on in.

Paola Caliari (1528-1588) was a Renaissance painter from Verona – hence ‘Veronese’. The exhibition has some of his most early work, done in his late teens, and it shows his expertise even at that early age. He does faces very well, really brings out the real person, and uses lots of colour, so it was bright and cheerful almost wherever I looked. I managed to get through all seven rooms by six o’clock when they closed.

Then over to St Martin-in-the-Field (one of my favourite ancestral churches) & sat reading my kindle until their evening service started at 6.30. They didn’t have a sermon as such, just one of the regulars giving a talk. She had been a real yuppie in the early days, then her boyfriend was in a plane that was hijacked and they sat on the airport somewhere (can’t remember where now, but I recognised it when she said it, as it was a big story on the news at the time) and killed one person every hour until the plane was stormed, and about 19 were killed. Her boyfriend escaped, but being involved in something so life-threatening made her look differently at her life. 

Later she went to China, and was there shortly after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. English-speaking Chinsese who listened to the BBC were asking her if the BBC told the truth when they said that government troops had  fired on the protesters and killed hundreds if not thousands of people. The Chinese government had put out the story that the protesters actually killed the soldiers.

After returning to England, she worked for Amnesty International, and was amazed to discover that it started right here at St Martins. 

After church I wandered down a different street to get back to the Embankment Tube Station, but was delighted to discover when I came out at the river, that I knew just where I was from using this station many times on our last trip, and which way to turn (away from the London Eye and under the bridge) to the river-side entrance for my train. (Most tube stations have more than one entrance/exit on different streets.) What a joy it is feeling at home in London!

Current Reading: Emily Brightwell's Mrs Jeffries and the Yuletide Weddings

I find I head for all the lightest and most cosy of stories at the moment, I guess the brain has enough to cope with just being in London