Wells Cathedral Carol Service

We walked on the road, mostly. The pavement was a skating rink, a thin film of water spread onto compacted black ice. I said to Clare: if you fall try to crumple and relax otherwise you'll surely break a leg.

Thankfully we were let straight into the Cathedral. If we had had to queue there would have been frozen corpses on the Cathedral Green - snowfield that it now is, -8° plus wind-chill.

A reading at the Carol Service, Wells Cathedral

The Cathedral choir sing very beautifully (they've just won an award as "the best choir in the world"!). At the beginning and end of the hour-long service they paraded along the aisles, fronted by tall, bulky, impassive men wearing secret-police robes with the inscrutable air of secret vices. I must confess I find men in frocks incanting nursery rhyme nonsense deeply creepy: what are they really in it for?

The altar showing scissors arches, Wells Cathedral

The architecture here was, I believe, deeply innovative in its mediaeval day, preventing the walls imploding under the weight of the superstructure.