It seems to be a day for deacons. I’m listening to Choral Evensong from St Lawrence, York, and this morning the Daily Prayer app told me that today is Vincent of Saragossa, Deacon, first Martyr of Spain, 304 [Commemoration]. Wikipedia tells me that this martyrdom took place under Diocletian, and notes that according to tradition it involved roasting on a gridiron, a detail which may have been carried over from the hagiography of St Lawrence. As if it were contagious, at least among deacons.
Up until I looked at Wikipedia an hour ago, everything I knew about St Vincent came from this series of tiles – which, since my Spanish is not great and apparently in 2007 my photography skills were worse, wasn’t much. They were displayed – probably still are – in the parish rooms of the church of Santiago in Logroño, to which I and my friend Anne, and another pilgrim, Ursula, were invited by the priest after mass on Palm Sunday. He gave us the run of the place, encouraging us to help ourselves to pizzas and packet soup from the kitchen. It was a kindness that we appreciated very much on a trying day.
And so, eighteen years on (good grief), the name of St Vincent, San Vicente, carries for me an association of hot, salty soup, and olive branches, and warming up on a grey, chilly day, and hospitality gratefully received. It’s been pleasant to think of it today – a day that’s been distinctly cold, and actively misty, a day on which I’ve been glad to be at home, cooking omelettes with potato and red pepper and smelly cheese.
I’ve shared these two before, but it is St Nicholas’ day. That isn’t really a thing in my tradition, except insofar as to grump (quietly) about how everyone else is getting Father Christmas wrong: but he’s just familiar enough in his red and white, and just saintly enough with his crook and mitre, to belong there. Maybe I’ll get the angel an umbrella. The nativity scene and the Magi will show up later.
Of course, this inevitably raises questions about how to render other seasonal saints in Playmobil. Saint Lucia, with candles on her head and her eyes on a plate? There are various monks out there, who’d do as St John of the Cross, and young men who could be St John the Evangelist or St Stephen. Perhaps we’d better stop there. Collecting Playmobil babies to play the Holy Innocents would feel distinctly, if illogically, off: why should I baulk at one plastic martyrdom but not another? (But couldn’t I get an Arius for St Nick to clobber?)
Usually these two would be up on top of the piano, but I don’t trust the cat (currently attacking a scrap of red and white brushed cotton plaid) with them, so they’re sheltering on the bookcase. They don’t really have a story. I just wanted to buy a Playmobil St Nicholas.
The St Nicholas decorations are great fun, very beautifully made, and rather expensive. Expensive, I think, because they’re beautifully made, but nevertheless outside what I think of as a sensible price for a Christmas tree ornament. I bought several of the Alice in Wonderland ones a couple of years ago, week by week, and had to write them into my budget.
However! I went into the cathedral shop several months ago, and there was an Etheldreda in the sale, so I bought her.
St Etheldreda was a princess of East Anglia and, after a vow of chastity, two marriages, and no children, founded the monastic house that became, several hundred years later, Ely Cathedral. Of course it’s difficult to pick one’s way between histories and hagiographies, and this is the period of English history where plenty of rulers ended up as saints. I’ve devoted very little time to research, but I get the impression that she was a formidable woman. All her sisters ended up as saints. I think they must have been quite formidable, too.
I’ve lived in a few cathedral cities in my time – Winchester, Exeter, Guildford (look, I’m not going to be picky), and now Ely. We left Winchester before I could read, and almost every time we’ve gone back it’s been to ride on buses. In Exeter, I lived most of my life on the university campus. Guildford’s only had a diocese since the twentieth century, and the cathedral is somewhat set apart, up on a hill.
In Ely, though, I get the sense of a city that exists because of its cathedral and because of its market. Ely is tiny as cities go: it can’t get much bigger because most of the land around it is below sea level. The big expansion has happened fifteen miles south, around Cambridge. In Ely I get the sense of a city that exists in very much the same way that it has for centuries. These days the cathedral brings in tourists as well as pilgrims and the market… well, the market attracts people wishing to buy stuff, some of which the medievals would have recognised and some of which they wouldn’t.
In some ways, Ely feels like everywhere I’ve ever lived, all at once: the rich light on old stone of Winchester and Exeter and Cambridge, the proximity to agriculture (tractors!) of the Welsh borders and the Isle of Wight, the excellent rail connections of Woking, the hills and the cobbles of Guildford. In others, it feels like nowhere else.
Etheldreda wouldn’t recognise the lush farmland and the complex system of drainage ditches that supports it. She’d be completely boggled by the railway, the fact that I can get to London in little more than an hour. She’d be bewildered by my bicycle, come to that. But there’s not much you can do to that big wide sky. Contrails aside, she’d recognise that.
One last thing: it took me a little while to catch on to the fact that St Etheldreda was also, later, known as St Audrey. St Audrey as in St Audrey’s Fair. St Audrey as in tawdry. The absolute blinginess that the designers have endowed her with her is really rather fitting.
While I’m on the subject of cathedrals, I loved Dr Eleanor Janega’s latest piece. (Even if she doesn’t talk about Winchester, Exeter, Guildford or Ely.)
Kathleen Jowitt 