Weekly Record

24th August 2008

The Mathew Street Festival takes place this weekend and will no doubt attract a large influx of visitors to the City centre over the Bank Holiday. Also, I am reliably informed that it is the opening ceremony of the World Firefighter Games on Monday. Most of the activities are at the waterfront end of the City so I’m not sure whether it will have much of an impact on visitors to the Cathedral. To any visitors who will be joining us for Mass this weekend a warm welcome to the City and the Cathedral and I hope the event is not a wash out as with most of the outdoor festivals this Summer. Also for the sake of the group of young people and their chaplain Fr Michael camping down in Walsingham for the weekend we hope the weather improves.

At some stage this week I presume that the Superlambanana on the Cathedral Piazza will be taken away in readiness for the auction of the collection at St George’s Hall in September. Somebody out there seems to think that I have a lot of spare cash as I received an e-mail inviting me to the sale and indicating that all the figures that were up for auction would start at a bid price of £3,000. I’m sure many of them will sell for a lot more than that. I know that the Archbishop and Sister Anthony are big fans but even that pressure won’t get me to attend. Ever since my sister asked me to bid at auction for a piece of antique furniture and then said she no longer needed it after it was bought I have a fear of bidding at auctions. Anyway they are charging £40 just for admission to the auction! After waiting for a few months for the next delivery of superlambanana figures for sale in the shop - the batch of 12 that came this week sold out within the first few hours of delivery.

The ‘Gathering Light’ exhibition of stained glass that has been on display in the West Apse will be taken down this week. It will be replaced by an exhibition of paintings inspired by Mediaeval Manuscripts from Cambridge Archives for the month of September. It will probably be a very fine exhibition but the title seems to me to be a bit of a mouthful.

This week a new set of contractors moved into the Concert and Crypt Halls to begin the set up for the Le Corbusier exhibition to be held from October. We have inducted that many workmen on to the Cathedral site in the last few years that we could almost run a course on it. What normally happens is that we all look one another up and down for the first few weeks and then everyone realises the lines of responsibility and authority and carries on regardless. Anyway, this set up involves an amazing amount of work and bears all the hallmarks of an exhibition of truly international quality.

Canon Anthony O’Brien
Cathedral Dean