Gesù e Maria

I am not a good church warden, and I feel my failure acutely. If you see me at a view on a Sunday at the Langham, it is because I am not opening doors and welcoming congregants in Wales.

It had been a busy week, cataloguing and pulling in the final lots for the March sale, and I was in church last Sunday, swimming in the rich language of The Book of Common Prayer. Half way through the Nicene Creed, intoning ‘through Him all things were made’, the lightbulbs went off. I realised that the answer to all my cataloguing problems were there – in black and white.

Wouldn’t it be easier – I thought – if from now on, I could write:

A violin, by God.

I am pretty sure the office, the courts, and ultimately common sense would shoot it down as an idea, but it tickled me.

And it is in that spirit that I place here a photograph of a prayer by somebody far more talented than myself. Tucked up at the top block of the violin by Tomasso Eberle, in an understated show of piety, the prayer:

Gesù e Maria.

He would have made a much better church warden.