The answer to the question at the end of the previous post...

...is Canterbury.

It is a week and a bit ago now... (and yes, I have been a tad slack in updating the blog, sorry!) but the day dawned sunny so I took a train east and spent a day wandering about Canterbury. The cathedral is clearly the highlight of the town. I spent a couple of hours slowly wandering about the buildings and ground with my audio-tour handset against my head looking like a 1980's mobile phone.

The audio-tour is to be found at most attractions in the UK and can be had in a variety of languages (generally I chose English, for those of you who may be wondering). Personally I prefer a proper tour conducted by a human being. The audio-tour has more detail, but people always have more character and their wonderful little anecdotes the are lacking from the recorded version.

Unfortunately I was a few minutes too late for the guided tour of Canterbury Cathedral so the audio-tour it had to be. It was rather verbose and had a rather heavy backing of organ music, but generally it got the point of what I was looking at across... eventually.

The highlight of the visit was a large, temporary set of tiered seats in the middle of the naive. These, very conveniently, contained about 100 of the Cathedral's choristers who spent the entire time I was in the building rehearsing. The sound of those voices echoing through the stone vaults and aisles made for a most uplifting experience (and thankfully overpowered the organ music background of my audio-tour).

Having now visited quite a number of cathedrals, abbeys and minsters it will be interesting, next time I am in Brisbane, to visit the nearly complete St John's. Clippings from the Brisbane press sent to me recently (my mother likes to keep me in touch with the local news) have shown its copper spires being erected, a mere 104 years after the building was started. I wonder what it will look like in 800 years?