The House Husband

I had another uni result today. One of my essays was a purely philosophical one in that it was about the philosophy of information. Now, I always love to babble and this was the perfect opportunity. Naturally, by the time I’d finished and submitted it, I was convinced it wasn’t very good and I’d babbled far too much. I guess I didn’t. I managed 80%! Who’da thunk it? I am rather pleased. As well as surprised.

To be honest, uni wasn’t a lot of fun today. It started ok, though the weather was foul and I was damp for most of the day. We discussed a lot of information retrieval stuff and then it came time for the tutorial presentations. It was the usual long drawn out process of getting people to go out to the front to present their findings. As usual this was like pulling teeth.

It was, however, exacerbated by the lecturer filling in forms with each group’s results. This took an age – there are eight groups – and, quite frankly, was a huge waste of time. It would have been a lot better had he asked us to fill in the forms prior to class so the findings could just be discussed.

The results were interesting and we managed to discuss some of them but the time was running out and we had to abandon class before the final group entered their figures. The class finished just before the next class were due to take over the room.

I headed out to get some lunch. The day was still miserable and my mood wasn’t much better. I decided to ditch my second class and give myself an early mark. The notes are all on the uni website and I could study in the warmth and comfort at home. The poodles were very pleased. I was very pleased.

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Butterick Update!!
Following on from yesterdays post…After a bit more research into St Augustine’s, Kilburn, I discovered that it was only consecrated the year before the Butterick mass baptisms (1880). Apparently, the priest at the old parish church wasn’t too happy with the way things were going and decided to branch out on his own. He wanted a more Catholic approach and so opened his own church, with the bishop’s blessing, of course. This was St Augustine’s. Now, my assumption is that the Butterick family were all for this new brand of worship and so shifted allegiances from the church they knew and loved to the new one down the road which promised more in heavenly trading stamps. This belief is strengthened in that a few years later, another Butterick child was baptised at the new font. This one was also well past birth.

Had my first results today. I managed a 68% in DITA (Digital Information Technologies and Architectures) which I’m pleased with. One down, three to go.

A while ago I blogged about the church ruins at the Barbican (Snow at the window) and I have managed to track down its history. It is St Alphage, London Wall.

Alphage (Alphege, Elphege) was the archbishop of Canterbury from 1005. In 1012, he refused to pay the Danegeld (the Viking ‘tax’) so the Danes had a big party, became very, very drunk, grabbed the bones of a handy oxen and beat him to death, finishing him off with an axe. Just goes to show. You really have only two certainties: death and taxes. Brave and stupid, Alphage proved it, clearly. Anyway, he was buried in St Paul’s and quickly became a national hero. In one of those typically Christian procedures, his body was dug up in 1105 to discover he wasn’t rotten. So he was made a saint. Naturally. But enough of him.

The original church was built a short time after he was killed and, because everyone loved him to the point of celebrity, it was clear it would be dedicated to him. Today a few bits of the first church remain scattered in, what could loosely be described as, a garden. At least they might be bits from the first church. I mean who really knows. They’re just stones, after all. Anyway, the church backed onto London Wall, the medieval city boundary.

This first church was dangerously close to collapse in the 16th century. During this time, the church was demanding payment for paintings and a sort of witch hunt for Anabaptists. It managed to just survive the Great Fire (1666) but by 1777, a lot of it needed rebuilding. This happened, leaving only the tower. Lots of repairs were ongoing up until 1924 when the parish was united with another and the church was not longer required.

When the parishes were united, a lot of St Alphage’s was transported to the new parish church (St Mary Aldermanbury) and, basically, just the tower remained. It managed to survive the German bombing raids in WW2, although most of the area around it was completely destroyed. Now, all that remains to tell the story, are the lower sections of three walls of the tower. A gap has been left in the Barbican and a little fence has been built around it.

Sadly, there is no information board and only a bit of searching will find any mention of it. I found most of the story in Gordon Huelin’s Vanished Churches of the City of London, a thrilling read for all the family…