S. Worthen | Weblog

The house distracted me; I was certain that the one week of the second-ever easterbunny one week LJ collection challenge ended Friday. So that's a little over a week then. Mine was this: "Choose any saint whose feast day coincides with your birthday. Find all references to that saint's name: churches, streets, pubs, and so on. Bonus points for finding pub names, streets, etc. relating to that of which the saint is patron."

After I surveyed all the options, I settled on the most obvious option, St. James the Greater, figuring that he upped my odds of finding any.

Before today, I had a whopping two items in my collection.
1. damedroiture went on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. (via cliosfolly) Tiago = Diego = James. Really.

2. At Nando's.


3. (Today) I had an hour spare between breakfast with schizmatic and when I was aiming to be at Taste of London, so I hurried down to see St. James, a church on Piccadilly, part of the St. James neighborhood which includes St. James Palace and Park. (The palace can only be seen in bits by attending church services at its chapels.)

It's a Christopher Wren church, bombed and restored in the twentieth century.


External pulpit for public preaching, plus bits of the lively little market going on outside of it.


Inside is a sanctuary of beauty and tranquility, with a collection of really wonderful memorial plaques on the walls, particularly in memory of lots of natural history folks.


I don't actually know which St. James the church is dedicated to, but if I didn't know otherwise, I figured it could count.

I may have chosen St. James the Greater, but you were all going to choose my also-ran theme for me. It ended up a dead heat between Olympiada the Deaconess of Constantinople (who went on post-death adventures), and the Ebernoe Horn Fair in Sussex (involves sheep-roasting, cricket, and thunderstorms). Poor Saint Anne is the only option with no votes. Pity. She was the only other one for whom I knew I could get at least one relevant photo.