York Minster…it’s beautiful. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a cathedral — Wells maybe. I love them, but find it infuriating to be charged for entry.

They are such beautiful arched poems in stone, these incredibl, built over e things stretching so finely up to the sky, built with such incredible skill. I know that this sits alongside the horrible concentrations of wealth and power, I know the politics of these buildings. So dialectical.

I like how it sits embedded in the fabric of the medieval town.

The figures adorning its sides

And this nave that sends your heart up to the sky:

The flutes render the massive columns slender, part of this weightless skyward soaring:

You can wander through the ages here, it sits over old Roman walls and the more recent Anglo-Saxon church here — the Norman building is of course a declaration.

These ages are visible through the glass floors that allow you to peer through the dirt to see history’s sedimentation, and they are marked with objects in the museum below. Wonderful carved ivory

The doom stone in the east crypt, its devils forcing souls into hell

And the old Romanesque columns here, which I love just as much as the gothic, squat and patterned as they are:

While we were down there in the semi darkness the organ started, a Bach fugue, it was wonderful.

My last favourite things — the clock

This owl:

But to remind myself how tied this place is to wealth and all the out-of-place pomp and false mourning that money can buy, I present a collection of absurd crying cherubs.