Lauren and I went to a concert recently at the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. (As a side note, I was always under the impression that it was St. Martin who was in the fields, not the Academy. In my original version of this entry, I stated that as a fact, only to be corrected by alert reader James Maysonett. It turns out that St. Martin lived on an island, not amongst the fields, whereas the church in his honor was erected in the midst of fields in 1222. I blame my mistake on the unclear way the Academy has chosen to hyphenate its name. It ought to be the Academy-of-St-Martin In The Fields.)
In any case, the concert was good, but what impressed me most was something I saw, not something I heard.
Lying casually in the landing at the top of the staircase to the balcony was an old wooden pillar.The weatherbeaten look of its ornate carvings implied that it had spent most of its life outside.
Among those ornate carvings was a date: 1752. I don’t know where that pillar once stood, or why it’s now been discarded in a corner. But I do know that it’s older than my country. In a parvenu country like the US, it would be an ancient artifact, carefully sealed behind glass in a moisture-controlled environment. Here in ancient London, two and a half centuries of history earns it a rank that’s just one notch above curbside recycling.
Perhaps they were going to use it to make one nifty violin!
At the risk of being pedantic (a risk I always take), I had been given to understand that it _was_ the Academy that was in the fields. That is, in the thirteenth century, when the first church was built at that site, it was outside the city walls.
Curse you, Maysonett! You win again. I just checked, and, yes, St. Martin lived on an island, not in the fields, whereas the original church building was surrounded by fields when it was built in 1222. It’s the punctuation that confused me. If the fields are going to refer to the church, it ought to be written The Church-Of-St-Martin In The Fields.
Anyway, I’ll fix the error.
It’s understandable. As Americans, we’re not used to these things. We would have wisely renamed it “the Halliburton Academy” by now, thus eliminating the ambiguity.