Late yesterday afternoon I was taking pictures of the florid Victorian Gothic entrance below the steeple of St Michael’s. Cornhill — and everything on the street including the church — was practically deserted, as should be expected at that time of day and day of the week. As I was trying to resist the impulse to madly lose myself down beckoning St. Michael’s Alley, a very well-dressed woman appeared as if from nowhere, and apropos of nothing in an accent completely unrecognizable to me (although I suspect it was something the English would describe as “posh”) strongly suggested that I should visit St. Bartholomew’s. 

Really, you should.

Startled, I promised that I would do so the very next day. And she disappeared again. I think she walked away, but I can’t seem to recall which route — down the Alley or along Cornhill — that she took.

Confronted with this sort of prodigy, I reshuffled my plans for Sunday to include Smithfield. And so here I am, between services, in the medieval remnant of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, with a lingering haze of incense, stilted Norman arches mixed with early Gothic, and (I must presume) the founder Rahere’s one-footed ghost hopefully stomping about somewhere just out of sight. The story goes that a workman nicked a sanctified foot from his tomb a while back, so the ancient prebendary’s ghost limps as well. 

If this narrative was part of one of those engaging phantasies that constitute my preferred form of literary entertainment, at the ancient priory I would shortly become involved in some sort of madcap or even profound ordeal involving all kinds of marvels and a frantic quest along routes that almost no one notices to parts of the City that the outside world has long, long forgotten. Dark alleys in the shadows of broken spires. Abnormally large spiderwebs. The Secret Order of the Temple. Rats, unaccount’bly big ‘uns, g’vnor! Dust, mounds of it, probably all that’s left of the bones of previous champions. A brace of trusty flintlock pistols, mind you keep the damp from the powder! And in a moldy library dimly lit through broken stained glass panes a hidden Puppeteer, who might be very old indeed if not one of the Living Dead . . . .

Instead, the only slightly-odd phenomenon I encountered was the accent (which I recognized, for once) of the woman collecting the entrance fees at the front desk. She happened to be an expat American, from a part of Florida close to where I was raised. Our grandfathers, who were both involved in county politics, would probably have known (or more likely squabbled with) each other.

Hi ho. Well, I had St. Bart’s on my “London list” anyway, so it I suppose it doesn’t matter.