Thursday 1 (15/07/10)

I spent all of this morning and early- to mid-afternoon working in my apartment. Now that I have the ability to check books out of the library, I don’t feel the need to spend every hour I can there. I didn’t go out until about 4.15, by which time the day was pleasantly hot, rather than unbearably so. I took a stroll South through the University to the block on the other side, which includes the natural history museum and the rose garden. Possibly the most impressive this about the rose garden is the lawns that blanket the ground between beds – pre-dawn sprinklers again, no doubt. That’s not to say that the roses are not worth mentioning. I forget the exact statistic, but there are somewhere in the region of 1500 bushes of 140 varieties of rose. It’s a shame that none of my photos do justice to it – they are either close-ups that lose the symmetry of the place, or they are wide shots with no colour.

On my way back I dropped into the USC Catholic Centre, which has a chapel and a rather interesting set of Westminster chimes outside it. There was no clock face, and the tower housing the chimes looked more like a water tower than anything else. As one would expect, the chaplaincy was very welcoming, and I was able to find out all the events that go on there over the summer (their usual timetable being understandably diminished over the vacation). This picture is of the chapliancy office front door, and reflects the one thing about Catholics of which I’m most proud – their enduring sense of humour. I would urge anyone who has had the distinctly forbidding experience of visiting European cathedrals (“No photographs! Take your hat off!”) to drop in uninvited to a small church somewhere – the effect can be like being given chalk after eating too much cheese.