Patrick Comerford
My stopover in Lichfield last night was short. But it was sweet.
I stopped over between meetings in London yesterday [23 November 2017] and Birmingham today, involving the trustees of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel) and USPG volunteers from dioceses in the English Midlands.
Lichfield has been like a spiritual home for me since I was 19, and ever since then I have made a point of finding opportunities, no matter how brief, of returning here to say thanks for the many gifts I have been blessed with in life.
I am now at Birmingham International Airport, waiting for a flight back to Ireland. It means, of course, that I have missed the exhibition in Lichfield Cathedral marking the 400th birthday of the antiquarian Elias Ashmole, which came to an end yesterday. Nor am I going to see the Christmas lights being switched on in Lichfield on Sunday evening to.
Not that I was ever one to go to see the Christmas lights being switched on anywhere. I only noticed they had been switched on in Limerick earlier this week when I found myself in the city centre on two early mornings, one after the other.
There was little time to do anything meaningful after I arrived in Lichfield late yesterday. But as I walked around the cathedral city after dinner last night, in the bright, crisp and dry winter weather, Samuel Johnson looked resigned on his pedestal in Market Square to sitting out the Christmas season.
Indeed, Lichfield looked romantic last night in the bright, crisp and clean winter lights, ready for being alight this Christmas. And so, these are some of my own photographs of the pre-Christmas lights in Lichfield last night as I strolled through the streets of Lichfield last night, after dinner in Ego by Minster Pool and a glass of wine in the Queen’s Head in Sandford Street to St John’s House on Saint John Street.
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