Lay for the Day: 20th November

Lay for the Day 20th November

The feast day of St Edmund, King and Martyr. An Anglo-Saxon Christian who was killed by the Vikings, Edmund is England’s patron saint (not St George, who is the patron saint of the royal family). The church of St Edmund on Lombard Street in the City of London is of very ancient foundation, though it has been many times rebuilt, damaged or destroyed and rebuilt again.

The literary collage below is made up of words and phrases found within the church, on its walls. It was composed for a series of poetry readings and concerts called Honey & Locusts which took place there in October 2001.

The grasshopper is a giant gilded one that hangs over Lombard Street from a building a few doors down, towards the Bank of England.

Beyond the Sign of the Grasshopper

For many years a God has given thee that are the King Military Cross to spend thyself who made all worlds at Mr Honeywood’s corner in the parlour of Mrs Ironside’s house.

William Belcher stedfastly regarding the close resolved to profit by the foundering in mid-Atlantic of the steamship Titanic through collision with an elegant and correct taste for polite literature.

Tissington Tatlow M.A.D.D. His soul is in the hand with kind permission for 54 years. His body of highly cultivated talents rests in one corner of the American Coffee and Vulture Tavern, one-to-one with a circle of the most distinguished persons in a vault near this place.

Woodbine Willy the popular martyred king at the mustard shop and All Hallows two doors short of White in the passage after the Great Fire now has no residents, replaced by one of stone from bombing the north wall followed a week later by Friday morning apple riots in the Dutch style between two houses at the end of the side house.

The effort of the police superadded the most judicious researches into the abstruse points and learning of antiquity. The cultivation of the congregation was also united thereto.

Jersualem is the published end simultaneously butting over the door of an iceberg while on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York.

John Henry Samuel James Heneage Robert George Bryant Charles Reginald Adam Ralph the Priest, President of the Grand Trunk, of a well-stocked Ritualist non-Christian website the second son, and all that are to be continue and expand.

Severe, protracted and harassing courses will be offered in a more perfect state for money, ethics, the meaning and purpose of stress, by the bright example which can alone adorn and give a lustre to the female character armed with apples.

Wm Quelch Wm Savage Wager Gold Wells Bury May Green Downes Wood Cliffe Brown Moore Hale Grey Heard Donne

John Gibbens