Tuesday 27 March 2012: Back to church....

Today we have St Joseph. As promised, I revisited St Mary's Catholic Church today (partly because I had to pass it again!) in order to photograph the beautiful stained glass windows.

I've always been a sucker for - well, my children would say 'a good Cathedral', having been taken to look round many over the years! - but I was going to say 'stained glass'. I even did a short leadlighting course once many years ago, not that it led me to become skilled at the craft. (In fact, now that I come think about it, I don't think they ever gave me the superior, diamond-edged glass cutter that I paid for....)

I noted on yesterday's blip that the elevations by Marice Duval of Timaru, supposedly for the church built in 1882, didn't seem to correspond to the building standing today. This morning I called the St Mary's archivist and asked her if she could shed some light on the matter. She told me that the first St Mary's was built in 1856 and destroyed by fire in 1881; the church now standing was opened and blessed on 31st December 1882. A leaflet that I picked up in the church this evening says that the architect was Thomas Turnbull from Wellington but it's not clear whether he was the architect of the first or second church - so to be honest, I'm still a little confused! The archivist asked if I would mind forwarding her a copy of my photograph, which I happily did and she sent me an email in reply thanking me and saying that it would be added to the church archives!

The windows are stunning. The afternoon sun was streaming through those on the Western wall when I was there, so most of the windows I photographed were on that side. Again, the leaflet in the church porch tells me that the windows on the South wall in the Sanctuary are French, while those on the East wall are from Munich in Germany. Others were imported from Birmingham and Melbourne so I'm assuming that this image of St Joseph is one of those. It was hard to choose which one to blip but I loved the gentleness of St Joseph's face and I've always had a soft spot for him anyway. I've included more shots in my blipfolio - do have a look, they're rather lovely windows.

Before my photography session I had been to Immy's school for parent-teacher interviews. To use a commonly-used phrase around here, "It's all good!" and hopefully next term will be more settled, now that she's finally in the class that she should be in and has started to make some tentative friendships after a ouple of false starts.

This evening, Immy, Lynley and I left Jonathan and 'Uncle Nicky' babysitting and headed off to the cinema to see The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which we had been eagerly anticipating. Imagine our disappointment on arriving at the cineplex to find the place packed and that film fully booked! A quiet Tuesday evening, for a film that opened last week?! Next time, we'll book online in advance.

• Canon EOS 60D:
• f/6.3:
• 1/800":
• 84.0mm

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