Excellent Timing

Ran into excellent timing recently. I picked up Alan Moore’s Jerusalem recently. Early on in the tome, one of the characters is on a platform in St. Paul’s Cathedral as it is raised from the floor all the way up into the Whispering Gallery so he can restore some of the paintings on the ceiling of the dome. The timing on my choice of when to read this was excellent, because I’d been sitting in the Whispering Gallery just a week before.

Seriously, I’d just come back recently from a trip to London, Brussels, and Paris. As part of that, we’d climbed all those stairs in St. Paul’s to the Whispering Gallery (and up into the tower outside and above). While reading about the character being on that raising platform, I had an immediate, physical memory of being in that dome and just how high it was, and how it felt. There was no way to have as visceral a reaction there as having a recent memory of being where was being described, all because of a chance in timing.

No real reason to mention this, but it was pretty cool.