Cathedral De Valencia

Tucked between streets and buildings and smaller seeming on the outside than the inside stepped into the Cathedral de Valencia onto a stone floor highly polished through thousands of feet smoothing it as they walk. Windows high up let a warm light drop onto the congregation. Not glazed they are filled with thinly sliced veined marble.

Around the outside of the main area smaller alters where people pray to their particular patron saint, iconography, paintings and sculptures, and in the one to St Martin a relic - a mummified arm.

The lighting of candles has been replaced by a system of dropping a coin into a box which automatically lights one of the electric candles by the side of the chosen alter. I sometimes light a candle in the memory of my mother but this doesn´t seem quite the same so I don´t do it.

Nuns run the postcard shop. In a side chapel an amazing vaulted ceiling and huge chains hung around the room.

Later sitting eating paella at a roadside restaurant watching a mother and daughter together at the next table I feel sad that I will never know my mother as an old woman. Dad sometimes says he is glad not to know her all withened [not sure how to spell this] and old but I don´t know, I think there were years of knowing still to be had.