An image of Peterborough cathedral tattooed onto his arm

Above:  picture from the Daily Mail website.  Not sure why the camera flash is reflecting off the arm.  It makes it look as if the skin has been covered with some kind of gloss varnish.

According to the Daily Mail Aston Merrygold has had an image of Peterborough cathedral tattooed onto his arm.  Aston Merrygold is an X-Factor finalist (winner? participant? bore? not sure how you would describe these people).  Yet another example of the X-Factor sub-culture forcing itself into the media you might think.

But this story attracted my attention for several reasons.

Firstly because the west front of Peterborough cathedral is one of the glories of world architecture, and yet hardly anyone knows about it.

Secondly because references to Peterborough cathedral in popular culture are rare.  Betjeman mentions it in his 1929 short story Lord Mount Prospect.  Erasure's Andy Bell (himself a former resident of Peterborough) might be referring to it in the 1991 song Am I right? ("I can see the old cathedral. But I have to play it down").

But otherwise Peterborough cathedral is unknown.

The third reason is that I know the building extremely well.  After I left university I worked in Peterborough for two years and every working day would have to go into the centre of the city (we had a very demanding client).  The city is an unbelievably ugly place, with no redeeming features of any kind, except for the cathedral. 

Whenever I walked along Bridge Street (which was virtually every day) I would always turn right through the medieval gateway into the cathedral close and walk around for a few minutes (sometimes going into the great church itself, sometimes looking at the remains of the monastic ranges, picturesquely incorporated into later styles of architecture). 

I must have walked around the cathedral close several hundred times and can still picture every part of it.

What I most liked was the surreal sense of going from the ugly modern world into a half-hidden paradise.

I suppose that is also what I like about this story - that someone from the X-Factor (which is a fairly ugly and intrusive TV show) should permanently honour one of our national artistic treasures.