Chapter 491 Big Girls Don't Cry:>22

• Dinner was good, steaks and lobster at a nice little restaurant at the bottom of Park Street, just off College Green, and afterwards we took a walk across the Green to stroll outside the floodlit cathedral, looking, as we had done since we were kids, for the bullet scars and sword cuts in the statues of saints and royalist effigies from when Cromwell's men had defaced the 'blasphemous' effigies carved on the outer precincts of the medieval cathedral walls and porches during the English Civil War in the 17th Century.
• I'd forgotten how much there was to see in my home town, or how much history had originated there; just around the corner from the cathedral was the quay where John Cabot set sail to discover Newfoundland, the first European to set foot on mainland North America, outside the church built by The Merchant Venturer's, and a few hundred yards away was the Red Maid's School, the oldest girl's school in England, dating back to the early 17th century; when I was younger, they still wore the red dresses and Red-Riding Hood capes that gave them their name.
• Back up at the top of Park Street was the 16th century Queen Elizabeth Hospital School, a Tudor mansion housing the Bluecoat school, the choristers and senior boys still dressed in 17th century navy-blue frock coats, snowy-white neck stocks and Navy-blue knee britches with silver buttons at the knee, with mustard stockings and silver-buckle shoes, looking as though they'd just stepped out of a Van Dyck painting.