Two days after Zaha Hadid’s untimely death, I’d been trying and failing to remember many details of an extended interview about her life that she recently gave on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. Not much had lodged in my memory except for the impression of a passionate and determined woman with an exceptionally strong and capacious mind.
Then last
night, in dreamland, I found myself in the unlit Chapter House at Wells
Cathedral, with a party of old friends, all exactly as I remembered them even though
some are long since vanished; and although we’d never met, I wasn’t surprised
to see Zaha Hadid among the group, now settled on a long bench that somehow
reminded me of that pile of stone goddesses looted from the Parthenon and
displayed in the British Museum.
They were
being entertained by a group of standing minstrels, maybe troubadours,
colourfully dressed. They seemed to be a
combination of Roxy Music c. 1972 and Piero della Francesca’s angelic musicians
present at the Nativity, painted c. 1475.
I don’t
remember what the band were playing in this dream but I do remember their
heavenly glitz, especially the various lutes and citherns and a Bo Diddly
square guitar, and every single instrument being enveloped in thin blue and
gold Pentecostal flames.
