It's getting old. It's had extensive transplants, metal pins and braces in its joints, and wooden splints to stop its legs from bowing out and collapsing under its own weight. Durham Castle is still standing, but doesn't do much to inspire confidence. The black stair was particularly impressive--a flying staircase anchored around the walls of a square cavity and designed to need no internal pillars. It started sagging in the middle soon after construction. Even with the pillars that have been added, it still slopes disconcertingly to the centre.
The castle now serves as student accommodation, hotel and tourist magnet.
Durham Cathedral is magnificent, an amazing edifice, staggeringly extravagant, an endless expensive exercise against inexorable erosion. It's humbling to think that so much money and effort has been put into this structure just for my sake, so that I can wander around its echoing chambers, looking at its wooden organ pipes that I could fit a thigh into, gazing at its ancient and modern stained glass depictions of spurious mythology, bemused by (and later on being enlightened about) St Cuthbert's spare head.
"Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together."
-George Santayana
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