Photo Pest: All Is Vanity

We began our ecclesiastical Sunday with a tour of Spencer House, recommended by Steven. Jerry Hall wed Rupert Murdoch in these gilded rooms, just across Green Park from Buckingham Palace. It's open to the public only on weekends.

Lords and ladies once owned town houses as opulent as their country homes. Spencer House is the only one that survives, thanks to a restoration funded by the Rothschild Foundation. Photography is permitted in just two rooms.

When I asked the very informative docent if Prince Charles's marriage to Lady Diana Spencer was somehow connected to the restoration that began five years later in 1986, she insisted it wasn't. Methinks the lady protests too much. That's gold leaf on the columns and the ceiling, by the way. No expense was spared, and the restoration team created facsimiles of the Spencers' furniture if they couldn't borrow the original pieces from museums. In a worst-case scenario, they used period furniture. For a price, you can use it too. Spencer House derives its income from weddings and special events.

It's all very pretty but I was more interested in the guide's accent. When she finally revealed that she had been born in Hamburg, both Chris and I wondered if perhaps she had been rescued by Kindertransport. More about that later.

We went to 3 p.m. services at Westminster Abbey. On any other day, we would have had to pay a 26-pound admission fee. Chris downloaded the liturgical readings on his phone and followed along, as did hundreds of other worshippers.

A sermon delivered by a female priest impressed me as much as the impassioned singing of hymns, which actually made my eyes brim with tears. She began by saying "all is vanity" before referencing the chaotic events of the week--a new, obscenely wealthy prime minister had been installed only the Tuesday prior--before asking the congregation to think more generally about the timeless themes of Ecclesiastes: in short, reality, reflection and joy deriving from reality. She told a compelling anecdote about a sociologist asking a perplexed student how long he had lived. The student responded with his age. "No, you're talking about how long you have existed. How long have you really lived, how many of those moments when all your senses are completely alive to your environment?" I immediately thought of watching the sun set over the Archipelago of the Recherché.

At some point, I realized we were seated in Poet's Corner, the area of the church I most wanted to see.

Once the service ended, an usher sternly stopped me before I could take too many free photos.

The City of Westminster has some beautiful modern architecture, too. Security is a big deal in London.

It was hard to believe we had just been in the church where Queen Elizabeth II had lain in state a month earlier. Pricey real estate agencies seem to be obsessed with her image.

We began our visit to the nearby Tate Britain with a retrospective exhibition of photography by Bill Brandt. Parliament has never needed former member Glenda Jackson more!

The Tate commissioned "The Procession," an extraordinarily colorful installation by Hew Locke, to fill its central, stately galleries.

Americans associate slavery with cotton. But in the Caribbean, enslaved people were forced to cultivate another white product. Henry Tate, for whom the museum is named, made his fortune refining and selling sugar long after Britain emancipated the West Indies. Still. Kara Walker explored similar territory in "A Subtlety," which memorably occupied the Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn before it was demolished.

"The Procession" delights even as it demands interpretation on a deeper level. It's chock full of cultural, religious and historical references, including the Black Star Line, Marcus Garvey's ambitious but failed attempt to establish a successful black business on a global scale in the early 20th century.