Norwich has contributed more than its fair share of familiar 18th and 19th century family business names, and perhaps the most prominent in the modern age is that of the Barclay banking family of Colney Hall. This was their parish church, and when Evelyn Louisa Barclay died at the age of 37 in 1899, the windows in the chancel by Edward Frampton were placed in her honour. They are worth more than a glance, because they feature Mrs Barclay and her eight children. The most charming window shows her at her reading desk, a baby on her lap and an infant on the floor, the six older Barclay children standing and listening attentively. They are in the height of late Victorian gravitas before it transmuted into the triumphalism of the years before and after the First World War. The oldest boy, Terence, standing in blue, met a tragic and curious end, for in 1911, when he was 29, he was mauled and killed by a lion kept in the menagerie at Colney Hall. His little brother David, the infant sitting at his mother's feet, died just five years later, mortally wounded on the Western Front during the First World War. Both of them are buried in the churchyard.

In the decades immediately before the Reformation, there was a great flowering in East Anglia of brasses for Priests, and there is one here, to Henry Alikok, who was Rector, and died in 1502. It is a chalice brass, depicting a chalice and host, to denote that the commemorated person was a Priest. It sits on the edge of a great expanse of orange tiles, which appear to have been painted. I assume that they are actually late Victorian, perhaps contemporary with the Barclay windows, and I couldn't help wondering what had been obscured.

A memorial to William Scott is a reminder of the days of the Raj. He was a Cornet of the Bengal Light Infantry, and he died at Jullunder in India in the year before the Indian Mutiny. He was 23 years old. The inscription quotes Genesis, Shall not the God of all the Earth do right, which must have been small comfort to his parents, I think. Outside in the graveyard is another memory of an Eastern tragedy, this time a modern one, in the form of a memorial to a local woman who died in the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004.

Here, it is hard to blot out the traffic on the busy road, or the vision of Bowthorpe across the fields. But two jays were obviously quite happy with the way things were. In recent years, these beautiful birds have followed their cousins the magpies into the cities. From being shy birds, they are becoming rather fearless. These two hopped from the churchyard wall onto the top of two adjacent 19th Century headstones, watching me with interest, dipping and tilting their tails slightly to find a balance. The sun came out, and their vivid buff and sapphire dress was jewel-like in this green of late spring. The tufts on their heads made their sharp eyes quizzical. It made a perfect photograph. But, of course, as soon as I lifted my camera, they launched themselves into the air, and were gone.